A Pilot's Journey

Well, A while back I mentioned that I was looking into some other career options. One was as an air traffic controller, I had applied with the FAA for that and recently was invited to take the test to determine if I will get an interview or not. I scheduled the test for Dec. 12 in Oklahoma City and have purchased my airline tickets to get there and take it. Sometime later, I decided to submit my packet to the United States Coast Guard for Officer Candidate School and pursue a career as a Coast Guard Aviator. Yesterday I received a call from my recruiter to inform me that I had made it in, I have been accepted into Officer Candidate School. It is contingent on some blood pressure results, apparently when I had my blood pressure taken for my initial physical it was borderline high. They requested I have my blood pressure taken twice a day for three days and send the results. I am on my last day and so far everything looks fine. I should be swearing in next week and reporting to the Coast Guard Academy for OCS on January 8. I am still going to fly to Oklahoma City and take that test so I have a backup plan in case my blood pressure should be a problem (though I am positive it will be fine). I am also now scheduled to take the Aviation Test Selection Battery or ATSB on Dec. 15. This test is used to determine if I can qualify as an aviator in the Coast Guard. Getting aviation is not guaranteed but I figure I have a pretty good chance given my background. I plan on continuing this blog and relaying my experiences as I go through OCS and then hopefully as I am going through Coast Guard flight school (The flight training is actually through the Navy). I know it has been a long time since I posted last, but I had a lot in the works that I did not want to make public yet. When I get to OCS it will be a while before I will be able to post again as I will not have internet access initially, but I will post as soon as I can. Till then, fly safe...

Now is not the time to be thinking about going to the airlines as they are furloughing pilots and cutting their fleets and routes. It is also probably not the best time to go into Flight Instruction full time as most students are probably discouraged with the outlook of the airlines right now. I am about 3 months away from being able to leave the company I am working for but the things I was really hoping to do are not viable options at the moment. I will continue with my flying and get my instructor certificates and will most likely do some flight instruction on the side but not full time. So I am starting to look at other options for work. I have been burned out on writing code for the past couple of years and I definitely want to move out of that as soon as possible. I have a couple of ideas for other jobs I could pursue, one if which I have applied for already. I will not give any details as to what it is as I do not want to give that away just yet, some people who are closer to me already know what I am referring to. I will just say that it is in the aviation industry and leave it at that until I have more details. Till next time, fly safe...

Due to the high price of gas I have been looking for the past couple of weeks for an alternative travel method. I have seen a lot of little 50cc scooters around the area as gas continues to climb higher. I have ridden motorcycles in the past and decided to start looking for another one. I expect to get around 50mpg with a motorcycle and in doing so save a lot of money over getting 16mpg in my truck. After watching Craig’s list like a hawk for a couple of weeks I finally found a great bike for a great deal. I bought a 95 Kawasaki Ninja ZX6 E3 for $1500. I should be able to make that back in gas savings in a short time. In the past I owned a Honda shadow cruiser so having a sports bike is new to me and I never thought I would like the way they sit, but after checking it out and test driving it I found that I am not laying over the gas tank as I thought I would be. The only problem with the bike is that it was laid down by a previous owner and the right side has several scratches, I might get new fairings and fix the damage at some point, but for know I will just have to live with it. And now for a picture, this picture is of the good side which has not been laid down.

Must have a lot of time on their hands. My old flight instructor sent me this image last week showing the flight track of a cessna Citation X on Flight Aware. The aircraft averaged 500 Kts and was airborn for over 4 hours.

Don't you wish you had that kind of time and money to burn. On a side note, I have been able to get about 3 flights in so far this year due to crummy weather. Hopefully things will start looking better, but it just snowed last night so we will see. Till next time, fly safe...

I did not get as many comments on the Plane on a Conveyor Belt post as I thought I might. But I was glad to see that the majority of the posts came to the correct conclusion that the aircraft will take off. As was said in many of the comments, the wheels being free rolling will not impart any of the reward force of the conveyor belt to the aircraft. The aircrafts propulsion system (prop or jet) will propel the aircraft through the air regardless of what the ground is doing and the wheels will just spin twice as fast. I think there are several points where people get hung up on this; one is that they are thinking in terms of a car on a conveyor belt in which case the car will not move forward. There are others that think the question states that the aircraft will not move forward through the air and will therefore not take off, but again that would be assuming the aircraft acts like a car on the conveyor. There are still others that believe speed is the speed of the wheels (like a car measures speed on its speedometer). The speed of the wheels argument presents an impossible situation due to the way the question is worded. It says that the conveyor automatically adjusts its speed to match the airplane, but if we are going by the wheel speed it is not possible. Since the plane applies its force to the air, when it starts to move forward, the conveyor tries to match the speed in the opposite direction but all it does is cause the wheels to spin faster, so the conveyor has to speed up again, and the cycle has started. The conveyor has to accelerate to infinity and yet it would never catch up to the speed of the wheels. Now in reality the bearings would eventually fail, but the point is that the conveyor could never match the speed of the wheels even in a theoretical world of frictionless bearings, there is simply no way for a conveyor belt to prevent an aircraft from moving forward and taking off.

I am a huge fan of the Mythbusters show on Discovery Channel and they recently did the Myth of an Airplane on a Conveyor Belt. The myth goes something like this: "A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?" I used to be in the camp that it would not take off but only for a few hours, once I really thought about it, I realized that of course the airplane will take off. Mythbusters came to the same conclusion and for the same reasons I came to that conclusion. It is kind of frightening how many pilots out there are on the “won't fly” side of the debate, especially pilots who are flying for the airlines. What do you think? I will post my reasoning for why it will fly after getting some responses. I will give it about a week.