Garmin and a Day's Instruction

I have been running regularly for the last year. I happen to be training for my first marathon on Halloween this year. As a reward for all my hard work, I indulged myself with a super-cool gadget. I am now the proud owner of a Garmin ForeRunner 405 -- a nice running watch that has a GPS logger that I got to track my long distance runs more accurately. The wide range of features that this watch boasts are stunning, but I'll stick to the GPS features for now.

I was curious to see if the functionality of the GPS could work well for flight instruction, so I configured it to record a whole day's worth of instruction that I did on a day in August. I exported the day's recordings and managed to export the proprietary Garmin format (which is essentially XML) into a usable format for Google Earth. Once I successfully converted it into a kmz file, I extracted some really nice 3-D views of this day's instruction in Google Earth.

After viewing these flights in Google Earth, I made some screen-shots of the day's flying, and included them below. There was one spot landing approach that was just barely above the ground during the flare, that it appears to have gone underground. This is possibly due to the proximity to the ground was smaller than the GPS's accuracy, or the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data that Google uses for Front Royal's airport is slightly inaccurate at that location. Rest assured, most of the landings were on the grass, some were beyond the expected landing area, some were right on target. (Also note there was a tailwind that day).

The color coding is the rate of climb and descent. If you carefully look at the areas that aren't for takeoff or landing, you can see me walking around, dragging the glider back to the staging areas, doing positive control check, etc. These approaches were all done by solo or nearly-solo students, with no interaction from me about where to be in the pattern.

After seeing this form of display, I'm pretty sure this visualization could be used as an excellent opportunity as a reflection and review resource for students -- especially for the situations when the student doesn't realize that they were out as far and down as low as we said they were.

Civil Air Patrol National Flight Academy

From June 23 through June 29, I attended the Civil Air Patrol National Flight Academy Encampment, in Mattoon, Illinois.

I take a week off work to go give flight instruction for the week. I got to fly one of the the USAF's Air Force Academy's old 2-33 trainers. It was in pretty good condition, but was pretty clear that it had a long lifespan of injuries and repairs. All of the repairs were nicely done, but I've never seen a 2-33 with so much empty weight (and so tail-heavy too!)

Even though I paid my own air-fare to the event (A flight with Jet Blue to Chicago O'Hare, plus a one-way rental car trip from Chicago to Champaign, IL), I enjoyed the event. They paid my room and food expenses, and I got to concentrate on teaching 8 students to fly gliders.

The amazing thing is that within 7 days of instruction, I turned several students from having never seen a glider before to being able to do all aspects of the flight without any intervention, hints or help from me.

There were 24 students at the encampment, six flight instructors, three towplanes, and 9 tow pilots. We got to borrow a nice big hangar from the CIA. Not the US Government agency, but Central Illinois Air. It was quite easy to cram all the aircraft into the hangar when a big storm came through.

The weather?! Terrible! It rained or was cloudy every day of the encampment. It was quite amazing that we actually had any flights at all. Every day was ruined by weather, and most of the students did not get a flight higher than 1200 feet until the last few days of the encampment. This was by far the worst weather that the encampment had ever suffered. All the farmers were happy for all the rain, but the pilots were miserable.

When I was in New York City earlier this year, United Airlines lost my luggage for three days. During that time, I was forced to get some short term laundry at the lcoal tourist trap. I bought some I heart NY tee shirts, some I heart NY boxers (several pairs), and a nice Borat Tee shirt saying "Sexy Time!" I wore this tee shirt one evening, (while we were all out of uniform) and the cadets, who apparently all had watched the movie many times over, all loved the tee shirt. Of course, the kids all said "Sexy Time!" (just like in the movie), every time they saw me. One of the cadets loved it so much, I gave it to him at the the end of the encampment. it was like the old Coca Cola commercial when Mean Joe Green gave the little kid his work-out towel. (yuck).

Here are the pictures from the event. [Picasa Album Page] [Slideshow]