Look...I'm Video Blogging Now

And The First Topic Is Aviation...


I guess that I've mentioned before that I'm an aviation fanatic.

For my 8th Birthday, my father took me out to the local airport and bought me an hour ride in a Cessna 172. He was a pilot himself, but since he wasn't current on that airplane he rode in the back seat and let me sit up front in the right seat with our pilot.

We flew over our house and our neighborhood, and I even got to take a shot at keeping the nose on the horizon and the wings level (with the pilot doing some serious trim adjustments without my knowledge.)

When I was in junior high school, I got my first ride in a helicopter, a UH-1 "Huey", out at Ft. Rucker, Alabama with my Aviation Explorers Group.

My very first trip on a commercial airliner was in the summer of 1978, when I climbed onto a Douglas DC-9 in Dothan, Alabama, then flew to Atlanta to meet a Lockheed L1011 for a flight to San Francisco. After a bus trip to Travis AFB, I then boarded a MAC flight (a Lockheed C-141 cargo plane with paratrooper jump seats) for a 23 hour saga to Alaska (I forget the base); Yokota AFB, Japan; then on to Subic Bay Phillipines for a tour on the USS New Orleans, LPH-11.

My Duffel Bag and suitcase arrived two days later.

Christmas of 1979 found me at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, riding the "Dilbert Dunker" (the thing shown in the movie "Officer & a Gentleman that slid down a track and turned upside down in a swimming pool) and getting orientation flights in Jet Ranger helicopters.

About then I found out that my vision had deteriorated to about 20/40 in one eye, and you had to have at least 20/25 uncorrected in both eyes to fly F-14's.

Thus ended my career in naval aviation.

At the same time, for about 30 of the first thirty five years of my life I spent much of my free time and much of my extra money building and flying model airplanes.

Since I was about age five, if you gave me a pile of balsa wood and some tissue paper or "Monocoat" I could make a structure that would fly, much of the time from scratch (no kit.)

Gliders, rubber bands, gas engines...it was all great fun to me.

My model airplane career sort of ended when I started flying the real thing in 1990, and after my house fire in 2001 I hate to admit that I only own two model airplanes right now--a simple Radio Shack RC model with twin electric motors, and a paper model I downloaded and cut out of the Airbus A-380 Super Jumbo that sits on top of my TV in the living room.

That said, just take my word for it when I say that you can make me stop talking and pay attention if you show me anything related to aviation in video form.

Take a look at my introductory video from the popular site Youtube.com
(Turn up the volume on your PC speakers, and click on the arrow on the lower left corner to play the video without leaving my site):






I can't say that I could ever fly like that, but I do appreciate the idea of trying...