Vectors To Final

My Dad let me know of a V-tail Beechcraft crash in my home town of Rock Hill, SC yesterday. It is too soon for a preliminary report of the cause, but NTSB is supposed to be on scene today. Very tragic thing; it sounds like the pilot worked hard to prevent people on the ground from getting hurt.

This weekend I had to chance to take my brother-in-law and his wife for their first trip in a small plane. We lumbered up to 4000' (at max weight - had a full tank) in order to find cooler temps and get over some clouds at 2500'. We just did a quick circle over a few of the highlights in the area and came back for a nice straight-in landing on 20 at KPHF. I had the best landing I've had in a while that day. I think the reason was because of my even-more-careful attention to the approach speed. I tried to hook up an iTalk to my ipod to record the flight's audio, but the device was unhappy with the intercom connection as an input. Time to send it back. Instead, I used the iPod to give us some mood music in the headsets.

Yesterday I had the chance to take someone on their first flight in a small aircraft. He (Steven) is the son of a co-worker of mine and both he and his mom joined me for a 30 minute flight in the area local to KJGG. He's a big fan of airplanes and I hoped he'd get a kick out of the flight. Apparently he did, as his mom said he told everyone he saw afterward that he was a "total pilot" now - and if that pose in the picture doesn't say "total pilot" then nothing does. :) Steven sat up front (on a small pillow) with my spare headset engulfing his head like it was trying to swallow him alive. I let him take the controls for a bit and he seemed to get the hang of it fairly well. I told him to lightly push the yoke forward and the slight descent gave his mom a little touch of a nervous feeling - but both she and he did great! :) I tried out my iPod in flight for the first time that day. It worked very well. There is a normal 3.5mm stereo input in the ...

I am giving serious thought to going through a little more training sometime soon. I'd like to get my complex endorsement so that I can fly planes with constant speed props and retractable gear. My local flight school has the airplane pictured here available for training: a 1974 Piper Cherokee Arrow II (making the airplane 3 years older than I am). I think the engine is rated at 200HP which I guess means that I can't use it to get a high-performance endorsement. I believe the horsepower has to be greater than 200 to count toward that. I wish I could find a good reference to other people's experiences getting their high-perf endorsement. I am curious to know how hard it was, and what was involved. I am expecting the endorsement to take about 6-8 hours of flight time.