Mini adventures

I’ve been doing enough flying to keep current but not been able to fly much beyond that with the weather. In order to get my instrument rating, one of the boxes I need to check is 50 hours of cross-country time (a trip farther than 50 nautical miles) as Pilot in Command (PIC). Right now I have 16 so I need to do a fair number of trips in the coming months. So towards that end I recently took a fun trip to an little airport in Ohio called New Philadelphia. On the way back from New Philly I had to answer a call of nature so I landed at a little country airport called Carroll County, I had heard there was a restaurant on the field. On final approach you go right over an old red barn before touching down, pretty cool. I taxied in and parked the plane at the transient lot. I went into the restaurant next to the field and upon going into the restaurant I noticed they had homemade pie and ice cream. So of course I had to order a slice of Black Raspberry, it was nothing short of phenomenal. I love that about GA, the mini adventures. Next time I go, I'll have to check out the Bluebird Farm, apparently just a 10 minute walk from the airport.
*image of Carroll County Airport from AirNav

Icon Aircraft

This article has quite a bit of misinformation about general aviation but it does highlight an exciting company and trend in GA, that being the light sport aircraft (LSA) category and industry. No company is garnering more of the LSA spotlight than Icon, and for good reason, they have one really, really cool aircraft. I recently had an email exchange with the founder and CEO, Kirk Hawkins saying that the support for their cause is extremely strong and they receive emails daily from all over the world encouraging them to keep moving forward. I, for one, hope that the company becomes a success as GA and the industry can certainly use the shot in the arm.
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/17-01/mf_icon_air

NASA says, use your checklists

Below is a study from NASA on commercial flights on errors made and how the efficient use of a checklist could help avoid those errors. While the content is geared towards commercial flying there is a lot of information and take-aways from this presentation that is relevant to GA flight as well.

Checklists, Monitoring, and Multitasking in Cockpit Operations

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: nasa aviation)