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new wings…
Friday, July 17, 2009

i went up in a new plane last weekend!!! up til now i’ve been flying the bellanca citabria which is an awesome fun plane… citabria is airbatic spelt backwards – as the name suggests it’s an aerobatic, so fun stuff like loops and rolls are possible! i wasn’t really worried ‘bout air sickness, but after a few aero manoeuvres i know that my stomach is good!

post-citabria i’ve started my move up to “normal” aircraft – tricycle undercarriage (instead of tail-dragger) and yoke (instead of joystick). i had my first flight in a piper warrior/cherokee on saturday, and it’s a very different animal to fly! the citabria wasn’t very stable but damn she could move – flying the warrior is like driving a truck! but the stability is a beautiful thing for navigation, which is what i’m now working on.

the warrior will almost fly itself in comparison, leaving me with more brain power left to think about maps and track and heading and 6-minute markers and airspace and radio frequencies and fuel and all the other fun stuff =D

it’s a little sad to move on, tho i’ll still fly the citabria from time to time to keep my hand in, but bigger and more complicated is where it goes from here! one big advantage is that the warrior has four seats… joyflights here we come!!!!

Mike Whiskey Yankee – the citabria i did my GFPT in

Lima Juliet Lima – my first “normal” aircraft =P

scrawled bysteve at 3:13 PM 0 comments  

head in the clouds…?
Tuesday, July 14, 2009

as i mentioned earlier i’m training as a pilot. i’m currently working my way through my PPL, having passed the GFPT and just recently started working on navigation. it’s been a lot of hard work so far, and it’s going to keep getting harder as i go, but it’s also a lot of fun!

flying is an expensive hobby however, and unless you make it into one of the larger airlines and fly the big jets it’s not a particularly lucrative career path that, when it does pay well, involves a lot of time away from family and friends. but i’m not doing it as a hobby or as a career change…

the reason that i’m learning to fly is because i want to be a missionary support pilot with new tribes mission, and specifically NTMAviation. both my skye (my wife) and myself are christians and we want to help share the faith we have with ppl around the world. There’s a need for pilots who can transport supplies, medical support and people in and out of remote tribes in places like PNG and I have the opportunity to try and help fill this need. skye supports me heaps, and also wants to work with NTM! she’s awesome ;-)

i’m currently training with curtis aviation in camden, funding my flying by working in IT and skye working with education for early school leavers, and we’ve just started the process of becoming official with NTM! it’s going to be a long (10yrs) process and it’ll be hard, but with God’s help and support from friends, family and church we’ll make it if that’s what we should be doing…

 

one of the NTMA planes in PNG

 

mountains (volcanic!) that are a lot higher than the runway we took off from, which was already 5,250ft (1,600m) above the sea!

 

 

that little patch of green is the runway, 350m long and on a 14deg incline! fun times

scrawled bysteve at 3:56 PM 0 comments  

desire...
Friday, July 10, 2009

being human i struggle with desire, whether it results in over-eating, getting addicted to facebook games, inappropriate lust, or any other failing you care to list. i'm sure it's the same with you. in my attempts to overcome these problems i try to exercise self-denial or self-discipline to restrict my access to whatever it is that i'm wanting to stay away from. sometimes i do really well and am able to stop, but most of the time i fall back into the same problems and i start to think that my desires are too strong to overcome!

in my surfing today i came across a quote from c.s. lewis that i found really helpful:

“The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.”

denying myself is only the first step, and without the second step of replacing the wrong desire with a a right desire i leave myself wide open to fail again!!

lewis goes on to say:

"Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

so maybe my desires aren't too strong to overcome; maybe they're actually weak desires and i'm too easily pleased!! isn't it funny how i find my wrong desires so much easier to overcome when i'm focussed on God rather than on what i'm trying to fix...

scrawled bysteve at 9:54 AM 0 comments  

my brain hurts...
Thursday, July 9, 2009

so one of the things that is a big part of my life at the moment is learning to fly!! (more on that later) for those in the know i've passed my GFPT and have just started to learn to nav... which is why my brain is hurting. last night i spent an hour or so playing with my newest toy, the E6-B flight computer. it's an incredible piece of computational ability (think old slide rule on steroids) and i can only imagine how much maths must have gone into creating something like this!

unfortunately ASA haven't put quite as much effort into their instruction manual as phillip dalton put into creating the original (wiki link). there are sooooo many different calculations that you can do, and i'm sure that once i've done them a few times it'll be all good, but starting out with the basic manual that comes with the flight computer is rather painful!!

have a look at the pic below... on this one device you can calculate fuel burn, wind correction, time en route, ground speed as well as convert all kinds of measurements and a bunch of other stuff that i don't even know yet! crazy...



















pic stolen from wikipedia

scrawled bysteve at 1:19 PM 0 comments  

hello, world
Wednesday, July 8, 2009

i thought it would be a momentous err... moment... the first time i published my thoughts for the whole world to see. well, right now part of me still thinks it will be momentous because it hasn't happened, tho i'm writing in the past tense as if it already happened. but by the time you read this is HAS happened, so should i write for now, or write for the future?

i don't even have any followers as my blog hasn't launched yet, so i'm effectively writing for myself as the future viewer, even tho i already know what i'm writing / have written /will write. confusing much?

anyways, after all that rambling the moment has arrived (or has it passed?) and my blog has officially started... welcome to my world!

scrawled bysteve at 3:48 PM 0 comments