It sure looked easy enough. Downhill all the way after those pesky curved cuts were done. Putting the seat frame together looked to be simply a matter of building a rectangle.
I measured and marked where the 2 2x4s would go in relation to the side pieces that I made last night and laid it all out on the floor. The parts are glued and screwed together: Elmers wood glue and 2.5" #10 wood screws. 2.5" is a long way to go through pine, but screwing one into a test piece showed that it could be done. I thought it would be a good idea to countersink the outside surface, though, so the tops of the screws would be flush with the sides:
Isn't the impressive? I'll bet you're thinking that those screws went right on in and seated themselves all nice and flush and... What? You don't think that? Well, you're right:
Stripped out and stuck. Twice! I had to turn them back out with a pair of pliers, drill the hole all the way down, then put in new screws. And it would have worked too, except for one thing: the top screw went right on down into the hole easy as could be and... stuck. Stuck right in the same place as before. Now, I'd like to be able to tell you that it had run into a solid, impermeable pine knot and that no one could have foreseen such a blameless and unpredictable event. But I can't. What I had done is picked up the same stripped out screw that I removed with the pliers only minutes before and ran it right back down in there. It never had a chance. And it had to come right back out, didn't it?
Well, I wasn't really in the mood to pull it back out again right away. I had earned a break, even if it had been earned through an example of abject boobery. Work is work, productive or not. So, a break. So, do you remember that part where I said the joints a screwed and glued? Well, I remembered the screwed part, but not the glued part. I thought it was hard getting that screw out the first time; after that glue set up, it was even harder to get that thing back out of there, not least because the head of the thing was getting pretty mangled.
That screw sitting on the top of the side rail? Oh, look very closely at its head. Once I got the mangled screw out for the second time, I made sure to go to the bench and get a replacement. I put the new one in the hole and hit it with the drill: nothing. Of all the times to pick a bad screw out of a brand new box of screws, it had to be on this one damn painful hole.
Once I finally got a screw into that hole, I proceeded to drill the other joints:
You may be asking yourself what the purpose of those gallon jugs of fluid perched on the corners of the frame is, and I have an answer: they're holding the corners down. I'm using cheap wood again, and at least one of the 2x4s is warped enough that it caused a huge twist in the frame. Those jugs are what I had handy, but they were by no means the optimal tool to use. They kept falling off at the most inopportune times!
Once it was all screwed together, though, it flattened out nicely:
I picked up the borrowed bandsaw from Co-pilot Rick last night, and tonight I used it to re-cut the part that I messed up so badly with the jigsaw. The top of the ruined board was actually still usable as a template for marking the cut line on the new board, so that only took a matter of moments to trace, and it was off to the saw:
Ahhhh, that's better:
I went ahead and cut the second piece, and they match fairly well:
If you get right up close, you can see where they don't exactly match:
... we'd have no animals today. There's no way I could have built that ark.
The weather yesterday was thunderstorm after thunderstorm after thunderstorm, and as is my wont, I got to thinking about projects. After a brutally long Google hunt, I arrived at this:
It has everything I look for in a project: useful, inexpensive, and at least at a cursory glance, easy enough for even me to build:
How hard could it be? There's only one curved part, after all. Well, two, but they're identical to each other. What could go wrong there? Oh... yeah. They could end up with one inch gaps between them that would guarantee that it would never float. No, that's the canoe project that I'm thinking of. This should be much simpler.
This morning started out cloudy and muggy, and even though it was supposed to clear up at around 3pm, I knew that I had an raft load of chores that I've been putting off. If there was to be any flying at all, it would be a short ride in the cool of the evening. So off to Lowes, hopefully before the normal Sunday crowd.
I decided not to buy the entire load of wood for two reasons, the first being that there is only so much lumber you can carry in a Subaru Forester. The second was, of course, that I didn't want to end up with a bunch of wood if I couldn't get that curved piece right. The list calls for a single 2 x 6 x 10 pine board, but I can't fit a 10' length in the Subie. Lowes had an 8' length, though, so I bought two. I also went ahead and got a couple of 2 x 4s too, since the step after cutting the curved parts is to join them together with 2 x 4s.
As I was checking out, the cashier dude asked me if I was building a small porch swing. I hate to admit it, but I was simply astonished that he could figure that out based on a purchase of four innocuous planks, right up until I realized that I was holding the plans. Duh. The boards fit (barely) into Red Sue and we made an uneventful trip back home, where I got the chores out of the way. With that done, it was time to get to work.
The curved line that needs to be cut in the 2 x 6s is shaped the same way as was done on the canoe: they give you measurements to a couple of points and you use something flexible to make and trace the curve. The measurements are pretty straightforward, but I didn't have enough hands to hold the PVC pipe in place while tracing the line:
The curves look OK to me:
Time to cut:
At this very moment, I have two conflicting emotions: a devout hatred of jigsaws, matched only by my burning desire for a band saw. This cut, as a matter of understatement, did not go well:
Fortunately, I have plenty more 2 x 6 and can try again.
I paid Papa a rare mid-week visit this afternoon to address a couple of annoying little quirks he's been exhibiting. First, Co-pilot Rick has been complaining that he's not getting any sound through his headsets, and thus can't hear me talking. Now, most people would consider that a feature, but broken is broken and cannot be tolerated.
I went out to the hangar prepared to pull the jacks out of the panel to look for wiring problems or possibly a trapped insect, but decided to approach this particular job in stages. First stage: clean the jacks on the headset. Brasso and elbow grease took a lot of black junk off of them, and now they're putry and shiny. I plugged them in and listened to static on the radio for a few minutes - solid noise. Problem solved? Well, maybe. Maybe not. I really won't know until the next time he flies with me.
The other problem was with the oil pressure gauge. It's been reading low (usually over vast expanses of water or solid-looking trees), but a few taps on the gauge would run it up to red line. Absent the fact that an oil pump is an unbelievably simple piece of machinery (basically it's just two meshed gears spinning and forcing the oil to flow around them) and would not typically fail all at once, one must consider that tapping on the face of the gauge would be very unlikely to even be noticed by the oil pump, much less responded to.
I had a similar problem with the fuel pressure gauge a couple of years ago and ran through a new gauge and transducer before tracing the problem down to a loose ground wire. With that in mind, I have on a couple of occasions reached behind the panel to tighten up the two wires plugged into the back of the gauge. But today was different: I broke out an actual tool! I took an inspection mirror out of the tool box and actually looked at the back of the gauge where, to my surprise, I learned that there are three more wires that I hadn't known about. The two wires I had been securely pressing onto the gauge had nothing to do with the pressure indication at all; they are for the night light. Sigh.
That was good in a way, though, as it still left open the possibility of a zero dollar fix. Two of the wires had red terminals (indication positive polarity, I guessed) and the third was blue. I wiggled the blue terminal and it was tight enough on the spade, but both of the wires pressed into it fell right out. Ok, now that's a clue! I pulled the terminal off and inspection showed that it hadn't been fully crimped. Another tool fixed that, and the terminal was pushed back onto the gauge. Fixed? Don't know. It should be interesting next time I fly!
My categorization of Saturday's weather as 'icky' received a challenge, but I'm sticking by it. The early forecast was for 3,000' ceilings all day, and with an accompanying promise for a level of humidity that would make a humidor proud, I figured any flying would have to be below the clouds and down in the sauna. It looked fine from the ground, though, so I took the opportunity to get a few chores done. I've been waiting for a couple of rain free days to get my crop dusting done (which sounds more fun that it is, although I do get a small pecuniary rush every time I spray my yard for weeds using a $20 gallon of concentrate rather that paying $160 to Scotts Lawn) and I've been back burner-ing the task of sanding the rusty spots off of the heavy steel cellar doors (I call them the Auntie Emm doors) and spreading on a coat of Rustoleum. Those completed, I considered pressing on with the miserable job of sweeping the insect detritus out of the stairwell covered by the Auntie Emm doors, but the natural extension of that would be to sweep up the even larger Blue Heron Boatworks, and the very thought of that brought on an insurmountable malaise.
Sunday's forecast was, well, more of the same. Except for an improvement in the ceiling, the promise being for no worse that 4,500' all day. 85/feels-like-85 on the temp/humidity discomfort scale, though, so the desired destination would/should be air conditioned. As I've been investigating opportunities in the next state over recently, I thought that it might be time to finally visit French Lick, Indiana. The name alone is intriguing, isn't it? Why, those wacky French and their tongues - it could mean anything! Google(the fun wrecker) cleared that up, though:
There are a number of colorful stories concerning the origin of the town’s name but the most widely-accepted theory came from its early settlers. French Lick got its name from the early French settlers and the “mineral licks.”
French traders came to the area and discovered the mineral springs bubbling from the ground in the vicinity of what is now French Lick. At the same time, they discovered the abundance of wildlife that flocked to them to lick the mineral deposits left on the ground and rocks.
Google, however, failed to turn up any of the alleged "colorful stories," but that may be because I keep the Google Safe Search setting turned on. But I did find out that Larry Bird was born there, so yet one more completely useless piece of trivia makes it to my blog. Now, I think that we can all agree that going to visit the birthplace of Larry Bird would be necessary and sufficient reason all by its lonesome to visit French Lick, but wait(!!), there's more!
The waters (or the name - I can't be sure) were a huge draw in the late nineteenth century, which was prior to the common importation of Evian ('Naive' spelled backwards - coincidence or in-your-face irony: you be the judge) to fill the populace's need for expensive water:
As many as 14 Pullman train cars a day pulled into town, traveling mainly down the Monon and Southern Railway systems. In 1907 a limestone passenger station was built and in 1929 a brick freighter station constructed to handle the influx of tourists, who didn’t only come to drink the water.
At the turn of the twentieth century, tourists particularly came for the casino gambling, although it was illegal. Until 1949, Taggart (National Democratic Committee Chairman Thomas Taggart - no comment) had all the right political connections to avoid prosecution and as a result thousands of dollars were dropped at gambling halls like the Elite Club and the Brown.
So, short story made long, there's some interesting history there. Still, there's history everywhere, so why fly to French Lick? Well, gambling is legal in Indiana now (as opposed to Ohio, where the state government holds firm rein on their gambling monopoly with the state lottery, while concurrently banning any other type of gambling because of their deeply held ethics. Snort.) and some of the old hotel/casinos have been revitalized. Specifically, the French Lick Hotel and Casino, and the West Baden Springs Hotel. The infusion of gambling dollars has allowed them to restore those old buildings to their original glory, and to install air conditioning.
All of which only matters if one can get to the hotel from the airport. It's the classic "last few miles" quandary that every pilot deals with eventually. As luck (and the typical high-end service that accompanies gambling establishments) would have it, the French Lick Hotel is well aware of two things: high rollers often have airplanes, and those flying in need transport to the hotel. The French Lick airport, despite being way out in the middle of nowhere and having a very small FBO, has a 5,500' runway. It's no coincidence that 5,500' is long enough to handle almost all business/luxury jets. Transportation reportedly would not be an issue.
With a destination in mind, the next step was to consult Sunday's Weather-out-the-Window(tm) forecast. Loyal readers know that I've been breaking in a new camcorder, and the idea struck me that my fancy new camcorder also acts as a still camera, albeit not to the high quality of my DSLR Olympus. But sometimes good enough is good enough, and only having to lug around one small camera versus the camcorder/Olympus combo-kit sounded like an idea worth investigating. I used the still camera function camcorder for this Weather-out-the-Window(tm):
Yep, looks like good enough is good enough.
Chief Videographer & Co-pilot Rick shares my belief in getting an early start, particularly on days that promise to provide hot, muggy, and bumpy flying conditions. We had agreed to a 0900 meeting at the airport gate, with takeoff scheduled for 0910. I'm up far earlier than that, so there was time for a shower (might as well at least start off smelling good, no matter what the end of the day brought) and a cup of "long-trip-with-no-potty" Espresso. Hard lessons learned and retained being the impetus for the latter, as you know. I got to the airport and did the preflight inspection, and the co-pilot arrived right on time. The weather was still very nice, clear skies and no wind to speak of promising to provide at least a nice morning flight. Mornings like that have a feeling, though, that foreshadows what the afternoon will bring.
Papa had full tanks, so there was nothing to prevent a non-stop trip to KFRH. I had to create a five waypoint route on the GPS to guide us around the Cincinnati Class B airspace and to thread the needle between a couple of MOAs in Indiana. You can fly through MOAs if you want to, but given that MOA stands for Military Operating Area, it doesn't seem prudent. One of them also has a Restricted area embedded in it, and as the name implies, you can't fly through those. The GPS makes short work of navigating around them, so there's no reason not to.
Avoiding the airspace. Note that the return leg is much wavier; we were avoiding the really tall clouds.
The ride was glass smooth and not yet hot, so we cruised down at 3,500'. Normally when heading to the west under VFR (visual flight rules), you would cruise at an even numbered altitude plus 500 feet, and at an odd number plus 500 feet when flying east. That rule only takes effect when flying higher than 3,000' above the ground, though, and at 3,500' on the altimeter we're actually only 2,500' above the Ohio landscape. So it pays to keep an eye open for traffic when you're down low. Which is hard to do when it's hazy and you can't see stuff very well. Not my favorite flying conditions, these. In any event, a cruise power setting of 2,300 rpm gave us a nice 143 knot cruise speed and a fuel burn later calculated to be just a tad over 7 gallons per hour. My nod to frugal flying, that.
The landing at French Lick was passably good, much to the relief of Co-pilot Rick who had endured the debacle at Eagle Creek just a few short weeks ago. As we taxied onto the parking ramp and parked next to the only other airplane there, the guy out on his mower immediately stopped his mowing and came over to the airplane to ask if we were headed to the casino. I thought he might be wanting to ask if we'd throw a coin in a slot machine for him, but his goal was far more service oriented: when Rick applied in the affirmative, he whipped out his cell phone and called the casino to have a shuttle bus sent out to pick us up. Fortunately, it would be ten minutes before it would arrive so I had time to visit the restroom. Yes, it was low-volume Espresso, but at the end of the day (or the flight), Espresso is still coffee, and all that that implies.
The shuttle picked us up and we enjoyed a nice ride through the rolling, rural hills of Indiana to the casino. The ride is gratis, but there is a well-positioned tip basket by the door, providing a hint to even the most financially obtuse. The driver shared a lot of local knowledge and provided entertaining conversation, so it was absolutely painless to toss some bills in the basket on the way out. Compared to other airport transportation situations, it was also dirt cheap. He told us that one of the shuttles would pick us up anywhere in French Lick and deposit us anywhere else we would want to be. That is what I call pilot friendly!
We stopped at the French Lick Hotel and Casino first, where we wandered about the old, well restored building:
We also had lunch in the old power plant control room, now converted into the Power Plant Lounge:
Yummm, cheeseburger. A bit steep at $8.50, though. I would have gone for the optional bacon had I known at ordering time that Co-pilot Rick was picking up the check.
After lunch, we flagged down the shuttle for a ride over to the West Baden Springs Hotel. This is the more luxurious of the two, and also the more architecturally intriguing. It's a round building (you'll see it from the air in the video), with a tremendously huge inner courtyard:
It was getting hot, and the clouds were building up. Knowing that it would only get worse, I started getting itchy to get back in the air and headed home. I want to go there again sometime when I can spend the night, though, and not feel the rush to get home or have the horrible restriction against having a beer at the Power Plant Lounge to go with my lunch.
On the way back to the airport, the shuttle driver stopped at the golf course for us to see. They are going to be building another course, the new one being designed by Pete Dye. They hope to have a PGA tour stop in 2010. The way I figure it, the airport alone will go a long way towards accomplishing that. If I learned nothing else during my years at NetJets, I learned how PGA golfers like to travel.
Back at the airport, I gassed up at a reasonable (given the current market) $4.80/gallon. Taking off with full tanks and a hot-ish day, every foot of the 5,500' runway was welcome. Not used, mind you, but welcome nonetheless. It's a bit unfriendly in the area surrounding the airport should an off-airport re-arrival be required, so having that mile long strip of concrete out in front of us was at least a mild comfort.
I had resigned myself to the long, hot, bumpy ride home under the clouds, but decided that I might as well try to get over them. I'd be looking for an odd numbered altitude, so 5,500, 7,500, or 9,500 were my choices. The lower the better, since the climbing takes a bit of time, and even at $4.80 per, time is (significant) money. Well, 5,500 didn't even get close, 7,500 wasn't much better, and 9,500 was marginal at best. We ended up at 11,500, which is the highest Papa and I have ever been. I know it's no more rational than being more afraid of swimming in the 18' deep pool than the 8' depth, but I get nervous up high like that. I'm not sure if it's the lower oxygen content causing some kind of tense reaction, or the way the airplane performs with the thinner air, or just a feeling of not belonging there, but for whatever reason it takes me awhile to get comfortable with it. It's worth doing, though, because that's where the clear, smooth, cool air hangs out, and it's much nicer to hang out with the cool air.
Even at 11.5, we were slaloming around some of the taller cloud build-ups. Just east of Cincinnati, I saw a very large gap in the clouds, and was thus presented with a dilemma: descend back down through that big hole and do the remaining 40+ miles down in the sludge, or hope that there would be another opportunity closer to home. Taking to mind the proverbial bird in the hand, down we went. Now here's a cool thing about the RV-6: we made a 2000 foot-per-minute descent without indicating any more than 140 mph on the speedometer. Normally I wouldn't be in such a hurry, but gaps are only as big as they are, and the far side might as well be a solid wall should I fly into it. Gotta get down while the gettings good, I always say. As a postscript, my ears didn't pop for three or four hours after I got home.
The Big Descent
As expected, we descended into bumpy, murky flying conditions which, were I to be honest, wouldn't exactly be the conditions I'd mention in a "Learn to Fly" brochure. In fact, I think I'd go to pains to not mention them. Icky, I think was the word I used on Saturday. It was the longest 40 miles of the day.
We arrived back at Bolton to a landing clearance of "number two behind the Cessna on downwind, and he's cleared for the option." There were thus to be two forces at play here: "The Option" indicates a student flying touch & goes (although it can also mean other things, as we will see) and a student flying touch & goes almost always indicates a landing pattern wide enough to land a 747. In that latter part, I was correct. By the time he turned base, I was well downwind of the airport. I gave him a little more room, slowed Papa down a bit more, and turned final behind him with what I thought to be more than enough room.
I was wrong. The Option selected by the fella in front of us was to stop in the middle of the runway and gather his thoughts, as was his right. Not the most courteous thing to do, mind you, but that kind of thought only comes with experience, and I was a student once too. I make concessions to that sort of thing. Which I say only because if you watch the video, you will hear me say "I wish he would GO!" just before you hear the tower instruct me to go around and try again. Because he didn't go, you see. Just sat there. As was his right, and I just want it known that I was observing, not criticizing. Even though it doesn't exactly sound like it.
But it was a day of things not being what they sound like, wasn't it?
Years ago, I was exchanging emails with a former co-worker when I brought up the idea of enhancing Mapquest with street level pictures. That idea is now known as Google Street View. A decade ago when I was still working at CompuServe, I proposed an offering that I called MLS Online. This is available today as www.realtor.com. When digital cameras starting coming out, I thought it would be cool to have a service where you could upload your shots to have them printed and mailed back to you. There are a ton of those now, so that one was probably pretty obvious.
So, about four or five years ago I bought a thermostat for my oil preheater since it was a pain to have to go down to the hangar and turn it on or off as the weather changed. I thought it would be cool to build a little box with a cellphone in it that I could just call up and have it turn the heater on or off.
Well, I saw this on the innernets this morning:
Ain't that something? I missed out on another one. It's enough to make me wish I was entrepreneurial. Or at least not inherently lazy.
On the plus side, this bodes well for another one of my ideas that most people (well, to be perfectly honest, 100% of people) seem to think is really stupid: chinese food burritos. No, seriously! You simply CANNOT eat chinese food while driving, but you CAN eat a burrito. Think about it. Trust me, the idea will grow on you. And in a few more years when you see a national chain selling them, remember that you heard it here first.
After what seemed like a biblical 40 days and 40 nights of rain, we had some pretty nice weather today. Low 80s, if that, and clear air all the way up to the stratosphere. Light winds thrown into the bargain at no extra charge. But... all of that rain had an effect on the grass - mowing couldn't really be put off any longer. Luckily I have help in that domain now - it's a shared duty with Co-pilot Egg. My part comes first; I trim around the fence so she doesn't drive into any of the posts. Naturally I plowed right into one myself last week, which to an appreciable degree moots that entire line of logic, but still... it seems prudent. Once she took over the wheel, I jumped in the Miata and headed to the airport.
Papa hadn't been flown for a couple of weeks, and he was still two hours worth light on gas. I figured a quick hop to MadCo was in order. Just a couple of blades swung by before the engine caught, yet again making me appreciate the enthusiasm and willingness that my engine consistently demonstrates to the task of pulling Papa and me along. The winds being calm, the temps being low, the pressure being high, and the tanks being light, we fairly leapt from the runway and made a climbing turn to the west. 2,500' was plenty of altitude for the short ride out to MadCo.
I figured that it would be a good idea to practice a few landings after the debacle out in Indy, then we'd tank up and head home. A plan like that is only as good as the first landing, as it turns out. It was a greaser, and at $5.28 a gallon a result like that one on the first try makes ensuing attempts both an expensive luxury and an opportunity to only do worse. We made a full stop.
Tonight was my first time pumping my own gas at MadCo since they went self-service in the spring. If you remember, I was kind of put off by the removal of the gas pumping guy's job, right up until he spilled fuel all over my left wing. At that point I figured that I might be better off pumping it myself after all. Well, guess what. Spilling fuel on the wing turns out to be pretty easy to do! Now, I'm not saying that I was careless enough to spill a large quantity of very expensive fossil fuel all over my left wing. Nope, not saying that at all. I do also have a right wing, though, if you recall. I don't want to talk about that one.
I loafed along back to Bolton at a leisurely and economical 2000 RPM which, with the slight tailwind from the west, gave me a ground speed of 130 knots. It was nice and quiet, too. Having greased the landing on the skinny runway at MadCo, I was sure that the big, fat runway at Bolton would skew my perception to the degree that I mangled the landing there. 'Twas not to be: another greaser! And no, of course there were no witnesses. Things just don't work that way for me. You'll simply have to take my word for it.
Taxing back in, I stopped to chat with a fellow student from the A&P school as he was preflighting his plane for the return trip home. As we were talking, another guy came up and asked me what kind of plane Papa is. As you know, the only thing I enjoy talking about more than the subject of me is the subject of Papa. I gave him the particulars and answered the questions he had regarding performance, etc. I particularly like the performance questions since most pilots are astounded to learn that I can get 155 knots out of a 150hp engine.
As we were talking, I noticed that he was wearing some kind of ID badge. It turns out that he has one of the coolest jobs I can imagine: he's the pilot for the local NBC affiliate's news helicopter.
Helicopters are wonderful machines, but because of their high cost and relatively slow speeds, they really aren't suited for pleasure flying. I've only ridden in one once, having begged a ride in an Army UH-1 Huey while on a National Guard summer deployment. I've always wanted to try flying a chopper but they're prohibitively expensive. You have to really need their unique flying abilities to justify the cost.
That said, if I was ever going to buy myself a flying vacation, I think getting five hours or so of instruction in a Robinson R22 would be one of my first choices. I've thought about buying a P51 ride, but while it would be fun and interesting, at the end of the day it would be exactly that: a ride. I'm more of a hands-on guy. I thought about doing a three day course to get a second-in-command rating on the venerable DC-3, and while noted that it would definitely be hands-on, maybe to the point of being a bit more hands-on than I really wanted (they're notoriously physical in their handling, at least according to novels and conventional pilot wisdom), that idea carries with it the requirement that I have a multi-engine rating. Which would be a luxury to have in and of itself. I haven't got one.
I'm guessing that five hours in a Robinson would be enough to learn how to hover, and you get right down to it, that's all I really want to do. I get plenty of straight & level flight already, but rare are my chances to hover. Non-existent, truth be told. Completely devoid of hovering opportunities, am I. And I figure that hovering a helicopter has to be one of the coolest things you can do in an aircraft. I visualize it as feeling like trying to maintain your balance while perched on a rocking chair that is in turn balancing on the end of a broom stick. Said broomstick balancing on top of a bowling ball.
The control stick (technical name: cyclic) is used to stay level, but the collective control in your left hand also gives you freedom to move up and down. Said movements in the vertical plane coming at a cost, though: climbing and descending change the torque being imposed on the airframe by the rotor, which causes a change in the counteracting thrust provided by the tail rotor. So, if you move the collective control up or down with your left hand, you then have to compensate against a pivoting caused by the change in torque by the use of your feet, which are used to operate what appear to be rudder pedals. The use of which will probably cause some roll or pitch that needs to be addressed by the cyclic. Which itself cause an elevation change that might have to be compensated for with collective. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
All of this stirring around of the controls eventually becomes nearly automatic on the part of the pilot, or so I hear. I think being able to do that would be one of the more intense man/machine synergies ever. I get a feeling somewhat like that sometimes in the RV when we roll into a tight turn. I just think "turn," and without any more conscious thought I move my left hand a half inch or an inch (the distance depending on the pilot's mood, the passenger list, and/or the number of degrees of heading change to be performed) in the direction of the turn. The resisting force of the stick caused by the ailerons, them being way out there on the wing and being pressed on by the wind stream, feels juuusssst right, it being firm enough to give you a good sense of involvement in the process but light enough to not feel like you're imposing yourself.
The response to the stick movement is instantaneous, and the tightening that I get in my shoulders when I roll into a steep bank feels like what I imagine it would feel like to actually have my own wings. I think in hovering a helicopter, the feedback from the controls and the immediacy of the response (I assume) combined with the freedom to maneuver in all three dimensions would result in an even stronger feeling of control and rapport with the machine. I'll bet it's one of those things that prompted the advent of the term "being in the zone." Concentration required, but not unpleasantly so. Thoughts and instincts unconsciously and instantly responded to with muscles that know what to do, giving the pilot a feeling of individual and unassisted flight as it must be felt by birds. Well, hummingbirds anyway.
After all that, you won't be surprised when I say that I think the idea of flying a helicopter around to gather video for ongoing news stories seems like an incredible day job. Somehow, sitting at a computer all day doesn't seem to stack up very well in the adventure dept. compared to a job like that. Oh well, it's all good since lack of adventure aside, it gives me the tremendous opportunity to share beautiful summer evenings loafing around the skies with Papa. Ah, what a great way to spend the 41st evening! Still a helluva bargain, even at $5.28 per.
