The Macon and her sister-ship Akron were unique amongst dirigibles – they had an embarked air wing of six Sparrowhawk biplane fighters. This is pure pulpish awesomeness – flying aircraft carriers! Except for the part about them both crashing in storms, of course…

The panorama was six photos originally, stitched in Hugin. The flat grey foggy background seemed to cause Hugin some issues – notice how obvious a few of the vertical join lines are in the centre of the image. Odd.

I had someone email me a few days ago about my Nov. 25th F-Spot blogpost and it’s long discussion thread. I’d planned to do a followup post in early December, but holidays and reality obviously got in the way, and I’ve got WordPress set up to automatically close commenting after three weeks to frustrate the spambots a bit. I’ll do a proper followup F-Spot post this week!

Hope everyone had a satisfactory, safe holiday season.

Turns out May 6th is the 76th anniversery of the effective end of the coolest method of aeronautical transport us clever monkeys have come up with yet: the dirigible.

LZ-129 Hindenburg came to a fiery end in New Jersey on May 6th 1937. Moral of the story: don’t design vehicles with inadequate anti-static discharge methods, paint them with rocket fuel, then fill them with volatile gas…

Hat-tip to Making Light[0], not an aeronautical blog, but one of the Internet’s better sources of Interesting Awesomeness. Which is what dirigibles count as, huge fireballs and “Oh, the humanity” notwithstanding. There’s a great graphic over on ML, too. Check it out.

[0] Best comment over there has to be comment #2: “But how would we know that books are alt-history if *we* had zeppelins?” ML’s commentariat is full of Interesting Awesome.

We went from Victoria, BC, Canada down to North Bend, Oregon via Seattle-Boeing Field & Astoria, then turned inland and north back to McMinnville, Oregon, home of the Evergreen Aviation Museum & the Spruce Goose. Wikipedia has a good Hughes H4 (Spruce Goose) article, for those wanting more information.

Short version: It’s a monster airplane, the biggest thing in the world at the time, still the largest seaplane & largest wooden aircraft ever made; only the 747 & A380 really rival it in sheer size. The main building of the Evergeen Museum is a huge building, and it’s still barely large enough to fit the H4 in. There’s absolutely no way to take a picture of the entire beast; the building would have to be three times the floorspace to allow you to get far enough back and still be inside! My camera does reasonable wide-angle setups, but you either need a fisheye lens or you need to resort to panorama stitching to get the whole beast in. Lacking a fisheye, I turned to Hugin, which has the additional advantage of being both free and Free.

More over the next few days, as I sort & process almost 200 photos, almost all from the Spruce Goose’s museum!

This evening I got to fly again, just as a passenger this time. This is actually a bit of a treat; I’m usually in one of the front seats, too busy with flying the plane to indulge in much sightseeing. Being cargo meant I could exercise the limits of my little digital camera, and get some very cool, rather impressionistic night shots from the back seat.

More, as always, at my Flickr stream – enjoy!

Combine very large lumps of rock and rather small aircraft; add summer weather that hasn’t exactly been perfectly summery; stir carefully. If you’re in British Columbia, you could well get this:

On Labour Day weekend (30th & 31st of August) I flew from Victoria up to 108 Mile House in the BC interior in a Cessna 172. My grandmother came along for the ride; we spent the night at my aunt & uncle’s new (still under construction!) house and came back on the evening of the 31st. The flying was exhilarating, the scenery spectacular, and it was great to see the relatives again.

Credit where due: Corey took most of these pictures, although with my camera, so I threw them up on my Flickr stream. I was busy flying the airplane! The full set can be viewed on Flickr.

Summer finally arrived in Victoria a few days ago (we appear to have skipped spring entirely…), and there’s really no finer place to be on a sunny day than out at a busy airport. If you don’t believe me, try it some time – ideally, at an airport lucky enough to have a cafe or restaurant with a nice airside patio.

Summer does have one disadvantage, though: really boring METARs like CYYJ 090300Z 18002KT 30SM FEW250 22/12 A3011 RMK CI1 SLP195 which basically says it’s warm, clear and there’s not even any wind to deal with… a pleasant change from the winter’s long, complex reports of all sorts of foul weather!

The Victoria Flying Club’s newest toy flew for the first time in VFC service on Saturday:

Yankee Romeo November is a 1981 Cessna 152, so it’s hardly new, but it’s relatively low-airtime (around 2400hrs) and that’s what counts as ‘age’ in a plane, mostly. It’s spent the past two months or so in our hangar having a fair bit of work done on it, including a total engine refurbishment and paint touchup. Saturday it finally flew again, new engine, new parts, nice paintjob, tongue-twister identification and all.

And perhaps in celebration, or to help compensate for the generally cruddy flying weather we’ve been having the past couple of weeks, this afternoon we got a nice rainbow. And 50% of another nice rainbow alongside the other one.

Most expensive thing I’ve ever owned, and it’s a single sheet of paper about the size of your hand. Excellent.

Come April I’ll be starting my Flight Instructor’s Rating, so by the end of July or so I should actually be earning money with these expensive pieces of paper. After spending more on the Instructor training, of course… Looking forward to that, too – instructing promises to be a lot of fun and a fantastic challenge!

Eight AM local. Not good weather at all. No wind, but low cloud all over the place.

CYYJ 281800Z 00000KT 10SM FEW006 BKN008 OVC012 03/03 A3038 RMK SF1SC6SC2 SLP287

Ten AM local. Even lower cloud, and the visibility is coming down.

METAR CYYJ 282100Z 00000KT 3SM -RA BR FEW006 BKN011 OVC015 04/04
A3027 RERA RMK SF1SC7SC1 SLP253=

Noon local. Even worse vis, rain, mist, even lower clouds. Fun. And to think that yesterday was bleedin’ gorgeous all day… Commercial Flight Test re-scheduled for Tuesday next week. Hopefully the weather co-operates by then!