Oh And By The Way

Oops. Not through yet...

I heard a physician say one time that there is no medical condition that is not helped by good nutrition.

But it occurred to me that because you are trying to get phytonutrients into each and every cell, it will probably take a year or two before the good nutrition can really start to make a difference.

So it would be a good idea to start now.

You know?

Cellular Health

I recently had a discussion with a friend about my nutritional philosophy. In the course of the conversation, I discovered that I can boil it down to a single concept - cellular health.

The way I figure it, if you have healthy cells, you will have healthy organs, and those healthy organs will work together harmoniously. You will be healthy and happy for a long, long time.

The way to have healthy cells is to give them what they need - energy and nutrients. Energy so they can function. Nutrients so they can function smoothly. Where do you get this energy and nutrition? Plants. It's that simple.

Last week I bought some chard - had never eaten it before, and decided to try some. I know that it is packed with phytonutrients. I cut out the heavy main rib from each leaf and steamed the remaining leaves for ten minutes. It was VERY good. I'll be doing that again.

And if you don't like to eat fruits and vegetables, the best backup I can think of is Juice Plus+ capsules. Even if you are doing your best to get the nine to thirteen daily servings of fruits and veggies, like me, but can't quite get there (like me) you can take Juice Plus+ and know that you are getting the nutrition you need.

My objective is to learn to prepare and eat enough of a variety of fresh fruits and veggies that I do not need anything additional, but I have to admit that Juice Plus+ is a VERY convenient way to get nutrition.

Be good to your cells and they'll be good to you.

Frustration and Satisfaction

Jeb and I took possession of the Yankee over a week ago, and I have yet to fly it. The insurance company placed restrictions on us - we have to get checked out by a qualified instructor before we can solo in it. The instructor has to have at least 300 hours total time and 15 hours in Yankees. We called all over the place trying to find someone qualified. We thought we were going to have to travel to San Diego where a flight school has a Yankee trainer. Finally we found a guy right here in Tucson at Ryan Field, but he can't instruct us until this Thursday - day after tomorrow.

Airplane ownership is not different from what I expected, though. I never expected that plane ownership would be like automobile ownership, because you don't just jump in a plane and fly into the sky without lots of preparation first. I figured there would be delays while all the pieces were put into place... the hangar, the purchase, the FAA paperwork, the aircraft registration, hull and liability insurance, and now training requirements.

But you know what? I own an airplane, and it is a good feeling to know that I have achieved another life dream.

Inch By Inch

Jeb and I have taken possession of a hangar at KAVQ. We even have keys to the restrooms in the hangar building! Insurance coverage for the aircraft has been arranged. All of the FAA documentation has been obtained (Jeb drove to Scottsdale yesterday to pick it up). We are still arranging a CFI to fly the Grumman back for us. Looks like Monday is the day.

Scared Spitless

We're going to pull the trigger, Jeb and I. As of this morning, the bank account is fully funded. Jeb has notified the seller of our intentions, and has received a prospective sales contract in return. I have inquired anew about insurance for the aircraft. I have also initiated a title & lien search. I will go to TUS (Tuscon International Airport) General Aviation Terminal and pick up a copy of FAA Form 8050-1 (Application for Registration) and FAA Form 8050-2 (Bill of Sale) to fill out at closing. Jeb is arranging the closing and will find a CFI or other knowledgable pilot to fly the plane back to AVQ (Marana Regional Airport) where we have a hangar waiting.

The price is right... hangar cost is affordable... insurance is affordable... everything is falling neatly into place...

Why am I scared?

It must be because it is An Airplane. There is something mysterious and awesome about that. I am shocked and awed that I will be half owner of An Airplane.

I just have to remember to breathe...

Pull the Trigger!

My wife and I are traveling this weekend, and I am actually composing this post while on I-20 between Abilene and Dallas, hurtling toward the Florida Atlantic coast! Dude, I feel totally connected!

I just got off the phone with Jeb and we agreed to purchase the plane! He will notify the owner of our decision, arrange for payment when I return from this trip, and arrange for aircraft delivery to Marana, Arizona, where we already have a hangar. I will research the required paperwork for the FAA, and insuring the aircraft. Pretty exciting stuff!

This is one of my life dreams - to own an airplane. I accomplished another of my life dreams in the 1980's - I am a motorcycle fan, and I wanted to own a Harley. While at Fort Leonard Wood I purchased a customized 1974 Harley Super Glide. Three speeds, no electric start, peanut tank. I barely weighed enough to kick the engine over. The fuel tank was so small that I had to fill it up when I rode the bike to work, and then again when I got home. It was useless as a road machine. The back tire that came on it was from a Volkswagen. The electrical system was always shorting out. Built in 1974, it was one of those piece-of-shit AMC machines. I sold it after a year.

But in 1985 I decided that you only get what you want for your birthday if you buy it yourself, so I purchased a brand-new mtallic burgundy Harley FXRS with the new blockhead engine. It was the last year that Harley used a chain final drive. I'm rambling... It was a fantastic bike, and I rode all of the long cross-country rides that I dreamed of. I kept that machine for ten years and sold it for the same amount I paid for it.

I mentioned the Harleys because in addition to owning a Harley, I dreamed of certain trips I wanted to make on one. This plane dream is the same. The dream of the plane includes dreams of long cross-country trips to favorite destinations. I won't bore you with those. You have your own dreams and your own trips. Now that the decision has been made to buy, I can start actually planning the flights!

Hurry And Wait

The mechanic advised us that the AA-1B we looked at would require a more expensive annual inspection the first time we had it done, in his opinion. We asked the owner to either reduce the price of the plane, or take care of the more important items we found during the inspection. He indicated a desire to do the latter.

Meanwhile, he has another prospective buyer flying up from Oklahoma today to inspect the plane. I do not think this new buyer will be allowed the unrestricted access that Jeb and I enjoyed. We learned a lot about the AA-1, but it was an extreme inconvenience for the owner. I truly appreciate that he let us do that, but I know that he really gained nothing from it.

Jeb and I are okay if the Oklahoma guy writes the owner a check. We are okay if he doesn't. We are content to wait patiently. The ability to wait patiently is a powerful negotiating tool.

Accidental Aerobatics

Remember my first stall fiasco that prompted talk about starting a dive bombing school because I was a natural? The power-off stall training was followed by power-on stall training. Power-on stalls are intended to simulate stalling the plane on the climb-out after leaving the runway. In a power-on stall the plane attains a much higher angle to the ground before stalling, as you might expect.

Well, after the accidental dive bombing event and a few power-on stalls I decided to go out by myself and practice so that I would develop some confidence with them. I rented my favorite C-152 and headed for the practice area. Because I was still very anxious about stalls I climbed to seven thousand feet instead of just three thousand. That turned out to be a wise decision.

I took a deep breath and started my power on stall procedure... full throttle... pull back on the yoke until the plane stalls... release back pressure... pretty simple.

It seemed to be taking a long time for the plane to stall... maybe that was because I was alone in the plane. If it were more lightly loaded it would achieve a higher angle to the ground. It had been a long time since I had seen the horizon, so I looked out the side window to get an idea of my orientation.

I was appalled to discover that the horizon was vertical in my window! That meant the plane was pointing straight up! I did not know why or how I had attained a straight up orientation, but I noted that this was the opposite orientation of my dive bombing stall, so I had that going for me. I decided that something was amiss so I pulled back on the throttle.

The plane stalled immediately and without warning. Of course. I had just removed all upward thrust that the engine was providing. Of course it would stall immediately and without warning!

I felt myself falling backward in what must have been at first a tail slide. But the plane is rather like a dart, in that it wants to go nose-first in the air, and as it was sliding backwards toward the earth it was also turning around. I was expecting that to happen.

I saw the horizon appear in the top of my windshield and move toward the nose. The direction it was moving was reassuring, but what was not so reassuring is that from my viewpoint the sky was down and the ground was up. I was upside-down! The plane was putting the nose first by falling backwards.

Soon the plane was pointing straight at the ground again. Great. More dive bombing. At least this time the engine was not at full power. I watched the airspeed move toward the red line. Not good. Gingerly, I started pulling back on the yoke and coaxed the plane out of the dive without exceeding the maximum allowable speed or pulling enough gees to make me sick. I noted that the dive bottomed out at three thousand feet, so I had lost four thousand feet falling backwards and flipping over. If I had started my stall at three thousand feet I would have plowed into the ground at a high velocity.

A little shook up, I decided to go back to the airport and call it a day.

Later that night I discovered why all that happened. To simulate a stall on climb-out after take-off, the plane needs to be at the same speed it would be at during climb-out... somewhere around seventy miles per hour. I had started pulling back on the yoke at cruise speed - one hundred and fifteen miles per hour.

Flying is really about ninety percent planning and ten percent moving your hands and feet. That was my introduction to that concept.

This just doesn't happen

Hot off the presses!

This evening I spoke with an older friend of mine who is eating the way I do, and he told me that today his optometrist gave him a prescription for WEAKER glasses!

That's what can happen when you become healthy by focusing on repairing your DNA. When the individual cells of your body have the nutrients they need, your body systems tend to change toward proper operation.

That's how simple it is. Really.

Filthy and Exhausted

Jeb and I performed our pre-purchase inspection with the help of an Airframe and Powerplant mechanic. We all agreed that the minor deficiencies we found were reasonable for a plane that age. The most remarkable item we found was a pack rat nest in the wing. How the hell could a rodent get into the wing of an airplane? I'm guessing that it happened some time ago, maybe when the plane was sitting for a while, as it waited for the new engine. Anyway, the inspection took eight hours of hard work - some of it rolling around on the dirty concrete floor of a hangar - to inspect everything we needed to look at. Airplane inspection panels have a lot of screws in them. There are a lot of tight places that need to be inspected. But now I am confident that the wings aren't about to fall off, and all of the controls are in airworthy condition.

I'm going to shower and go to bed. It has been a long time since I was this filthy and exhausted.

The Simple Solution

When I was recovering from my heart attack I felt like I had been given a second chance on life and had better not screw it up. I knew I had to lose weight and start eating right, or I would be asking for trouble in my later years. I believed I had a good handle on the exercise part - thirty minutes a day of aerobic exercise, alternating between straight aerobic and interval training, and weight training including machines and free weights.

It was the diet/nutrition part that depressed me. I knew I was essentially starting from ground zero, because I never paid attention to what my mother or teachers told me about how I should eat. But when I started trying to learn about it I felt swamped by conflicting information.

I want things to be simple! Why make life more complicated than it naturally is?

After reading a pile of books, talking with physicians and nutritionists, and thinking through things as best I could, I came up with a simple solution. Here it is - plant-based nutrition, also called phytonutrients.

Here is what you should do (and what I aspire to do every day) ...

• Eat the nine to thirteen servings daily of fruits and vegetables that the government recommends. Eat more than that, if you can.
• Ensure that you get a variety.
• Eat as much as you can in the raw state. If you must cook them, steaming is best. Only steam veggies until they are crunchy, not mushy. Boiling vegetables leaches the nutrition out and it is thrown away with the water (unless you are keeping it for a soup or something). Remember that heat destroys some nutrients, so any cooking will eliminate those from that dish. Microwaving has been shown to also destroy some nutrients, so avoid that when you can. Actually, some vitamins are destroyed by exposure to sunlight, which, after all, is electromagnetic radiation too.
  
• Focus on fruits and veggies that have high nutrient density (that is, a lot of nutrition per calorie that the food contains) How do you do that? Easy... eat the dark green and purple leafy veggies, eat the red and purple berries, eat the fruit skins. Dark colors mean nutrients and antioxidants are in there.
  
• Ensure that your fruits and veggies are organic, because honestly, nobody knows what trace amounts of pesticides and fertilizers do to humans.
  
• Ensure that they are vine-ripened, because fifty percent of the nutrition in a fruit or vegetable develops in the last week or two before it ripens. Grocery stores contain produce that was picked a week or more before ripeness so that it would ripen along the way or in the store, but if the product was not connected to the mother plant, the nutrition does not develop as the thing ripens.

You think I'm advising you to become a vegetarian. Did I say to quit eating meat? No, I did not. It has been shown that red meat is not good for you, but the best red meat on the market is grass-fed free-range buffalo. If buffalo is not available, purchase grass-fed beef. Cattle did not evolve to eat corn, and it makes them sick, which is one reason the stockyards have to inject them with antibiotics - that, and the fact that in their last days they are standing hock-deep in their own shit. I mean, the guys who are going to slaughter the cattle and process meat for us to eat start with an animal that is covered with shit. Grass-fed, free-range meat is best. But eat it sparingly.

Everyone has heard about chicken and fish. Don't eat the chicken skin. Don't fry it - as delicious as fried chicken is. (Yes, I eat fried chicken once in a while... maybe one meal every six months, I'll have two pieces.)

Do I eat junk? Yes, of course I do. I had a hot dog last week. Yes, I know what hot dogs are made of. I know they have nitrates in them. I ate one anyway. I had a Coke, too, even though I will advise you to stay away from high-fructose corn syrup. I had Fritos. Yes, I know they have a high fat content and lots of salt. When was the last time I had a hot dog, Fritos, and a Coke as a meal? Two years ago. Moderation is important.

The bottom line is this - humans co-evolved with plants. We can consume a lot of other things without dying from what we swallow, but our bodies need phytonutrients to function properly. If your body is properly nourished, there many ailments that will get better without medical intervention.

I can hear you now... nine to thirteen servings of a variety of fresh, organic, vine-ripened fruits and vegetables every day? Nobody could do that!

Heh, heh. How can you do it? That's for me to know and you to find out!

Oh, okay. I'll tell you. But it is lunchtime, so I've gotta go. I'll tell you later.

Pre-Purchase Inspection

Looks like we are taking the plane purchasing process to the next level - the pre-purchase inspection. Jeb found a mechanic who is familiar with the Grumman AA-1 series. The owner has agreed to fly the plane to the mechanic's site. Jeb and I will meet them there Monday and spend the whole day pulling panels off and inspecting the plane inside and out. This is exciting - scary, but exciting.

Loading the gun

My partner in aviation (Jeb) and I just returned from opening a joint account to fund our airplane purchase and to act as a clearinghouse for financial transactions related to aircraft ownership. It's a big step, and one that has me a little nervous, much like I was when I bought my first house. Actually, this plane is going to cost just about as much as my first house!

We're looking at that Grumman AA-1B in the Phoenix area. Jeb found a mechanic who is familiar with the AA-1's to do our pre-purchase inspection. He wants to do it Monday. We all need to be there to help and to see for ourselves what the condition of the plane is.

Jeb already had his share of the funds to contribute. I have to accumulate mine from various accounts I have scattered around. We think of this as Loading the Gun. When we write the check for the plane, that is Pulling the Trigger. You can't pull the trigger if the gun isn't loaded.

Wish us luck.

More With Less

Okay, I stole the title from the article. There is a great article in the June 2008 EAA Sport Aviation magazine by Neal Willford titled More With Less - A look at low-powered and efficient flight, appearing on page 54. The article is about flying using the least fuel. He covers sink rate and drag, speed, power to climb. He talks about how wing span loading affects minimum thrust horsepower requirements and minimum power speed. There is a lot of interesting stuff in this article,

The most fascinating section in the article for me is the one on sink rate and drag. In order to understand that section, you must know that parasite drag is drag caused by moving a solid object through a fluid. Induced drag is drag due to lift. Here is an interesting chart from Wikipedia:



Here are some gems from that section: "What aerodynamicists discovered is that there are some interesting performance relationships between parasitic and induced drag. The first is that the airspeed for minimum sink rate occurs when an airplane's induced drag is exactly three times its parasitic drag. Any other speed, whether slower or faster, will require more power to fly."



Veerrrrryyyy interesting. You can see that in the chart.

"The second relationship occurs when the parasite drag is equal to the induced drag. At this speed, the airplane is flying at its best lift to drag (L/D), or glide, ratio. This occurs at an airspeed that's 32% greater than the minimum sink airspeed. The max L/D speed is what you would want to fly at if maximum range or fuel economy is your goal."

I did that in a Piper Cherokee 160 after reading this article. Its best L/D speed is 82 mph. I flew around for an hour to see what it was like. First, I noticed that it was quieter in the cockpit. The engine was not laboring very much. I found it to be quite serene. And consider this - when people want to know how much experience you have as a pilot, what do they ask? They ask how many HOURS you have. They don't ask how fast or far you fly. They don't ask how big a hurry you are always in. So if you fly at max L/D, you are gaining more hours of experience AND you are saving fuel AND you are being easier on your engine simply by flying a little slower.

But back to the article...

"The last relationship occurs at the airspeed when the parasitic drag is three times greater than the induced drag. This condition is sometimes referred to as Carson's speed, and is 32 percent greater than the max L/D speed, or 73 percent higher than the minimum sink speed... ...While flying at maximum speed will get you to your destination the quickest, it requires the most power and fuel burned. Flying at maximum L/D gives you the best fuel economy, but it is slower than most people want to fly. ... there is a speed where you get the most increase in speed for the least amount of excess power (and fuel) burned... This is the Carson speed mentioned earlier."

Okay, so the Carson speed for that Cherokee 160 would be 1.32 times 82 miles per hour, or 108 miles per hour. I have not gone up to see what engine rpm that correlates to, but I think it would be an interesting experiment.

For me, the point of this article was to remind me that I can fly at any speed I want to, and there are benefits and consequences to any speed I select. I think I should become familiar with the relationship between speed and fuel consumption in any plane I fly.

One more comment. If you rent a plane wet (that means the fuel is included in the rental rate, for you non-pilots), you get charged the hourly rate regardless of whether you are saving fuel or not. If you slow down and save fuel, it takes you longer to get to your destination, so you end up paying more for the trip. You pay MORE for conserving! The economics of aircraft rental are such that you minimize your rental cost if you fly as fast and fuel-inefficiently as possible. That is harder on the plane and wastes fuel, but it costs the renter less.

If you own your own airplane, however, I think there are true benefits to slowing down a little. Your fuel costs will be lower. Your engine will last longer. It will take a little longer to get where you are going, but that means you get to fly for a longer period of time! It's win-win-win-win!

Dive Bombing Lessons

And now for something completely different, I want to write about a student pilot experience.

One day while I was learning to fly, Dave Bradley came out to the plane as I was finishing my preflight inspection. He said that since it had been a couple of weeks since I had flown, he wanted to review some of the maneuvers to get me back in the saddle, so to speak. He wanted to do some slow flight, steep turns, and stalls. Then we could do some short- and soft-field landings.

"I've never done stalls," I said.

"Sure you've done stalls," he replied confidently. "You just came back from your long cross-country. You can't do that without stall training."

"I did. You let me go," I said.

"No. I wouldn't let you go without stalls. You just don't remember them," he suggested.

"Oh, I'm sure I would remember stalls," I assured him. "I am terrified of them." I got out my logbook and handed it to Dave. He scrutinized the entries.

"Well, I'm surprised that I overlooked that..." he mused. "I guess we'll just have to do them today!"

I didn't look happy. "I think I'm going to wet my pants," I said.

"Well, change clothes before you get in the plane!" He climbed in.

I was feeling a little dizzy already. The specter of stalls had loomed before me ever since I saw the word in the training syllabus. To me, stalling the plane meant a death spiral into the ground, followed by explosion, smoke, and flame. But I got into the plane anyway. I thought I might as well get this over with.

We climbed to 3,000 feet AGL (above ground level) and Dave says, "Okay! Stall the plane."

I said, "Let's pretend that I have never stalled a plane before, and you tell me how it is done." I think he still thought that I had done this before but had forgotten.

He humored me. "For the power-off stall, you put on carb heat, pull the throttle to idle, keep back pressure on the yoke to maintain altitude. When the plane gets down to about 45 knots airspeed, you'll hear the stall warning horn go off, and a couple of knots lower than that the nose will drop. When that happens, release back pressure on the yoke, and the plane will start flying again. Add throttle to return to straight and level flight. Turn off carb heat."

I looked at him with dread in my eyes.

"Ready?" he asked.

"No," I admitted. "But here goes..." I did what he said. I was sweating. My heart was pounding. My hands were shaking. My knees were knocking. My teeth were probably chattering. The stall warning horn went off and scared the crap out of me. I know I jumped in my seat. My eyes were bugging out with fear. I'd never experienced having the plane's nose so high. All I could see was the sky. The horn was blaring. I was about to jump out of my skin waiting for the nose to drop.

Then it happened. The nose started to fall and I felt that falling sensation in the pit of my stomach. I was scared stiff. The passage of time switched to slow motion. I decided that we were falling, not flying. I wanted the plane to fly again as quickly as possible. If releasing the back pressure on the yoke would do it, then to get it to fly again even more quickly...

I shoved the yoke as far forward as it would go and jammed the throttle to the wall.

The plane immediately pointed its nose straight toward the ground. That falling sensation I felt earlier in my stomach became a serious sensation of falling, because we were headed down at full throttle. I was aghast at what was happening. This was going so wrong! We weren't flying! We were going to crash into the ground! Way off in the distance, it seemed, Dave was yelling, "YEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAA!!!" I looked over, and he had braced himself with his hand against the roof of the plane. I thought he had lost his mind because he had a huge grin on his face.

An eternity later, my wits returned and I reduced the throttle and pulled back on the yoke to get us back to straight and level flight. Dave was totally cool and professional - "Let's regain our altitude and try that again."

I thought I was going to cry. I also didn't feel so well. But I piloted the plane back up to three thousand AGL and we did it again, but without the diving this time. We did it again and again until I could get the plane flying with a loss of altitude of less than fifty feet. Then we went back to the field.

After landing and walking (shakily, on my part) back to the office, I uttered the ritual question to everyone inside - "Did you guys see that landing?" Of course, if they said they did, I would have to come up with some excuse about why it was so bad. If they said they didn't, I got to brag about how good it was. I can't remember what they said that day. But I remember what Dave said.

"You know, Paul," he said, seriously. (Paul was the other instructor.) "Those little Cessnas don't go very fast even straight down."

Paul looked up from what he was doing. He glanced at me. I'm sure I was white-faced. "Oh," he said. "Did we go straight down today?"

"We did," Dave acknowledged. "You know, I think we should open up a dive bombing school. I think Sam's a natural at it."

Why this blog?

Why do I have a blog titled The Airplane Cockpit - Surviving the Obsession? I'm glad you asked... it is a long story, so settle in and read on.

When I was a little boy in the 1950's my father, a career military officer, used to assemble plastic model airplanes and hang them from the ceiling in my room. Most of them were biplanes from the World War I era. He did a meticulous job painting them. They looked so realistic. He even painted the tiny faces of the pilots in those planes. I remember lying on my bed and just looking at them and imagining what it would be like to fly.

My dad was an infantry officer in World War II, and though too young for service early in the war, he got into it in time for the invasion of Okinawa. He told me that on his first patrol in Okinawa his squad was ambushed by some Japanese soldiers with a machine gun. His patrol was walking single file down a path through some heavy foliage and the machine gun opened up from a curve in the path. The first guy in the patrol got hit in the binoculars that he was wearing around his neck. Everyone dived into the bushes and returned fire. They never found the guys who shot at them. The patrol had to carry the wounded man out.

After the end of the war, Dad was assigned to a military police unit in Tokyo, so he stayed there for a while. Then, he signed up for the Air Defense Artillery branch and was stationed in El Paso, Texas, at Fort Bliss, where I was born a few years later. He helped develop the Nike Ajax. He claims to have personally painted the black and white checkerboard pattern on the very first one, so they could better see it as it flew toward the target out at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Another thing he did while stationed at Fort Bliss was go in with a few other buddies and purchase a surplus L-10 Bird Dog observation plane for $400. Yep. Four hundred bucks. They all learned to fly in that. He likes to tell people that he soloed after only four hours of instruction.

Then, one time after some engine maintenance, he and the mechanic decided to take it for a test flight. The engine quit shortly after takeoff and they landed on a slope. The uphill wheel dropped into a gully or prairie dog hole or something and sheared the landing gear off on that side. The plane spun around from the impact and nearly destroyed itself before coming to a stop. Both my dad and the mechanic were fine, but the plane was a total loss. He did not go on to finish his pilot certification.

His best friend from the group who owned the plane went on to become an Army aviator. Dad continued to enjoy taking the yoke when military pilots would let him. I think it is a little sad that he limited his enjoyment of flying to simply maintaining straight and level flight while being supervised by the pilot in command. It is kind of like when a father lets his son sit in his lap and steer the car. The son thinks he is driving, but he isn't really.

Years passed, and I continued to have an interest in flying. Any time I would talk about flying lessons, Dad would tell me about his plane crash. The message was clear - it's okay to like airplanes, but if you learn to fly you will crash.

I grew up, did a stint in the Army (infantry) during Vietnam, returned home and finished a degree in mechanical engineering. I passed my Engineer-In-Training test and went to work at a power plant in Columbia, Missouri. After a few years of engineering there, my supervisor encouraged me to take the Professional Engineer test. It is a hard test. At the time, it took eight hours to take. I started studying six months ahead of time. I decided that if I passed the test I would start taking flying lessons.

I passed, but a year passed before I scraped up the courage to start flying lessons. I elected to learn to fly with Dave Bradley at Tig-Air Aviation in Boonville, Missouri. I was terrified.

I soloed after ten hours of instruction, and listened as Dad reminded me that he only needed four. But unlike him, I finished my training and became a Licensed Private Pilot in the summer of 1988.

The next few years were filled with various aviation adventures and misadventures. I will write about all of them in this blog, so stay tuned. But here is a taste... I have run out of fuel, accidentally spun an airplane, accidentally went inverted, flown into bad weather, gotten hopelessly lost, and flew back to the airstrip with my head hanging out of the window and praying that I didn't puke. Not all on the same flight, of course. But so far (knock on wood) I have not bent an airplane.

Then I got married. Even though my wife was fine with me flying, and even went flying with me from time to time, the costs of a household prevented me from continuing, and I hung up my wings. I decided that my aviation heyday was over, and I should just settle down with my family and cherish the memories.

Ten years passed. I completed a masters and doctoral program in mechanical engineering. I did work for NASA and I now design missiles in Tucson, Arizona. I work adjacent to Tucson International Airport.

My wife is a nurse practitioner, and she made sure that I visited physicians regularly to ensure that all of my biological systems were working properly. I always passed with flying colors. But one Saturday morning (January 21, 2006) I felt bad after a workout, and my wife took me next door to the emergency room of the Tucson Heart Hospital, where I commenced having a heart attack.

That did it. Obviously, I survived. But did you know that statistically there is only a 50% chance of surviving your first heart attack? When I woke up in the hospital after having the stent put in, among the first of my thoughts were that my flying days were definitely over because a heart attack invalidates anyone's medical certification.

Still, I believed I had been given a second chance at life. I started exercising every day (after three months of cardiac rehab), and I began researching nutrition. Consequently, I was successful in losing thirty pounds. I looked good and I felt good. Exercise and nutrition became a theme for living.

Then one day I found out that I could get my medical certificate back! The heart attack did not have to prevent me from flying again! I decided that I have to fly. I'm not the hottest pilot in the world by a long shot, but I have to fly. I set my mind to regaining my medical certification. Meanwhile, I started flying again with an instructor, since you don't have to have a valid medical certificate to do that.

To make a long story short, I did get my medical back. I applied to the FAA for a medical certificate. They wrote back and said to send them proof that everything they ever heard was wrong with me has been corrected. I went to four or five specialists in the process, but after four months I had a Special Issuance Third Class Medical Certificate in my hands and the flying started up again.

The current status of my flying is that last Sunday a co-worker and I went to Deer Valley Airport north of Phoenix and flew a 1973 Grumman AA-1B that we are thinking of buying. It's a nice bird. The next step is the pre-purchase inspection, which could happen next week. I think you should stick around for the ride. Thanks for checking out my blog.