Light Posting? How 'Bout None?

Places to go, things to do ...

The Next Time You Fly

maybe you'll get a flight attendant with this sense of humor:

Synchronized Flying: Next Olympic Sport?

This came my way courtesy of ajdshootist:

Cold Days Are Best, say Alaska Pilots

Ever wonder what it's like to fly in the winter-time, up here?

The Alaska Star has a great story about some of the guys flying out of the Birchwood airport. (That's about 30 miles northeast of downtown Anchorage ... or, as long-time Alaskans would say, "It's over there," while waving their hands in that general direction.)

Excerpt:

To most of us, flying for pleasure doesn't seem like an obvious thing to do this time of year. If you didn't know better, you might think the snow, rain, ice, wind, darkness and changeable weather would keep local pilots' feet—if not their aspirations—planted on the ground.

You would be wrong.

Chugiak pilot Roger Denny explains it simply: "It's fun. Way fun."

 Denny, who flies out of the Birchwood Airport, also owns a Piper Super Cub outfitted in the winter with a pair of skis.

"Every swamp, meadow, river and mountaintop is a potential place to lay down a set of tracks," he said. "Everything is a runway."

Denny likens his plane to a snowmachine with wings.

"Flying is just playing and sightseeing," he said. "It's trying to land on some lake and make tracks; that's all you're doing."

Hopper prefers winter flying to summer flying.

"The air is so much clearer," he said. "You have clear blue skies, and the mountains are vivid white, and the glaciers are blue."

Read the whole thing here.

You Think YOUR Day is Bad?

Found at Theo's place

Thursday Morning

Good morning! It's 47 degrees with a bit of wind. Actually, we had gusts to 35 mph overnight, making the blinds flap and rattle like a live thing. The racket kept waking me up, and I'd have a single moment of semi-clarity each time regarding the need to close the window a bit to keep the blinds from banging into the window frame. And then the wind would stop for a moment, and I'd fall asleep again. I finally made the transition to 'vertical' around 3:30 and pulled the window nearly closed, taming the 'thing'.

Now the sun has been up for a couple of hours, adding more light to a night which was never completely dark. The wind is tossing the treetops as if there were a storm raging 100 feet off the ground - a windstorm that just doesn't reach the ground where we are, poor mortals, forever slaves to gravity.


It's days like this when my mind most often drifts back to the childhood dream of growing up to be Superman, flying high above mere humans, and gaining that new perspective that only altitude provides. It was that dream that led to my interest in aviation.

I still remember General Zod's stick-figure lady friend in Superman II, remarking in an oh-so-condescending way, "They need machines to fly." The little boy inside me curled his fists and shouted, "Oh, yeah? Well, I'm gonna be Superman when I grow up, and then I'll show YOU!"

The adult male housing that little boy sighed, stuffed down the memory once more, and watched the rest of the movie in resigned silence.


But on mornings like this... on wonderful, glorious mornings like this, I can be Superman again. The dream comes to life, if only in imagination.

And there, I'm soaring east across the Chugach Mountains ... looking at the peaks fading into the distance, and asking, "Why not?"

Why not?