January 28, 2006
The Dancing Tiger
No photos this time, unfortunately.
Today's formation destination was Salinas, where we were booked ofr a tour together with the local EAA chapter to visit Art Teeter's P51 restauraton facility.
Most members of our group come from Palo Alto, so we flew the short hop from San Carlos to Palo Alto, and on arrival we were greeted not only by the tower, but by some other person on the radio calling us the dancing tiger (N626FT).
That same guy must have been present later, since we heard someone calling us a "gaggle of grummans" on departure - even though I thought our rejoin wasn't that bad.
Today I flew #4, and we did a diamond formation for the first time. It's actually quite easy to fly the slot position. Everything is working for you, you look out straight, you see #2 and #3 in your preriphery, and you don't have to worry about power changes due to the "arm" effect on turns.
We did a low pass over runway 13 at Salinas, then returned for the normal overhead break and landing. The tower complimented us for the show, and off we went to look at P51s in various states of assembly.
I got to lead on departure, and we did a short flight to Marina, where fuel was almost a dollar cheaper than in Salinas. This time, our rejoin was not as nice, as it took us almost a whole 360 to get there. My radio work was also less than stellar - speak up, man...
On our flight back to Palo Alto, the amazing radio commentator was still on, berating the tower about misunderstanding somebody's intentions.
Posted by Christian Goetze at 06:17 PM | Comments (6)
January 20, 2006
We made it into AvWeb!
Greg Ketell was the photographer on the entry selected for AvWeb's Photo of the Week contest:
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/554-full.html
N626FT is the one on the right opposite the photo plane.
We started practicing echelon turns, boy are they hard, especially as #3. The sight picture changes utterly: it looks more line "in trail", with the additional burden that it feels like one is turning into the guy in front.
Posted by Christian Goetze at 08:46 AM | Comments (2)