Air America

Sunday I booked a lesson in a brand new Cessna Skylane fitted with the Garmin G1000 glass display avionics system. This is quite an honour since the avionics in this plane are actually more sophisticated than many 747's (don't believe me? ask your friendly neighborhood aviator). Features include streaming met data (satellite based weather 'radar'), mode s transponder (provides on screen display of airbourne traffic, and their movements without the need for aircraft fitted radar because it's relayed from ground stations) back-up systems, autopilot, auto xpdr, 2 glass (computer generated) displays for all Nav, enhanced (and i mean enhanced) GPS, ADF,DME,VOR,NDB, airspace & fuel range displays including the ability to automatically select correct radio frequencies for nearby airports. Basically it was incredible. I didn't know how to turn it on though.

Spent the day buzzing overhead Pottstown Nuclear Power station (checkout the yahoo pics) went up to 9,500ft (British reg's state flight at 10,000ft+ should be conducted with an on board oxygen supply).

We manouvered through scattered stratocumulous ;¬) (or cloud hopping) & Gareth was in the back videoing because the pics don't do the experience justice.

Landed at Lancaster airport where we spotted a Challenger (Learjet contender) decided I'd try that one out next week.




Ahh, twin turbofans. Plane $6 million. Capt Beard £4.95 plus benefits.

I'm working on getting web hosting sorted so I can put up the videos (300mb worth!) for now here are the pics:-
Air America flight Pics

Once hosting is running you can download the cockpit view of captain beard landing at Lancaster Airport, PA (bet you can't wait flight fans!)

Caption competition time again:-
Matt says: "I never touched it!"

Debugging

Yep we're finding a few bugs round here, (not all software related). Found this one in CMM's 16 & 81. This is a Preying Mantis. Apparently she will attack and kill the male during mating....hmmm.















We called this one Melissa the Malvern Mantis. She's the integration team’s new mascot. We keep her in the coffee cupboard.

Shoot you Sir...

Well we've settled in now and are getting to know folks (still working on getting them to allow us to take their pictures ;¬)). A chap at work has a brother who owns a range so the inevitable 'visit' was made.
We signed up with a club and had a go with some semi-auto's.

So after about 4 MINUTES of training we were let loose on the range. The first time i knew the gun was live my hand was shaking, needless to say i gave it a go. Once you tentatively shoot a few your confidence builds quickly (a feeling i fear is addictive) . Here is my target (yes mine i didn't take a photo of someone else's) I'm amazed i hit it at all actually.
After a while we were feeling pretty hard and then a 12 year old kid came in with his dad holding a magnum, fired it and practically blew the target off it's holster. At this point i wanted to go home...
....
Here MrBeard is sporting the Glock 9mm semi-auto, 15rnd magazine loaded but no bullets ($8.95 for 50) . Mr Beard would like to point out that he had no idea what he was doing.

I would also like to point out these things scare the crap out of me....but I'm going back next tuesday to finish off the rounds.

video of firing (10mb)

Going flying over here again soon, hope to get some video of landing at commercial airports.