The Way We Were

I can't help it: the image in the previous post of the cockpit instrumentation (including my iPad) I now take for granted made me go back to my original flying diary to find this image of 12R's panel back when I was learning to fly. Not exactly state of the art even then, but still, a pretty representative Cessna 172 panel from the late 1990's (12R's panel might even still look like this for all I know).

Do I ever look back on this sort of stuff with nostalgia? Not bloody likely. Like the old flying diary itself (which transmogrified into this blog, but still lives on as an extremely old-fashioned and primitive-looking thing if you can find it), I look on it and wonder (but not exactly with wonder)....

Because I Can

2,500' Over Oakland

A low-intensity solo local VFR flight… because I can. This should have been another flight with a friend, but he couldn't make it at the last moment, so why not just … fly? So I do, circumnavigating Mt Diablo, doing touch and goes at Livermore (KLVK), lazily sightseeing over the Diablo Valley, etc., all in perfect Bay Area spring VFR weather.

I've bought new headsets — Lightspeed Sierras — to replace my old Lightspeeds, and the new ones work nicely, after having wrestled with the odd settings on the audio panel which initially made me think the new Sierras were broken. Back when I had something to do with club aircraft maintenance, we used to joke that 90% of all pilot-initiated avionics-related squawks are ultimately caused by the pilot not understanding the audio panel, and this is nearly one of those (but I did understand the panel, and I did debug the problem, after first blaming the headsets :-)).

Early tomorrow I'll resume my more usual position somewhere in the passenger cabin of a Southwest 737 bound for Burbank (KBUR). Not quite the same thing, really.