Month: October 2008

Our Flying Club Lost a Plane

Last night whilst browsing the club’s online scheduling website I noticed that one of the Beechcraft 76’s was in maintenance with the tag “aircraft totally destroyed”. I did some digging around and, sure enough, on October 4 2008 N6013X was substantially damaged whilst landing on a private airstrip in Eloy, AZ.

I am glad to see that the pilot was unharmed, sad to see that we lost half of our twin Beechcraft fleet and I wonder what this will do to the club’s insurance next year. The penalty for any accident in the club is that you have to write an account and lessons learned for the next newsletter, so it will be interesting to get his view of what happened.

A To Do List of Sorts

In semi-preparation for my Commercial oral (if I ever get there) I’ve been rereading the FAR/AIM, and it’s amazing how much I’ve forgotten (or simply never knew in the first place). While reading I was struck by some things I am yet to do which I probably thought I would have done by now:

  • Get a special VFR clearance
  • Fly an IFR flight outside the SoCal TEC routes
  • Fly in IMC with a non-pilot passenger
  • Land at a Class B airport (can I get the 172 into Lindbergh??)
  • Fly to Mexico

Huh, I thought there were a couple more but they escape me now. Well, that’s a list of sorts.

Too Much Flying!

There is probably no such thing as too much flying, but there is when you are the passenger at the back of the plane. Over the last two weeks I have vacationed in New York City and travelled to London and Amsterdam on business. In total that has been 11 flight segments and included 24 hrs of flight time for the Europe portion alone – and I was only gone 3.5 days!

So I’m pretty exhausted from all the time spent in the tin can, but looking forward to getting back at the controls and doing it for myself. I was scheduled to fly tonight but we have strong Santa Ana winds and a couple of wildfires just north of the city so I will stay on the ground.