I had assumed you two were married. Makes more sense now.
Slightly funny Kiwi anecdote. …
When I was in IT we did a bunch of work for the NZ government. Which had me visiting Wellington frequently (from the US Midwest :eek: 28 hours door to door) and talking on the phone daily. One of my frequent contacts was a woman who I got to know fairly well. From the accumulated family chitchat I knew she had a man, a house, and some kids. But she also often used the term “partner” to refer to, well, somebody.
At that time (early 2000s) in the US, “partner” was the common euphemism for committed homosexual lover. It fit in with the US “don’t ask, don’t tell” zeitgeist. The only other use of the term was in the context of co-owners of a small or side business. Nobody, but nobody here would call their spouse or live-in hetero BF/GF their “partner”.
Who this mystery person was got more and more perplexing to me and I finally gave up and just asked as delicately as I could, waving my Progressive Leftist homo acceptance flag as hard as I could, since this was in the height of the Bush re-election campaign era. IOW, not a time to be proud to be an American as seen from NZ. She laughed a bunch at my ignorance and my tiptoeing up to what I thought was going to be an indelicate topic.
She explained that in NZ, unmarried folks living together get automatic legal recognition early and often. And it’s not considered a big deal. So “partner” got co-opted in NZ as the generic word for married spouse, de jure (what we’d call “common law”) spouse, de facto spouse you co-habit with, or just current main squeeze/flatmate with benefits. All with no hetero- or homo- baggage.
Turns out she and her partner dude were plain old legally & churchly married. About as vanilla as it gets in the US or in NZ.
So when I noticed you using the term “partner” I assumed more of the same. Especially once I knew about the common kids. I shoulda thought a little deeper about the other permutations.
Gosh it gets old living in Jesusland (wiki). Even if I’m in one of the less Jesusful cities.
I’m surprised you could understand her accent :D. I hope you enjoyed your time in NZ, I went back there earlier this year and found I’d forgotten how pretty it is.
I’ve been rostered to fly with my girlfriend/partner/soul mate/bride-to-be later this month. That should be fun, we don’t get to do it very often.
Flying with family is always fun and … interesting.
Loved NZ. Had I stayed in IT rather than returning to airlining I might well have parlayed that sales relationship into a permanent move to WLG. I was definitely laying the groundwork. I didn’t have much opportunity for sightseeing outside the city during my time there, but of course I was reading up on everything everywhere.
As a teenager my family had taken a 2-week NZ vacation, flying to Auckland, driving (and ferrying :)) to Christchurch then flying on to Sydney and home. So I’d seen, and loved, at least some of the hinterlands.
I still get wistful from time to time about the many roads not taken in the course of my life. When all is said and done, each of us can only take one path through life. A well-lived life ought to have a bunch of major branch points, not just a slow slog up an arrow-straight railway aimed right at the end. But each of those major branch points contains the seeds of a lot of good nostalgia or bad angst for the many more paths not taken. The non-move to NZ is a big one for me.
The non-move that I spent the most time kicking myself in the butt over for the past 40 years, is not pursuing a hobby in general aviation. I’ve been interested since I was in tenth grade. I read a feature-length article in National Geographic about gliders (with lots of pics) circa 1967, and my father took me out to Dillingham Field (Oahu, Hawaii) for a glider ride in a Schweizer 2-32. (They’re still flying several 2-32s there to this day.) A year or so later, I joined Civil Air Patrol. I got hooked up with a FBO owner at Van Nuys, doing minor janitorial work at his school a few days a week after school, in return for some flying lessons. I got about 10 hours dual mostly in a Cessna 150.
Then I graduated from high school and ran off to college, and got away from flying. Fast forward about 5 years. I took up gliding lessons at Sky Sailing, Fremont. Got about 14 hours dual over a period of several months and 4 hours solo, all in a Schweizer 2-33.
Then I got into other things and got away from that. I still have my log book, and for 40 years, every so often I’d dig it out and kick myself in the butt for getting away from it.
Finally, just last August, coming off a six-week episode of profound acute debilitating-level depression, I rather abruptly decided to get back into gliding. (Well, there was actually a bit more to the story than that. I wanted to suggest to a friend that he should take his girlfriend for a glider ride, something I never got to do. In the process of researching on-line to find nearby glider operations, I found two nearby, jumped in my car on-the-spot to go visit them, and that was it.)
And I’m still recording my lessons in that same log book.
So, what do pilots do when they lose their logbooks? Fire, crashes (not necessarily plane crashes), theft, etc can all happen and in aggregate must be not uncommon.
No kidding! These were my third and fourth thermaling flights – The first two being about an hour each, one with me riding in the back seat, and one with an instructor, both over mostly flat-ish terrain. This week’s flights were over mountains, as shown in some of those pics from last year’s events. In the first such flight, I got lots of (successful) practice in how to not get dizzy. As I said, Dan, the PIC, did most of the thermal work, but let me try some of it too.
The area is known for consistently fabulous soaring this time of year – well, usually – with convergence and cloud streets for the whole 40-some miles of this mountain range. The bolder, more experienced XC pilots can sometimes “jump the gap” over to the next mountain range and sometimes get all the way to Santa Barbara area, or across the San Joaquin Valley to the Sierra foothills and back.
This time, the soaring weather was merely quite good, but not fabulous. There were only a few little clouds here and there, and some blue-sky thermals if you could find them. The winds were atypical, and we didn’t get the usual convergence and cloud streets. Most of us got about 20 miles out and 8000 to 9000 feet up for a couple of hours, working scattered thermals that we could find – not the 40 mile 12000 feet journeys we had hoped for. We did find one good 10 knot thermal at one point. Monday looked a lot better, aside from the fact that most of the people and gliders had gone home. But four gliders with five people stayed around and got some good 3-to-4 hour flights for about 30 miles out and 10000 feet up. I didn’t get a Monday flight, but stayed on the ground and did ground crew all day. Anyway, we didn’t have a single landout the whole weekend!
Stay tuned, I’ll be back Real Soon Now with links to the GPS traces of those flights.
It’s [del]Wednesday[/del] Thursday now, and I’m just starting to come down from the adrenaline high, and the acute adrenaline withdrawal is starting to set in. I need to have another weekend like this Real Soon Now!
The time frame can be highly variable, but potentially very quick – maybe just a couple of months, they say. Formally, it doesn’t require a whole lot of hours. For me, it’s going very slowly, perhaps for several reasons.
They say it always takes older student pilots longer – a rule of thumb I’ve often heard is (some constant)+(your age in years)=(number of flights to solo). I’m sure I’m way past that already, and I don’t think I’m nearly ready to solo – This, despite the fact that I took lessons 40 years ago and DID solo after about 14 hours, but I’m basically starting over now. I certainly have way more than 14 hours this time. (Did I mention that I’m 65 years old now?)
There’s also the fact that my club uses a couple of Grob G-103 gliders for trainers. (Not this one, but similar.) In fact, here’s one of our gliders, N103FB. Everyone seems to agree that the G-103 is a hard glider to learn to fly. I find it difficult to handle. I’ve had a lesson in the very similar ASK-21, and found it much easier to handle. I also had a lesson in a Schweizer 2-32 – specifically, this one and found it a total piece of cake!
There’s also the fact that we have six instructors, who rotate on an irregular schedule, and they don’t coordinate with each other, so nobody really knows where any of their students are at. One might show me how to do side-slips one day, and I won’t get to try it again for another six weeks. Same with turning stalls or even plain straight stalls or incipient spins or boxing the wake or slack rope recovery, etc.
OTOH, it only costs about half as much as at a commercial soaring school. Still, I’m getting impatient, and I’m considering going to the commercial school (with the ASK-21 and 2-32) for more lessons there – it may cost twice as much, but it also may only take half as many lessons. Our club offers intro lessons for only $95, about half what you’d pay anywhere else.
The best way to fly inexpensively is to get to know someone. Since I’ve started, several pilots have taken me flying with them, sometimes asking me to pay half the tow fee (about $35) and sometimes not even asking that. And some of them are airplane pilots too, and I get to fly with them now and then.
As for those sweet RVs – I’d love one of those. I see the price for a build-it-yourself kit is about US$45,000, and that’s for the airframe only. Engine, propeller, instruments, and custom paint job not included.
If you think that’s sweet, did you take a look at the pic of the pilot I talked to? I don’t know where that pic is from (I found it on-line) and it’s clearly a different airplane, that that’s her.
I am reminded of a post I made way back on the first page of this thread:
Okay, so Dan (the PIC for my Panoche flights) posted the GPS traces to the OLC site. Here they are:
May 27:
May 28:
If you move your mouse across the altitude profile at the bottom of the trace, you can follow the course of the flight.
The club webmaster created a photo album for people to post their pics. I hope we got some video of my flights. In the meanwhile, if anyone wants to see what a glider flight looks like from inside the glider, here’s a 28-minute video of a flight we did last December:
(It's the same link I may have already posted a while ago.)
Yeah, that’s me in the floppy hat, and Dan in the back seat who you can hear doing the coaching.
We had an unscheduled visitor, too: Most of us camped at nearby Mercey Hot Springs. On Sunday morning, the daughter of the owners dropped by to see what was going on, along with her 8-year-old son Patrick. So Dan took Patrick for a 15-minute glider ride.
We had some problems with the management with our camp site reservations. Here’s hoping the management remembers this next year!
Oh, and did I mention, on our Sunday flight, we briefly encountered a pair of California condors!
I keep copies of the last full page of my logbook since it has all of my totals, and update each time I fill up a new page. Lots of people now keep their logbooks electronically, but I’m old school.
If one were to completely lose all records, I believe the only “official” backup would be the hours you put down on your last medical.
I keep an electronic log book. I can print pages as required in any of a variety of formats corresponding to standard logbooks from different countries.
How would that work for student pilots, whose log entries are made by their instructors, not by the students themselves, and include a comments section?
I don’t know. Log books don’t work like that in Australia / NZ, it’s a personal record written by the pilot. Nothing to stop you from scanning or photographing any hard copy notes and attaching to your electronic logbook though. The one I use has a way for an instructor to sign for an entry and can attach files to single entries.
Just read Michael Crichton’s 1996 novel Airframe, about a fatal in-flight incident on a Chinese airliner coming into Denver, and the investigation afterwards. I can’t really recommend it, as it’s kind of plodding and the heroine does some stoopid things. At one point the fictional Norton Aircraft Co. is conducting flight testing, with an F-14 as the chase plane. Uncle Sam never sold any F-14s for that purpose, did he?
It would be reasonable that Grumman, the F-14’s maker, had a couple oddball prototypes or early production test aircraft that they kept around for modification and testing duty.
Typically I’d think of the F-14 as too big / complex = expensive for anyone else to choose to use as a chase aircraft. The obvious exception being if there was some sort of chasing mission that only an F-14 could meet; perhaps sustained high Mach cruise?
There are private companies today that operate former frontline fighters. They provide target towing, aggressors, and the like. Using a variety of aircraft up through and including the early model F-16s.
I’ve never heard of anyone like that operating an F-14. They went to the boneyard long before that business approach got going.
IIRC, in his autobiography, Bob Hoover talked about how North American had to purchase one of their own F-86 Sabres (from a third party) for him to fly on publicity tours. Something about how their contract with the government didn’t allow them to just take one off the line for themselves.
