Details available at this link, or just click the picture below.
The Van's RV-12 is an extremely popular airplane for a number of reasons. It is economical but also offers great performance with a high climb rate, a cruising speed on par with airplanes like the venerable Cessna 172, and is equipped with modern high-tech avionics. It's handling qualities are light and enjoyable for short flights around the local area, but it is also a very capable cross country machine, especially when equipped with a two-axis autopilot.
So what's the catch? Well, that's a matter of opinion. The Van's RV-12 is a kit plane, which means that it comes from the Van's factory as a kit to be built by the buyer. People that aren't interested in building an RV-12 can either buy a fully-assembled one from the factory, or buy one used. I chose to build mine.
This book tells the story of the three years that I spent building my RV-12. It shares the good, the bad, and the ultimate joy of having built it and the equal joy of finally getting to fly it. I wrote this book for the person that I was before I assembled my kit. I knew that I wanted to build a kit, but I didn't know if I was capable of doing it. I didn't know what kind of skills it would require, and I didn't know if I had the skills to do it.
This book is a story of the ups and downs, the highs and lows, and ultimately the immense satisfaction of having finished it. Along the way I learned what I was capable of, what I was incapable of, and I made some great new friends. I learned about tools that I had never heard of, and I learned how to use them.
In short, this is the story of how building my airplane changed my life.
Thursday, February 7, 2013 - that was the date when my RV-12, N284DG, took flight for the first time. While that didn't entirely signal the demise of this blog, it definitely changed the nature of it. Schmetterling Aviation slowly yet inexorably retreated to the back of my mind - I found YouTube to be a better way to share the experience of flying; this blog was better suited to documenting the build process than the usage of the finished project.
There has been no appreciable shortage of maintenance work to be done on the RV-12, but that is not the same as building. The work is of a different nature - maintenance work is quite often much harder (and less fulfilling) than building. Parts have had ample time to become so accustomed to their position on the airplane that the refuse to be parted. Screw heads get rounded out and become very difficult to remove.
The primary cause of this particular recurring problem is a lazy maintainer that didn't replace a worn screw with a fresh one when he had the chance.
I have three nicknames for that guy: me, myself, and I.
I have been flying the RV-12 for more than seven years. I am still madly in love with the way it flies, although I would be lying if I said it satisfactorily addresses every flying need/want I have. It cannot fly IFR, for example. While it would not be the perfect all weather airplane, I would like to be able to file an fly in marginal VFR/light IFR now and then. Also, it isn't actually slow, but I could use another 50 knots every now and then too.
I also miss the work of building. One thing that I like to tell people is that "Building an airplane is not something you do, it is something you become." It invades every open space in your brain. The Build never fully recedes into the background. It's always there. I have a couple of hours with nothing I have to be doing? Go do some building. The next subkit is taking awhile to show up on your driveway? Read ahead in the plans to make sure you have the tools and supplies you're going to need.
And the worst of all: spouse wants to take a one or two week trip in the camper. Or you have to attend the wedding or graduation of some young kid you barely know. It's torture!
I missed it. I started thinking about building another plane for myself. The FAA regulatory regime has changed - I no longer need an LSA. I could BasicMed myself back into any airplane smaller than a King Air.
So, what would I build if I could? As of this writing, I 'm not 100% sure. I like all of the Van's models, but I'm pretty sure that I have it narrowed down to an RV-8A, an RV-9A, or an RV-14A.
Yes, all three are nosewheel airplanes. I liked my tail-dragging RV-6 just fine, but there are downsides to having a tailwheel, primarily having to do with takeoffs and landings. They are very different in a taildragger. Crosswinds become a much larger factor. It's also a little bit harder to stay competent in a taildragger after a layoff from flying.
Case in point: Ohio winters.
I like the RV-8A for the tandem seating - it feels more like a military fighter. Sitting on the centerline is very beneficial when it comes to formation flying and aerobatics. The downside is passenger comfort. They're back there alone. They also don't have much in the way of forward visibility. That makes it very difficult to fly from the back seat, and I let a lot of people fly the plane when they ride with me.
I like the RV-9A as a travel plane. It is far more stable than the rest of the bunch, with the possible exception of the big four-seat RV-10. It's a bit small, though.
I like the RV-14A because it is aerobatic and roomy. It's really just a bigger RV-7A. It is also the only one on my list that has the modern-style build manual of the RV-10 and RV-12. That's a big factor for me. The downside is cost - it's bigger and therefore uses more expensive materials like aluminum. Building an RV-14 would be roughly 20% more than an RV-9A.
As of this writing, the kit prices are:
RV-8A: $25,925
RV-9A: $27,800
RV-14A: $36,335
Those are just the kit prices - that isn't even half of the finished cost. I would also be more likely to put a bigger engine in the -14 than the other two. For the RV-8A and the RV-14A, I would also want a constant speed prop and a few more fancy boxes in the panel.
Engine, avionics, and covering (probably vinyl - paint is too expensive) would be somewhere in the neighborhood $50,000 - $75,000. Realistically, the -8A and -7A would cost in the $85,000 - $100,000 range. The RV-14 would range from $100,000 - $140,000.
I currently do not see a financial path to any of those destinations. I'm at the finishing stages of my first book (tentatively named The PapaGolf Chronicles), but I have no faith in it netting me $140 grand. Time will tell. If you are reading this in my third book, well... I guess I was wrong.
So, you are surely wondering what event has prompted the revival of this blog?
The Civil Air Patrol.
Well, more or less indirectly. A guy I met in CAP had developed an interest in building an airplane and was referred to me as someone that might know something about doing so. Fair enough. I'm always happy to try to talk people into life-changing events and activities, just so long as I personally have no vested interest in the endeavor's success.
He was thinking of building an RV-8A.
I was thinking that I want to be involved in that. I told him that I would give him as much help as he could stand. He ordered the tail kit about 32 seconds later. I'm in it now!!
His name is Scott, a fact only slightly less important (to me) than the fact that he is a veteran F-16 pilot. I'm not going to go into my decades-long interest in that particular jet, but I can tell you that I am ecstatic about the prospect of having all of my lingering F-16 questions answered. I have a very realistic Virtual Reality (VR) F-16 simulator on my PC - so realistic that I often struggle to learn the correct procedures, right along with my innate inability to land the doggone thing. Having a source of real world knowledge is going to be great!
I have already been disabused of an idea that I read somewhere - I read that the F-16 is so light and powerful that they didn't even use the afterburner on takeoff. Not so, according to Scott. I have changed my simulated flight procedures in response.
Guess what! It's a LOT more fun with the afterburner.
Prior to filling out a membership application, prospective members are encouraged/required (don't know which, but it matters not) to attend two meetings. I attended my first last night. The meetings start at 19:00 hours, which is a little test in and of itself. Fortunately, I instantly recognized that as being equivalent to 7:00 Eastern Muggle Time. The meetings are held in a room located in Hangar 4 at Don Scott (KOSU) airport. If you don't know precisely where hangar 4 is, or where to go once inside the voluminous interior space, you are not alone. Well, you are now, but less than 24 hours ago I was in the same boat. The hangar wasn't hard to find, but it was festooned with doors - which to choose?
Easy - follow the guy wearing a CAP shirt - chances are that's where he's going.
Maj. Joe was already inside and dressed to the 9's in ho Air Force blues, ostensibly because he was getting his picture taken. He was preparing to lead the meeting, so we only talked briefly before I tried to find a place to sit in an inconspicuous area. Failing that, I ended up right up front. Was I the subject of eighteen pairs of inquisitive eyes? I have no idea, but it sure felt that way. The ages of the group appeared to run from late-30's to early 70's, all male. They chatted amongst themselves while I attempted to blend into the wall behind me.
The meeting started right on time. Not immediately, but soon thereafter, I was asked/ordered (don't know which, but it matters not) to stand up and introduce myself. I immediately cleared up any possible misunderstanding of my name (98% hear 'Campbell') by telling them that it's "Gamble, with a G" and following up with an early biographical factoid: "I was enlisted in the Air Force; they were afraid to make me an officer because at some point I might become a Major Gamble."
Someone, somewhere dropped a pin. Everyone heard it. How not to, given the utter silence? They either didn't get it, or the meetings were far more formal than I had anticipated. Or, and I credit this with being nearly impossible, they didn't think it was funny.
Tough room.
The meeting went on for two hours, and I was very happy to have done some preparatory research into what it is they actually do. Even so, a lot of it was inside baseball; I still paid rapt attention to whoever was speaking - I can't prove it, but periodic glances at Maj. Joe led me to believe that he was paying attention to whether or not I was paying attention. Most of it fleshed out many of the fundamentals of what I had learned from perusing the documents on their website, and some of it was brand new and very intriguing. There was a lot of talk about having mounts installed on the Cessna 182 to carry a Garmin Virb, which is sort of like a GoPro camera but with presumably better mission supporting features. That's not much of a stretch - the G1000 instrument panel includes Search & Rescue (SAR) functions that take the drudgery (and time) out of plotting search grids.
I'm very intrigued with this subject. There is a PowerPoint (oh, goody - thought I left that behind when I retired from Corp. America) at this link, if you're curious.
Towards the end of the meeting, a handful of achievement awards were presented to squadron members who had successfully defeated entrenched resistance from various bureaucratic offices. It was at that point that I realized just how much this was going to be like the USAF.
The next meeting is in two weeks and will be notably different from this one - they will have planes in the air coordinating with the staff on the ground as they go through what I assume will be a practice mission. I'm looking forward to that too.
As far as flying, I am still practicing what I can in my own plane, which really isn't much. I'm just flying GPS instrument approaches in good weather and no vision obstruction devices as are usually used in IFR practice. I'm not ready for that quite yet; I'm practicing following the routes and altitude changes with the autopilot and my eyes mostly looking out the window. I'm getting close to the point where I will put on the vision-limiting goggles (Foggles is the trade name) and enlist the help of a safety pilot. I'm still also using one of my PC-based flight sims to practice the use of the Garmin G1000. I'm also getting close to starting discussions on the subject of spending some money on a new iPad and a tremendously useful app called ForeFlight. Frankly, I want that even if I never fly IFR again - it's an incredible tool.
My first real conversation with Maj. Joe was chock full of information, but it was delivered via iPhone while I was driving. To me more precise (in order to ward off the nannies), the iPhone was pumping through the fancy software in my truck; it was like listening to someone sitting right there with me. And I do mean "listening" - it was a lot of info and I gathered as much of it as I could while still paying adequate attention to traffic, etc. It wasn't until a couple of days later that I started having questions to ask.
The delay in queries came from the discovery of the squadron's website, where I found a treasure trove of interesting documents, ranging from "getting started" to details about the tasks expected and required of crew members. My favorites, which I can't seem to find again, were copies of actual mission briefing sheets. There were also documents describing the knowledge and skills that will be put to the test on check rides. Those were the ghosts of CAP future that I feared the most. While I can (and do) fly my RV-12 safely and according to applicable regulations, I doubt if I could answer the types of esoteric questions that are the very hallmark of check rides.
In a nutshell, there are going to be challenges in learning the non-flying aspects of the CAP and there will be challenges in getting myself back up to the flying and aeronautical knowledge standards appropriate to the mission. In other words, I have to do a lot of refresher learning in both the book stuff and the flying stuff. For VFR (good weather) flying, I am mostly concerned with the knowledge portion, although I will need some flying time to get up to speed on the bigger, faster, and more complex Cessna 182.
The questions that I had ranged from uniform requirements (what are the uniforms going to cost), how pilots are tasked with missions and what is the expected response time (is it 30 minutes notice? 48 hours?), and confirmation of the parts that sounded too good to be true (personal rental of the planes for training for only $40/hr dry), so I invited the Major to meet me for lunch to get an idea of what the time requirements would be (don't really care - I have time!) and what kind of financial outlay will I be looking at. I was also wondering how to work through all of the learning documents I had found in some kind of logical order.
First, there are many options in the uniform regs. They can be as easy as a blue polo shirt and grey business slacks. Sadly, the military-style flight suit is acceptable, but not mandatory. Being optional and carrying a price tag of over $250 makes it a tough sell. I may treat myself to one of those if/when I work my way up to flying from the left seat as the flight commander.
Response time varies, but it seems that there is plenty of notice before showing up for a mission. Promising news was that many of the pilots have day jobs, so are mostly restricted to evening and weekend flights, whereas I would be available just about every day. That sounds like I will be able to fly a goodly number of missions, and I'm okay with that!
The airplane rental is real - $40/hr, but I have to buy the gas. We'll talk more about this in the budgeting section of this report. I also learned that in addition to the Cessna 182, they also have a Garmin G1000 equipped Cessna 172, which is important for two reasons: it burns only a little more than half the fuel as the 182, and it isn't very popular compared to its big brother, meaning more availability for 2nd Lieutenant Memyselfandi. I forgot to verify that the CFI (flight instructor) is free, but that's not a big deal. Either way, it's a very good deal from a financial point of view.
I'm pretty close to 100% sure I'm going to do this, but the process needs to be followed; I will have to attend two meetings before submitting my membership application. The first meeting is inn two days, and there is another scheduled for two weeks after that, so this part will go quickly. I will have to go to the Sheriff's office to get finger printed and they will do an FBI background check, but that's nothing new. Once that it done and my membership is approved, I will get a training curriculum, most of which will be simple policy training and easily available online.
While I'm waiting for that, I will bone up on the flying aspect, starting with the VFR flying. That one is easier than IFR for two reasons: I need only concentrate on the weather, regulations, and flight planning since I am confident that I can fly the C-172. The bigger plane is a separate thing and can wait. The book learning will be easy because I bought the Sporty's Learn to Fly Private Pilot online training years ago for exactly the same purpose: keeping up with the things I need to know, and keeping up with new regulations.
Once I'm comfortable with that, I will do the IFR side of things. This is where I will need the most work - not only have I forgotten most of the book learning, but I am also way, way out of practice in the flying aspects too. For this I will buy the Sporty's IFR training package. I am also going to need to buy an iPad - flight planning is almost always done with an iPad app called ForeFlight. My tablet is an Android, for which there are no apps equivalent to ForeFlight, and my old iPad is exactly that: too old.
One thing that I can do right now is to get started on learning the Garmin G1000. That will be enabled by a flight simulator I have on my PC. It's called X-Plane 11, and it has a simulated Cessna 172 with a G1000. It also emulates Air Traffic Control (ATC), so I will be able to plan and fly actual flights - that will save both time and money.
So, budget. Everything related to flying costs money, and more often than not, it costs a lot of money. Just to get an idea, I put together a brief pro forma budget.
ITEM COST Uniforms $150, until flight suit IFR Training $200 172/hr* $40 + fuel ($5/gal, 8 gal/hr) - $80/hr ($185 mkt) 182/hr* $40 + fuel ($5/gal, 14 gal/hr) - $110/hr ($225 mkt) ForeFlight $100/yr iPad $600 new, $450 used * $5/gallon is very conservative - it is likely to be less given current prices. I figure I'll need about 15 hours split between the two planes to get to a decent level of competence, so initial flight training will be around $1,500, more if the CFI is getting paid.
I've kept quiet about this for awhile now - probably more than a year but less than three - but I have been starting to question whether flying was "worth it" for me anymore. It's deeply personal and has huge ramifications. Factoid: I flew a total of 17 hours last year, which is practically nothing, and certainly not enough to justify the fixed costs and the maintenance work. I've even gone so far as considering selling the airplane and either getting a different airplane or just quitting entirely.
On the quitting side, there has been one huge unassailable fact to deal with: I would never be able to come back. The reason for that is by no means unique, but not something that I share with anyone but the host of other voices in my head. On the "getting something else" side, I think about doing something like buying an older Cessna or Piper and having it upgraded with a Dynon Skyview by virtues of the STC (basically a piece of paper that says a store-bought plane can legally use Dynon avionics) and cleaning up any paint and/or interior issues, the purpose being to end up with an IFR-capable travel plane. I'm instrument rated, but haven't been current since the day I sold my Tampico in August 2005. I would like to get back to that level of flying, but an RV-12 is not the way to do it. And no, there is no way of owning both, and I will not rent for that type of flying.
I started to wonder if I was simply bored. Probably, is my guess, but.... bored with what? Flying in its entirety? Flying the same trips over and over and over? Some mix of both? While it might seem unlikely, I do have to consider than I'm closer to age 60 than I am to 55. Things change, both physically and in other realms. Or, and this is my working theory, I need for there to be more purpose for my flying than buying bargain-priced cheeseburgers in Portsmouth.
Something happened recently that set the gears in motion for testing that hypothesis: I went to Missouri to fly the B-2 simulator and found myself more pumped up about aviation than I was for the first flight of the RV-12. I learned that there are still things about flying that bring out that old enthusiasm for flying that I grew up with. There remains hope.
Oddly enough, I enjoyed the camaraderie of the group of pilots almost as much as I enjoyed the simulator. I even got nostalgic for the military, something my 26 year old self would never have imagined. After some thought about it, I reached out to a local friend who happens to be a major in the Civil Air Patrol. You can meet him here:
I was. of course, aware of the CAP, but had never paid much attention to it. Joe's descriptions of the types of missions that they fly were very intriguing indeed. Most of them are quite meaningful and provide important services in support of more than just the air force. This is a partial list of what they are tasked with:
Civil Air Patrol covers several emergency services areas. The principal categories include search and rescue missions, disaster relief, humanitarian services, and United States Air Force support. Other services, such as homeland security and actions against drug-trafficking operations, are becoming increasingly important.
A CAP search and rescue (SAR) pilot
The Civil Air Patrol is well known for its search activities in conjunction with search and rescue (SAR) operations. CAP is involved with approximately three quarters of all aerial inland SAR missions directed by the United States Air Force Rescue Coordination Center at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida. Outside of the contiguous United States, CAP directly supports the Joint Rescue Coordination Centers in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. CAP is credited with saving an average of 100 lives per year.
CAP is active in disaster relief operations, especially in areas such as Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana that are frequently struck by hurricanes as well as Oklahoma and Texas which are frequented by large, damaging tornadoes. CAP aircrews and ground personnel provide transportation for cargo and officials, aerial imagery to aid emergency managers in assessing damage, and donations of personnel and equipment to local, state and federal disaster relief organizations during times of need. In 2004, several hurricanes hit the southeast coast of the United States, with Florida being the worst damaged; CAP was instrumental in providing help to affected areas.
The Civil Air Patrol conducts humanitarian service missions, usually in support of the Red Cross. CAP aircrews transport time-sensitive medical materials, including blood and human tissue, when other means of transportation (such as ambulances) are not practical or possible. Following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City when all general aviation was grounded, one of the first planes to fly over the World Trade Center site was a CAP aircraft taking photographs.
CAP performs several missions that are not combat-related in support of the United States Air Force, including damage assessment, transportation of officials, communications support and low-altitude route surveys. The CAP fleet is used in training exercises to prepare USAF pilots to intercept enemy aircraft over the Continental United States. Civil Air Patrol aircraft are flown into restricted airspace, where United States Air Force pilots may practice high-speed intercepts.
The Civil Air Patrol also provides non-emergency assistance to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Drug Enforcement Administration, and United States Forest Service in the War on Drugs. In 2005, CAP flew over 12,000 hours in support of this mission and led these agencies to the confiscation of illegal substances valued at over US$400 million. Civil Air Patrol makes extensive use of the Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance system, mounted on the Gippsland GA8 Airvan. The system is able to evaluate spectral signatures given off by certain objects, allowing the system to identify, for example, a possible marijuana crop.
As a humanitarian service organization, CAP assists federal, state and local agencies in preparing for and responding to homeland security needs. The Red Cross, Salvation Army and other civilian agencies frequently request Civil Air Patrol aircraft to transport vital supplies including medical technicians, medication, and other vital supplies. They often rely on CAP to provide airlift and communications for disaster relief operations. CAP also assists the United States Coast Guard and Coast Guard Auxiliary.
So, yeah, there is definitely some purpose to be had there! I was also curious about the planes they fly. The local Sr. Squadron has a Cessna Turbo 182T with a Garmin 1000 panel. And therein lies the other facet I have been lacking: a challenge. The RV-12 is about as simple as a modern airplane can be, and lacks a purpose to keep my high-end skill set current. The 182 and Garmin mix is daunting, but not nearly so much as having to take check rides now and then and fly under conditions that I normally shy away from due to a very low benefit value to balance against risk. I am NOT saying that I want to fly in thunderstorms, but the weather I limit my flying to is clear skies and light winds, some of which is attributable to the relatively light RV-12 and some of it is the lack of any reason to get off the couch.
This will be one of the welcome challenges:
I also poked around on their website and found all kinds of stuff that indicate the level of effort that is going to be required just to fit in with the personnel structure and to get through all of the training. Again, it's all very appealing. I also came across some mission brief sheets that were super interesting, but I can't find them again. A couple of them were for flights up the length of a river that runs through town - civil engineers wanted to see the state of the bridges after a period of high water. For that, they needed a photographer - that is a position I could elect to be trained in if I chose to, which most of you will recognize as being something right up my alley.
As far as coming up to speed with flying the plane, there would be plenty of time for that. A typical mission requires a crew of three, with one of them being in the back seat acting as a spotter for search missions, or a photographer as mentioned above. That's where I would start. Through time, experience, and training, I would eventually move to the front seat. It's obvious to me that the time spent in the back would also provide a great place to watch and listen to get a feel for how operational flying is done in this new environment.
I'm leaving in 45 minutes to have lunch with the Major - as you can imagine, I have a LOT of questions for him!
Through a series of events and personal relationships that aren’t unique or interesting enough to detail here, it transpired that I found myself at Whiteman AFB one fine morning, waiting with almost childlike anticipation for my turn to get some seat time in a B-2 ‘Spirit’ Stealth Bomber simulators. This would be one of the very simulators used in the training of actual Air Force Spirit pilots in the exotic and esoteric operations endemic to the amazingly complex process of stealthily, accurately, and hopefully survivably task of delivering bombs, both conventional and nuclear, to their assigned destination. As you can imagine, this is not an activity commonly offered to civilians. In fact, I myself was quite surprised when I received the invitation; I had to read it half a dozen times to make sure it said what it actually said, not what I wanted it to say. Frankly, I still can’t fathom it. The only requirements, and they were very strict on this, was that we leave all personal electronics (phones, FitBits, etc.) behind. There were no non-disclosure requirements or TSA-style detectors, and if we asked a question that they couldn’t answer due to security concerns, they politely deflected them.
Despite my initial disbelief that a civilian would ever be allowed to do something like this, I found myself poised to experience what will surely be one of my top five most memorable days of my life. It will be added to a collection of notable days that include the sunny morning that I first flew the airplane that I had spent three years building, the out-of-the-blue chance to ride in a Huey helicopter, and the day I drove four different Porsches on the factory test track in Leipzig, Germany. Oh, and I are dare not omit the day I was wed and the ensuing birth of my daughter, although those actually fall into a different category.
This, though…. this was something so unique and completely unexpected, and let’s just come right out and say it, so cool that a lot of people simply won’t believe it. For this they can be forgiven for the simple fact that I didn’t believe it either. You can buy a ride in a Huey, You can buy the Porsche test track experience. There is no price assigned to being invited onto an Air Force base to fly an exact replica of a front line, nuclear-capable stealth bomber because it cannot be purchased. As a measure of the value of this offer, consider that it was a nine hour drive and it rained every hour of that, both going and returning, and I would do it again tomorrow if the opportunity arose.
Our group had a two hour window for the use of the sim, and as I was in the ‘friends’ column of the ‘family and friends’ chart, I was to ‘fly’ last. I was waiting in the sim control center and I was able to see the out-the-window view and the screens that make up the majority of the instrument panel as the family members took their turns, but was really interesting was talking about the technology with the civilian factory rep that is responsible for the upkeep of the simulators. The sim is lot like airline-level sims in that it is an entirely enclosed pod perched atop a collection of massive hydraulic pistons.
There are five servers, each supporting a different aspect of airplane operation. Some run on a Linux platform, and at least one is hosted by Windows 10. The software is kept in sync with updates to the airplane systems and flight models; it’s a twenty year old airplane, so there have likely been quite a few changes. As changes propagate through the fleet one at a time, there are periods during which not all of the fleet are identical. When this happens, the individual simulators also diverge until the fleet is again homogeneous.
Awesome stuff for a guy that has been passionate about PC-based flight simulators since the release of the T80-FS1 Flight Simulator from subLOGIC in 1980. It cost $25 in 1980 dollars, which is equivalent to $75 in contemporaneous dollars. That program eventually became the venerable Microsoft Flight Simulator, and I had every new version of that as well.
The state of the art these days is almost immeasurable as compared to the early days - $75 will buy you an extremely accurate PC-based simulation of modern airplanes like the F-18 Hornet, the AV-8B Harrier II, or the Top Gun star, the awesome F-14 Tomcat. As I was looking at the B-2 sim's options for throwing system failures, just about any type of weather conditions imaginable, and all kinds of emergency situations, I didn't see very much that I can't configure in most of my PC-based sims.
The best of the bunch is DCS World and, inconceivably*, it is a free download. It comes with a high-fidelity P-51, but you have to buy any additional planes and helicopters you want, all of which are worth every penny. They are predominantly military planes ranging from WWII fighters to modern jet fighters. There are also a handful of helicopters and one general aviation plane. New planes are routinely added. Hint: wait for sales - they happen a few times a year.
These can all be flown in Virtual Reality, which adds an entirely new level of immersion that you just don't get with a flat screen - the VR experience blocks your peripheral vision which allows your eyes to be the sole contributor to your sense of balance. If you really let yourself forget that you’re sitting in a stationary chair, it is quite easy for your eyes to convince you that you are feeling actual banking and pitching movements. It is equally capable of making you airsick.
With 45 minutes left on the clock (way more than I had hoped for!!), it was my turn to head down to the drawbridge that leads to the cockpit. Normally the drawbridge is raised to allow the pod to move freely, but as civilians we weren’t allowed to use the full motion function for reasons not explicitly given. I personally suspect that it was to avoid a messy clean-up job should one or more of us got airsick. That turned out not to matter all that much anyway, for the reasons mentioned above. The B-2 is a big airplane, but its interior is almost entirely filled with massive fuel tanks, a large void where up to 80 500 lb bombs or a couple of really huge bombs can ride, and four jet engines. The pilots get a space the size of a Ford F-150 cab. There is a large center console supporting a host of boxes festooned with a plethora of knobs, switches and displays, not a single one of which was recognizable for its function. Not that I cared; I wasn’t there to learn the plane, I was there to fly the plane. I only mention the console because it sits in exactly the spot you would want to plant your feet as you crawl into the seat.
Once I had awkwardly plopped myself into the Pilot’s seat (the one on the left where the person primarily responsible for the flying sits) and my friend had settled into the right side seat (far more gracefully),which is known as the Mission Commander’s seat (the boss of the whole endeavor), I took a few seconds to get a feel for the space. Keeping in mind that these pilots often fly missions lasting over 24 hours, you would think the seats would be well cushioned and as comfortable as possible. You would be, in a word, wrong. I was sitting on an ejection seat and the “cushion” was a tightly packed parachute. It wasn’t quite like sitting on stone, but it was close. Being of slight build and not well endowed with natural cushioning, I cringed at the thought of having to endure that seat for seemingly endless hours in the air. I didn’t spend any more than a few valuable seconds thinking about it as I was almost instantly overwhelmed by the broad spread of screens, instruments, and other indecipherable things spread out in front of me.
My own airplane is flown with a stick (as opposed to the steering wheel-ish yoke you would see in an airliner or a Cessna) so I was instantly comfortable with it. I fly mine with my left hand, though, because my throttle is a single knob emerging from the center of the panel, but the B-2 has the throttles on the left side, just like fighters to. The stick was comfortable in my right hand, and the set of four throttle controls fell naturally under my left hand. I was surprised at how small they were; all four fit comfortably into my hand. If you compare that with the relatively massive throttles of a passenger jet, you will understand the difference. The view out of the windshield (not sure if that’s what the Air Force calls it - it probably has a three letter acronym (TLA) like just about everything else military related) was expansive. I would estimate it as around a 200° arc. As I saw later in the actual airplane, that’s a little less than they have in the actual jet, but there’s not that much reason to look around that far anyway, at least in the sim.
We were soon ready to go and the operator set us up for the flight operation that I had explicitly requested. My desired flight scenario differed from the more typical requests, which I suspect are more commonly focused on takeoffs and landings. During more than 1,000 logged flight hours, I have done more of those that I could ever count While they wouldn’t have lacked appeal, they came nowhere near what I wanted to try my hand at, something that a civilian is very unlikely to ever do: air-to-air refueling. I have always been fascinated by it, and assumed it to be one of the more difficult skills that the already highly capable pilots must learn. If there was time left after that, though, I did entertain the notion of trying a landing.
We started out about one mile behind the KC-135 tanker, level at 25,000’ altitude and 260 knots. The speed doesn’t really matter, though - it is all about the relative speed between the tanker and the receiver. Before starting the approach to the tanker, I wanted to get a feel for the flying qualities of the bomber. The feel of flying the bomber was what you would expect from an airplane whose mission was almost completely dependent on a very stable platform: ponderous.
I was not the least bit surprised at the glacially slow response to control inputs, but I was shocked at the relatively high stick forces. My little airplane is flown with very, very little force or movement of the stick - it’s actually primarily controlled by light pressure on the stick rather than large motions. If you were to watch my hand during an entire flight, you would likely not see any movement larger than half an inch, and that would only be for a steepish turn at landing speed. In the B-2, it takes an estimated 10-15 pounds of force to move the stick. Full deflection of the stick to either side gives you a response of… almost nothing. That took a lot of getting used to after years of flying a plane that could do an entire roll in a second or two, if it was stressed for it.
This was surprising, but not hard to understand. The very mission of the airplane is to be a stable platform. No one wants to spend 24 hours flying a plane that is in need of constant correction. It would be like 24 hours babysitting a precocious and hyperactive three year old. On the other hand, when you have become accustomed to instant response to your control inputs, it is a recipe for disaster to attempt an intricate refueling operation with controls with an endemic, anemic response. More on that soon. But rest assured: there is a TLA for it.
After getting a general idea of the control feel and response, I was ready to approach the tanker. The first step is to slowly approach the tanker from below and behind until you reach a position relative to the tanker called “pre-contact.” This would entail radio contact with the boom operator in the tanker, at which point the operator would drop the refueling boom down to our level. You are very close to the tanker at this point, and the goal is to very slowly begin to move closer to the end of the boom.
Wikipedia Commons
By ‘slow’ they mean a relative velocity of about one foot per second. This is performed with very small, but very frequent, changes in the throttle positions of the four engine controls. At this point I fully understood why the throttle controls were sized as they were. The idea was to approach in a straight line and any level of asymmetric thrust on the collection of engines could induce some yaw, which would be very unwelcome indeed. Even with the small changes in thrust, there was a commensurate change in altitude. Plane goes faster, plane goes up. Unless, of course, you make quick corrections with the stick. But as we’ve seen, there are no quick responses to be had from the ultra-stable plane. Having made a control input without seeing a response, my autonomous reflex was to move the stick more. By that time, though, the plane had finally gotten around to responding to my first input, so I reacted by shoving the stick forward, resulting in the exact same over control, but in the opposite direction. This all very quickly adds up to a pilot-induced roller coaster simulator. This kind of thing naturally has a TLA - it’s known as PIO, or Pilot Induced Oscillations.
PIO in and of itself can lead to some spectacular failures. Combine it with a flying wing like the B-2, which just like every other wing wants nothing more than to climb, and you are begging for a problem. In my case, that problem ended up in an unwanted climb that went so far as to cause us to collide with the bottom of the tanker. The sim is very, very accurate in what it models, but fortunately it doesn’t model the mid-air explosion of two valuable military assets. It was also quite embarrassing. Best of all, though, we were only a reset button away from starting over and trying again. It was also only the first of two things that I did that would have broken the real airplane, but the other incident is yet to come.
My friend took over and flew us back to the pre-contact position and it was fascinating to see and feel. The left and right side throttles and control stick are tied together, so by lightly resting my hand on the controls I could feel his inputs. The astonishing thing about them was how rapid they were. Neither control stopped moving more than a second at a time. He could see and respond to changes in our movements relative to the tanker that I could not even hope to see. I like to think that the difference was due to the 30 year difference in age, but that’s just an excuse. The raw talent on display was awe inspiring. Again, that’s no surprise. B-2 pilots aren’t selected because they have just average innate abilities, after all. There are fewer B-2 pilots than there are astronauts.
My second, third, and possibly fourth efforts weren’t as deadly, but I still failed to get into a position that would allow the refueling boom to reach the receptacle back behind the cockpit of the plane. It’s actually pretty far behind the pilot’s location, so at some point it completely disappears from view, unless you accidentally run into it, which I did at one point. You have to maintain the proper position by a combination of using the visual position of things on the tanker such as the perspective of a couple of antennas mounted on the belly of the tanker and two strips of lights, one of which helps you with fore and aft position, and the other which helps with altitude control. When you get to this point, the operation from our point of view became nothing more than flying very tight formation with a four-engine Boeing.
That’s not easy. One challenge is the aforementioned PIO, but with the added complexity of areas of turbulence generated by the tanker. Suffice it to say, twenty minutes or more of this kind of flying results in a pool of sweat, and in my case, a crease in the surface of the parachute from instinctive clenching of certain muscles. It took a few minutes to get a feel for the inputs I would need to maintain the relative position, but there wasn’t nearly enough to become adept at it. I managed to get the boom attached twice, which is actually very, very gratifying, but it turns about that you only have 6 (or was it 9?) feet to get slowed down to the precise speed of the tanker. Both times I got connected, I was only able to stay that way for a few seconds.
That was good enough for me, and by that point we only had a few more minutes to try a landing. Unfortunately, the heading of the tanker was away from the base and we had travelled over 200 miles while I was ham-fisting my way through an operation as delicate as brain surgery. My friend called the operator and had him give us a 200 knot tailwind, but it still wasn’t enough. Just to have something to do, he suggested we do some low altitude flight, his suggestion being 100’ above the ground. This is not the forte of a stealth bomber, though, and to be brutally honest, the graphics down that low were far worse than what I have at home on my PC-based sims. I had a better suggestion.
We were doing 500 knots, so there was plenty of energy to quickly climb up a few thousand feet. After asking for permission, I decided to try a barrel roll. If you aren’t familiar with the term, Wikipedia has this to say:
A barrel roll is an aerial maneuver in which an airplane makes a complete rotation on both its longitudinal and lateral axes, causing it to follow a helical path, approximately maintaining its original direction. It is sometimes described as a "combination of a loop and a roll." The g-force is kept positive (but not constant) on the object throughout the maneuver, commonly between 2–3 g, and no less than 0.5 g. The barrel roll is commonly confused with an aileron roll.
Because Wiki referenced it, this is what they have to say about the aileron roll:
The aileron roll is commonly executed through the application of full aileron in one direction. In some lower powered general aviation and aerobatic training aircraft, prior to applying aileron input, the pilot must begin the maneuver by trading altitude for airspeed (i.e. diving). This helps achieve enough airspeed to complete the roll without losing rudder and aileron control. The minimum airspeed needed depends on the aircraft's design, but is generally about 120 to 200 knots. Because full aileron is applied, structural limitations prevent many aircraft from performing the maneuver at very high speeds.
With the roll rate of the B-2 being accurately described as “glacially slow,” and the very likely chance that it would simply fall out of the sky once inverted, I deemed the barrel roll as the safest choice. And in order to spare you the suspense, here’s what happened: I did it. We made it all the way around, albeit with substantial loss of altitude. At this point I had already experienced something only a handful of other people have ever done. I was satisfied well beyond even my most optimistic hopes. But there were still two minutes on the clock. What to do? Hmmmm.
A loop. I wanted to try a loop. My friend had never heard of anyone completing a loop in the sim, but I was gung-ho to try it. I suspect that it probably has never been tried by an actual pilot - I know that simulator training is treated as being every bit as serious as flying the actual airplane and I doubt that a pilot working towards the responsibility of delivering nuclear weapons cannot afford getting a reputation of being frivolous. Not the case for me - I had precisely nothing to lose.
Having already made a short story long, here’s a brief synopsis of how it went.
I climbed us back up to 8,000’, put us in a shallow drive to get as much scoot as the bird would take, and pulled the stick about halfway to two-thirds back. I didn’t want to use full back stick in the beginning of the loop because I intuited that I was going to need a lot of altitude to survive the backside of the loop. We went across the top of the loop at a pretty slow speed, but it was enough to get the nose headed back down. I pulled the throttles to idle, but I didn’t think to deploy the speedbrakes. We actually made it through the loop, but I am pretty sure that it would have over sped and over G’d the airframe. It definitely would have caused a brutal meeting with the Wing Commander. I will never know if the speedbrakes would have alleviated that or not, but it doesn’t matter: I made a loop in a full-fidelity simulation of a B-2 bomber.
If that wasn’t enough (and it sure as h*** was!!), doing that loop also conveyed upon me a minor and short-lived celebrity status with the squadron of B-2 pilots later in the day when they gathered for some drinks and comradery. If someone had told me about all of this back in the early 80’s when I was a lowly airman maintaining the side-looking reconnaissance radar on the infamous SR-71 Blackbird and was in awe of the astronaut-ish pilots, I would never have believed that some day I would be chatting with them as if we were peers.
Every pilot has at least one reason to fly. In fact, I would hazard that the majority have more than one reason that they were initially drawn to flying. I know I do.
I get the question a lot from curious folks: "What attracted you to flying?" Others will answer along the lines of "more efficient travel," "it's my job," or "I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I was hooked,"but in the interest of concision I have distilled my response down to a minimalist answer: "I like airplanes."
It's short, sweet, and has the benefit of being utterly honest. I developed a fascination with airplanes when I was six years old. Not "flying," mind you, but "airplanes." It was part and parcel with an interest in operating machinery.
I recently came across a little book my mother used to keep for each of her children, of which I was the middle of three. I found in that book that when I was five or six years old, my career goals were recorded as "Astronaut" or "Gas station attendant." Honest truth!
Why astronaut??
Ha, kidding. That one is obvious. The thing about the gas station attendant, though, was that even at that age I was smitten with operating equipment. I just wanted to run the gas pump! That career path was, as we all know now, rendered moot soon thereafter. Ironically, I now hate pumping gas.
I provide this snippet of autobiographical data to set the stage for the remainder of this story.
The wife and I are considering buying a winter home in Florida, but one potential drawback of being down south during the inclement months is that it would be difficult to visit my father. I was relating that concern to a friend of mine and was describing the budgeting process I had gone through to determine the monthly airline and rental car costs associated with making visits.
His response was along the lines of "Why would you want to do that??"
While I was trying to understand why visiting my father would be a questionable activity, he said, "Why wouldn't you just fly your plane?"
That left me just as speechless as his first comment. Why? Because the though had never crossed my mind!
I fly because I like flying the airplane, not because it's (sometimes) a more efficient way to travel. Sure, I make day trips and give lots of rides, but I have never thought of the airplane as a travelling machine.
I decided to give it a try. The friend that woke me to the idea of Ohio-to-Florida happens to live in Florida and has often offered to host me for as long as I want if I ever travel down that way, so I decided that would be the perfect way to introduce myself to long-distance (well, 600nm) flying.
Given that my longest flight ever, across almost four decades of flying, was a trip to Oshkosh in my RV-6 more than a decade ago, and the furthest I had gone in the RV-12 that replaced the -6 was a 100nm day trip, this was no mean feat to consider.
The thing about about flying any appreciable distance in a small plane is that it is NOT just a collection of 100nm flights taken contiguously; it's not a question of enduring the distance, it's a question of dealing with a potential six (or more) different weather systems. Considering that weather is my personal #1 challenge/fear in flying, this is no small thing to consider.
I have found that a strong tonic for personal trepidation is planning - lot's and lot's of planning. The first decision to make was fuel stops: how many, and where? Deciding the "how many" was the first order of business. I could make three 200nm legs, or two 300nm legs. That's a pretty straightforward napkin-math equation: the most likely fuel burn, as provided in the Van's performance charts, is 4.0 gph at 5,000 rpm and 5,000' density altitude. That does not, however, account for the fuel used for the takeoff, climb, descent, or reserve. At 5,500 rpm, the projected burn rate rises to 5.0 gph. The projected airspeeds at those values range from 101 - 114 knots (TAS).
For my planning, I used 100 knots and 6 gph to make the math easier. I also selected these values as a reflection of the conservatism I adopt when faced with the relative unknown. It's not that I don't trust Van's calculations, mind you, it's more that I don't trust myself to do everything correctly and as efficiently as theoretically possible. And, of course, the weather gets a say in that matter too. Burning six gallons per hour would take 18 of the 20 available gallons for a 300 mile leg, but would leave me with less than the mandated 30 minute reserve, which I conservatively bump to 45 minutes.
The one-stop plan would have to wait until I become more comfortable with this kind of planning/flying.
With the two-stop decision made, I used airnav.com's fuel planner to find a route: KTZR → KBYL → KCTJ → 2R4.
Most of the rest of the preparation was making sure I brought everything that I thought I might need and adding a couple of alternates for my chosen stops. The last bullet item is Decalin, because it was likely that I would have to use 100LL instead of the Rotax-preferred 93 octane Mogas :
"Pee bottle" was a last minute addition, and took the form of a couple of Travel John packs, just in case the fuel capacity exceeded my bladder capacity.
With the things I can control taken care of, it was then a matter of waiting for the perfect weather, which in this case I defined as "CAVU the whole way." When that day arrived, I went.
Crossing the Ohio River
The first leg would have been as easy as pie, had I not run into a difficult decision: about 20 minutes out from KBYL, I had to decide whether one of the Travel John packs was going to finally achieve its career goal, or whether the operation would be so constrained by the tight quarters of the RV-12 to the degree that I'd be just as well off waiting. I chose to wait. About ten minutes later, when the options had dried up (so to speak) and the FBO building was the only recourse, I remembered that it was early on a Sunday morning and the FBO building might be locked.
It wasn't.
One tank emptied, one to be filled
The second leg was notable only for altitude flown (8,500') and a tailwind that ranged from 20 to 35 knots. As happy as I was for the tailwind, I could only wonder how bad it would be as a headwind on the return flight. But that was days away, so I didn't spend too much time thinking about it. The fueling at West Georgia went easily, and had the benefit of being Mogas. I wish more airports would get it.
Ground speed 146 knots! It peaked at 148.
The third leg would include the arrival into Peter Prince (2R4) which is somewhat complicated by the surfeit of restricted airspace, large MOAs, crazy amounts of student traffic, and an airport sitting in a two-mile diameter notch in the Whiting NAS Class C space. As a final wrinkle, 2R4 has left traffic for runway 36, and right traffic for 18. I would have to be careful in how I managed the landing pattern.
Studying the sectional, I decided that the most conservative approach would be to utilize the channel that runs between the restricted area on the east side and the MOA on the west side and make sure to stay below the 1,400' shelf of the outer ring of the Class C around Whiting.
Once mostly south of the Whiting Class C, I would just have to shoot the two mile wide gap between the inner ring of the Class C and the restricted area. Yes, I could have contacted Pensacola Approach, but local knowledge gleaned from interviews with local residents indicated that I would end up with the same kind of "skirting" approach, but with the additional stress of knowing someone was actually watching.
In the event, the Dynon Skyview, for the umpteenth time, earned its keep. Just flying the little airplane between the lines was no more difficult that playing a simple game on my iPhone. It did make me wonder, though, how we were able to do things like this in the pre-GPS era.
I spent a couple of days in Florida, the highlight of which was a trip to Pensacola NAS to watch the Blue Angels practice and to visit the terrific Naval Aviation Museum. As much I love the USAF museum in Dayton, the naval air museum wins hands down: no cordons around the airplanes, and much better lighting.
After just a couple of days there, the weather looked favorable for the return trip, so I decided to head back. Note that by "favorable," I do not mean "perfect." It was time to add a little bit more challenge, which came in the form of a less-than-perfect forecast for Ohio.
The first two legs were just as easy as those of the trip down to the south, but the last leg from Kentucky to Central Ohio required some decision making. Most of the salient portions of the state of Ohio were reporting VFR, but there were a couple of airports, conveniently directly on my preferred route, that were steadfastly refusing to go from IFR to VFR.
Again, the Skyview was a great enabler. While sitting on the ground in Kentucky, I was able to check the most recent conditions at every airport that mattered, and determined that if my preferred route didn't work, I could detour to the east or west to get past the areas in question. I hadn't been in flight long before the recalcitrant airports went from IFR to LIFR to Marginal VFR to good-enough VFR. As I flew over the hills of southern Ohio, I had a few minutes where good-enough VFR had me flying at a lower altitude than I would have preferred, but I was still legal in the eyes of the FAA and made comfortable by the fact that I could see well into the distance. It wasn't pretty, but it didn't need to be.
The final tally was 5.5 flying hours down, and 6.1 coming back. I got back faster than I had thought I would: not only did I fly a 600nm trip for the first time ever, I also had another notable happening: I had tailwinds BOTH WAYS!
So, as mentioned previously, I have shaken off the shackles that go in concert with working for The Man.
What to do now?
Work for this Man! Or, in other words, me.
It's not like I forgot how to build programs, after all.
To understand this undertaking, there are a few things to know:
- the RV-12 airframe and the Rotax 912 engine both have scheduled maintenance items, which fall under the broad categories of coming due based on calendar time ('do this once after 36 months in operation' versus 'do this every 200 flying hours')
- it requires constant attention to make sure you don't miss any
- there are also Service Bulletins from the factories that need to be addressed. Some of these require periodic scheduled inspections too.
- the Dynon Skyview, which is the central flight computer in the airplane, can be configured to capture data logs every time the plane is flown.
- these data logs include both the most current Hobbs and Tach times. If you don't want to read that short article, just read this snippet from it:
"Tach time is the preferred method for logging engine time for maintenance purposes."
This is misleading - for the Rotax 912,Rotax stipulates that Hobbs time is a better (and mandated) measure of the aggregate working time of the Rotax engine. Tach time was (and still is, I suppose) the choice for the older, more traditional aircraft engines like the Lycomings in my previous plane, but with the Rotax, time spent idling is still considered to be working time, primarily because of the RPM reduction gearbox. Hobbs time runs faster than Tach time on average, so the extra effort of idling through the gearbox on the Rotax forces us to manage maintenance on the engine using Hobbs time to account for the extra effort required by the gearbox.
So, I intend to make use of the Hobbs time recorded and reported by the Skyview to track maintenance requirements on the engine. That's a bit of a simplification (I'll do a lot more, including using the calendar date to find the "n number of months" inspection/replacement schedules too), but I'm sure you get the point.
Where this all ends up (personal use only vs. a for-profit service) is up in the air, so to speak, but it sounds like an intriguing project, and that's all I need these days.
Now, I don't expect you to sit through all of this video - I present it only because it is the flight for which I gave the data logs to work with:
A short recap of the flight for people with better things to do with an hour and twenty minutes:
I flew an IFR approach into Madison Co. (KUYF) using the Skyview. I remained VFR at all times.
I then flew a 2nd IFR approach into Urbana (I74) - I had initially intended to use a navigation waypoint on the far side of the runway, but shifted to a closer one before I got there.
The approach I flew was to runway 20, but the wind slightly favored runway 2, so I had to circle around.
I didn't get the plane low enough on the first try, so had to go around for another try.
I stopped for lunch at Urbana, then flew back to Bolton (KTZR)
I started on the program (which will take a few weeks to build) this morning. I selected "read the data log file" as the first step.
Here are the results:
As long as I was reading the data to present it in that list (there are approximately 127 columns of data, two of which are latitude and longitude, so I exported those two plus altitude into a new file, correctly formatted for display in Google Earth (3D) or Google Maps (2D).
This is the 3D representation of the flight - you will note that the altitude I can get from the data is MSL (above sea level), not AGL (above ground level) and I don' know how to translate twixt the two, so the plane never seems to touch the ground.
This is the entire flight:
This is the 2D representation of the taxi out and back in at KTZR:
This shows the go-around at I74:
It's a good start, and not bad for three hours of work!
I was going to say "Back by popular demand," but.... that would be something of an exaggeration.
Well, not really an exaggeration, more like a bald-faced lie.
And, just to treat you to some of the impetuous, spur-of-the-moment research you've come to know and love....
Q From Michael Benson: A friend of mine recently posed the question as to whether the proper form was bald-faced lie or boldfaced lie. Naturally, I thought of looking to your site for the answer, but having found none, I figure it’s the perfect opportunity to ask. Which is the proper phrase?
A This one confuses people a lot. To increase your own confusion, the original is actually neither of the two versions you quote, but is instead barefaced lie. The first example I’ve come across is this:
"How dare you try to falsify my person? You are discovered in a barefaced lie, and now want to bully it out."
-- The adventures of William Ramble Esq., by John Trusler, 1793.
This is still the usual form in Britain and to a lesser extent in Canada. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Americans started to use bald-faced lie instead, which has become the most common form in today’s US newspapers. An early example:
"No one of ordinary intelligence is, of course, expected to believe the statement, and every one who is capable of putting it into readable English knows it to be a bald-faced lie."
-- The Newark Daily Advocate (Ohio), 12 Jul. 1883.
Both forms are based on colloquial uses from the seventeenth century. Someone bare-faced originally had the face uncovered, and hence was figuratively acting in an unconcealed or open way (Shakespeare is the first known user of both literal and figurative senses). From the latter part of the seventeenth century onwards, it took on a sense of something or someone who was audacious, shameless or impudent, so that a barefaced lie was one in which the speaker made no attempt to disguise it as truth.
So, there ya go. It was a boldfaced lie.
As a bonus:
Q What is the origination of the phrase spur of the moment
A Spur of the moment is in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) along with other definitions of the word "spur". The first recorded usage was in 1801. Spur also means at haste so perhaps spur of the moment - something done impromptu or without deliberation grew out of spur in that sense, as in a quick decision.
Something in the moment (the brief period of time when a decision is made or an action is begun) acts as a spur-an incentive, an impetus-much as the literal spurs impel a horse to go. What motivates a "spur of the moment" decision arises quickly, as opposed to long forethought.
You're still here??
Well, if you were willing to sit through that, you might have the patience for a bit of an explanation as to what's going on with yours truly with regards to this blog which, by extension, is also going to be an update on my absolute favorite subject: me.
Or did you think I was going to say "flying?"
For most of my life those two have been so tightly integrated as to offer nothing but a thread-thin gap between the two.
Such may or may not still be the case. The jury is still out on that decision.
Why? What has changed?
Good question. And the unsatisfying answer is "a whole hella lot of things have changed. Most for the positive; some not so much."
Fundamentally, this blog started out as a way to document and share the experiences and lessons learned through the building of a Van's RV-12, but for better or worse it has always been something of a personal diary as well. Once the plane was flying, it obviously became far more of the latter than the former. At that point I found it easier just to record flights and post them on YouTube.
Easier, but far less gratifying. But...
You might want to skip this next bit, but I think moving forward the content is going to get far more eclectic, and a relatively short autobiography might help to explain why the subjects are bound to be so far ranging.
I once came across a little book my mother used to keep for each of her children, of which I was the middle of three. An older brother and a younger sister. Making me the middle child. With a bullying and dominating older brother. When I was five or six years old, my career goals were recorded as "Astronaut" or "Gas station attendant." Honest truth!
Why astronaut??
Ha, kidding. The thing about the gas station attendant was that even at that age I was smitten with operating equipment. I just wanted to run the gas pump! That career path was, as we all know, rendered moot soon thereafter. Ironically, I hate pumping gas.
Astronaut was the same, albeit with a bit more ego gratification for all involved. It was the technology, not the idea of being in Space, that grabbed my interest.
I am endowed with a quirky sense of humor. I consider myself to be above average on the 'funny' scale, but I am a little too self-myopic to spend much time pondering where I fall on the 'laugh with' vs. 'laugh at' continuum.
I do now and then dwell on the subject. I have a theory.
I am, and always have been, what people have referred to as "scrawny."
In my presence.
Being small has rarely served me well. When I was pulled out of three years of parochial school and dumped into the Cincinnati public school system to fend for myself, it proved to be a far more hostile environment. Luckily, I was already pretty used to being bullied, although the cast on my right arm and a couple of weeks on crutches after being pounced on in the school hallways was a new experience.
This is probably just self-serving psycho-babble, but I believe that my caustic/sarcastic/scalpel-sharp sense of humor was developed, at least partially, as not so much a defense mechanism (because it often acted in exactly the opposite way) but as a way of punching back. My dad nicknamed me "flip lip" for a reason!
Far from being the last chosen for any sporting event (the 'last' actually gets chosen; I was simply excluded), I naturally turned to books. I was a voracious reader. By the time 'Treasure Island' was assigned as a term project in the 7th grade, I had already read it three times. You would think that would garner an easy A, but that would be to ignore my inherent tendency towards procrastination. I finally outgrew that, but it certainly caused me a lot of grief before I did.
Much of that reading was non-fiction. I was fascinated with books about WWI aviation, WWII U-boats, and just about anything in between. POW escape stories were popular with me as well - there's a reason that I thing Stalag 17 is one of the best movies ever made. The Blue Max, The Great Waldo Pepper - those were my faves.
Fast forward to more than a quarter century ago when I was first introduced to my girlfriend's uncle, a former WWII naval aviator, when I asked him what he flew in the war.
"Hmmph. Kid like you wouldn't know what they were anyway."
"Try me."
Which he did, somewhat to his embarrassment. Of course I knew them all! I had since I was six years old!
Middle child side note: my older brother, who didn't know the difference between a P-51 and an F-4, got to go to the USAF museum in Dayton.
I did not. It's odd, the tidbits you remember. Ah well, it all works out. I go as often as I want to now, and that's fairly often. There is an airplane that I worked on housed in that museum - it's nice to be able to visit.
When I was 14, I was introduced to another deep and abiding interest. At the time, if you could get permission from the principal, you could spend your lunch hour dialed in (via acoustic modem) to the mainframe downtown. It didn't matter that the modem was slow; the teletype was even slower!
Using that, I was able to teach myself to do simple programming in BASIC.
Trust me, this is all leading somewhere.
In parallel with all of this, I pretty much always had a paying job, starting in the 5th grade when I volunteered to work in the kitchen prepping dirty dishes for the dishwasher. In return, they gave me a free lunch, a 35¢ value. My mother started a little 'bank book' for me since she figured I deserved to keep the money. You'd be surprised at how $1.75 a week adds up when you have no living expenses. And keep in mind, that would be $10 a week today. That's probably nothing to today's 11 year olds, but back then, at least in our house, there were no allowances.
That was followed by a $1.55 an hour job delivering drugs (the legal kind) and running the cash register for a local pharmacy while I was in Jr. High. I did that until I was old enough for a minimum wage job. I spent every one of my high school years cooking pizza for 25-30 hours a week.
Why??? Well, it's not like I was turning down a lot of dates.
But I had hobbies. Adult hobbies, and thus expensive hobbies, by 1970's standards.
A lot of that money went towards R/C airplanes, but I saved quite a bit as well, which is how I was able to buy a Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I the year they came out.
By my math, that makes me one of the first 1,000 people on this planet to have had a store bought home computer. Naturally I used it to program simple games, and to fly the earliest precursor to what eventually became the Microsoft Flight Simulator.
So, we have a deep interest in aviation, a deep interest in building flying models, and a deep interest in computer programming.
Do you see where I'm headed with this?
I didn't at the time,
After very disastrously unsuccessful attempt at college, I had a very successful 5-year stint in the USAF, where I was privileged to work on the CAPRE system on the venerable SR-71, and as a side job I also loaded the map projectors. The upshot of the latter is that I knew where they were going, and how high/fast they would be flying. There weren't many people that knew that, at the time.
Heady stuff for a 19 year old.
Being SAC, though, the shop was way overstaffed for the amount of work there was to do. I didn't join because I was looking for long hours and low pay, I joined because I wanted to work on airplanes!
I got bored, so after a little more than a year I volunteered to be sent anywhere, worldwide. In the recon world, that meant TAC, and that meant Korea. The only other suitable bases were in West Germany and Texas, but Korea was automatic for a single, enlisted guy. It was a remote assignment, which meant married guys had to go alone. It was a year long assignment, but that's a pretty long haul for a guy with a family, so they were always on the lookout for unmarried volunteers. Of which there were many, because the availability of cheap booze and a roaring economy in other areas made it all a great nighttime playground.
I worked the night shift. I got more time on the flightline that way.
Choices.
One of the bennies of getting an assignment to Osan AB was that you got to pick your follow-on assignment. I requested Germany, but with only a year left in my four-year term, they didn't want to foot the bill. Fortunately, all I needed to do was extend my enlistment by one year, not another four.
I lived off base in Germany for a couple of years. I had car, so I got to see quite a bit of Europe. I even got to cross the channel on a hovercraft.
In both Korea and Germany, I worked on the RF-4C Tactical Recon jet. The tactical recon of the RF-4 was very different from the strategic recon of the SR-71. The strategic recon needed to be wide ranging - it was what the generals used to decide what to target. The tactical recon was far more tightly focused - it was what the generals used to see if the target could be approached, how it should be attacked, and what was left of it after the attack.
In other words, SAC flew two flights a day. On weekdays.
TAC flew all day, every day.
This is one of the planes I worked on in Germany:
Being TAC, there was plenty of work to keep me busy. My primary function was to perform both the flightline and the shop work maintaining the AN/AAD-5D infrared recon system, although I voluntarily cross-trained into the optical cameras too.
The IR system was used for night recon and scanned horizon-to-horizon. They were pretty reliable, for the most part. I did once track down a problem that had plagued a certain jet since the day I had arrived. I had the weekend standby, and rather than just sit around killing time in the shop, I decided to have another look at it.
Long story short (HA! We crossed that line five minutes ago), there had been a wiring error made at the factory. I fixed it.
I got a 3-day pass for that. I didn't even know they still did that.
That also led to me being selected as an alternate team member for the summer of '86 Red Flag exercise at Nellis AFB. I desperately wanted to go to Red Flag... but only an alternate. So close!! I guess being selected as an alternate was better than the choosing of players for team sports had ever been, but still.
One of the primaries took leave and went to Denmark. He apparently never got the memo that going to Denmark (or Amsterdam) was the same as pounding on the door of the med center insisting to be drug tested.
He was. He had. I went. He didn't.
Because we were going to be shipped over from Germany, it was for more than just the normal two-week gig at Nellis. We first did a two-week competition at Hurlburt Field, then did three back-to-back-to-back Red Flag exercises.
Red Flag was the experience of a lifetime. It was six weeks of twelve hour shifts. My part was initially limited to the operations and maintenance of the cameras (the IR systems all broke during the first couple of weeks), but I also spent a lot of time hanging around with the crew chiefs. It should come as no surprise that I wanted to know how everything worked and asked a lot of questions.
They had never seen a 'specialist' that was in any way interested in their line of work, and they adopted me into their fold. By the end of the sixth week, I was out on the flightline launching jets! It's not as dramatic as that guy that signals the catapult operator on aircraft carriers, but the starting on an F-4 is still a fluid and highly-choreographed process.
I got a medal out of that. A good one. Just for doing something I wanted to do. Life can be like that.
After the military, I returned to Ohio and used my veterans benefits, tuition assistance from the Ohio Air National Guard (another six years of military!), and money earned from menial part-time jobs to get as far as my senior year at THE Ohio $tate University, where I was working on an engineering degree in (not what you would guess, although I actually DID start as an aeronautical engineer) Information Technology.
That led to a series of two-year IT jobs as a I sought a place where I thought I could have a career. Through happenstance, I landed at a small outfit with looming IT needs - it was very much like getting in with a dot-com startup. I spent more than sixteen years there.
Fairly early on, we were acquired by what was last year a Fortune Five corporation. I don't really know or care where they are this year.
As the sole IT guy, and with only a background in software development, I pretty much built the place as far as the systems go. And there were a lot of them! It ended up being a much broader business than we had expected. There were 17 of us in the company after the acquisition - today there are 70+.
Minus me.
I retired March 31st.
Which brings us to today.
It was a high satisfaction and very high stress job, and it paid well. I married just as well - she kept us well within our income to the degree that at age 55 we have the house, cars, and airplane all paid off.
And.... notable savings. Years of paying double mortgage on the house and maxing out my 401k contributions, and banking any annual windfalls in the form of bonuses, inheritance, or the like, built up a nice nest egg. Diverting so much into savings kept our standard-of-living comfortable but not ostentatious.
Well, other than owning my own airplane. That's kinda showy.
But if I was really rich, I wouldn't have had to build it myself. So there is that.
Anyway, I figure I need just enough to get me to the age where all I'm going to need is a big TV, a comfy chair, and good speakers.
I look at it as buying the most expensive of all commodities: time. It's expensive, and often can't be purchased for any price. When a chance comes up to buy some, you really ought to do it.
And you should get good value. I think I'll get more bang for the buck from ages 55 to 65 than I will from ages 75 to 85.
If I even get that far.
Believe it or not, I have always valued time over money, although my time usually needed to be filled with relatively expensive toys, so I tended to be on the position of having to trade more time for money than I would really want. But I never went in for 60 - 70 hour work weeks, and I avoided travel for work.
Not surprisingly, my lifelong goal was to someday have enough money to support the owning and operating of an airplane. Not a low bar, that. And you need to definitely consider both costs: owning and operating. I could probably afford to buy a T-6, but I couldn't afford the fuel, oil, maintenance, and insurance costs. It would eat me out of house and home.
Flying can and does require a financial commitment, and there are significant barriers to entry in training costs, etc., but it is more attainable than people imagine. I can walk around my block and find a dozen cars that cost more than a Cherokee 140. Or boats.
You get the point.
It's all about choices. Some, while momentous, are very easy.
I chose to retire from a lucrative career. At age 55. It was an easy decision.
The funny thing is, there are those that say that I retired too young and that I will ultimately find myself bored.
I refer to those people as "strangers," because they clearly know nothing about me.
They plaintively and, I suppose, hypothetically, ask "What will you do??"
Wrong question.
The correct question is "What will you do first?"
I have no shortage of options.
One of them, and the most topical at this very instant in time, is to bring back this blog, albeit with a far broader focus.
So, I'm back. For better or worse.
PS - There is one thing I would like to see happen with this blog: please comment!
