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Happy Holidays – Capt Force Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is

December 13, 2008 by 3 Comments


This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio, please check out the other posts.

If the story as told to me by the EAA is true, in the early 1920s, engineer William B. Stout sent out a number of letters to wealthy potential investors asking $1,000 from each. In his letter, he said, in relevant part, “For your one thousand dollars you will get one definite promise: You will never get your money back.”

By all accounts I can find, Stout kept his promise.

Stout’s project and passion? On a beautiful August day this year, I took the controls of one of only 199 units that this particular dream produced. But what a unit! It was a 1929 Ford TriMotor, a silver, corrugated, and cantankerous, but awe-inspiring, harbinger of the golden age of aviation. Because of Stout’s dream and the loving labors of countless people from then to now, I added 0.3 hours dual received in the Tin Goose to my logbook.

Several months ago, I found out that friends, independent filmmakers, and fellow pilots Will Hawkins and Rico Sharqawi had decided to make a documentary film about aviation. It’s called A Pilot’s Story. Will noticed that, no matter the circumstances of the individual pilot or aviation enthusiast, some magical core part of each of their stories was always the same. As a labor of love, Will and Rico have set out to capture the essence of what it is to become, and be, a pilot. Although Will and Rico’s appeal for donations to help pay for the project was a lot less dramatic than Stout’s, the core idea was the same. This is a labor of love and we might get to watch a really spectacular movie about people and aircraft (and so much more) if the project gets finished.

So, as is my practice, in lieu of fruit baskets, nut trays, and other indicia of the season, I have elected to contribute to a worthy cause. Earlier this week, I made a contribution in your collective honor to the making of A Pilot’s Story.

Though I am certainly no captain of industry, I share at least one thing with Stout’s investors. I don’t expect to get my money back. I don’t want it back. Neither does anyone else I know who has donated. We have traded our funds, time, and talents to the universe, confident in the knowledge that the universe (and, in non-trivial part, Will and Rico) will deliver a film that will be an artifact of our hopes and aspirations that will tell a story that defies conventional storytelling. I hope that you get to see it when it comes out in late 2009 or early 2010.

If you’re interested, you can see the newly-mixed trailer for the film at www.apilotsstory.com.

I hope that you’ll regard this gesture as appropriate to a season that is, after all, about a very similar kind of wonderment and joy. Thanks for the opportunity to work, play, fly, and/or laugh with you this year. It’s been a privilege and I hope that you’ll receive this note with the appreciation that I continue to have for each of you and for our professional and personal relationships.

Happy holidays, everyone!

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Airspeed Wrapping Up 2008 – Holiday Special In Process!

December 9, 2008 by Leave a Comment


This is a regular blog post. Looking for show notes or links to show audio? Please check out the other posts.

“I started out working in film, but I found that it was insufficiently visual.”

– Anonymous radio producer.

Wrapping up the calendar year soon here at Airspeed. I started writing the holiday feature today (not much of a start in terms of word count, but the framework is in place and all I need to do is stretch the fabric over it). I’ll probably post the holiday episode this week or early next and then drop off radar until early January.

As you know, Airspeed turns three in just a little more than a month. With 148,929 downloads of the show in 2008 through the date of this post and a near doubling of monthly volume over the course of the year, the show has really caught fire this year. And I think that the show might have passed its 100th episode somewhere in there.

It’s extraordinarily nice to have thousands of you in the back seat when I fly and I’m already working on some extraordinary opportunities to bring you in 2009. Expanded airshow coverage (adding the Indianapolis Air Show and Sun ‘N Fun in 2009), more flight training (possibly DC-3 recurrency and maybe some balloon training), more video (including continuing aerobatics in the Citabria), and more.

You know that Airspeed puts you in the cockpit like no other medium and we’ll keep bending over backwards (or pulling to inverted!) to bring you the best-researched, best-produced, most in-depth, and most emotionally-charged experiences in the podsphere, on the radio, or anywhere else.

Stay subscribed and I’ll see you on the other side of the new year!

Filed Under: Stephen Force

The Year-End Push and I Discover a Great Little Uncharted Airstrip

December 6, 2008 by 1 Comment

This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes and links to show audio, please see the other entries.

This is not my favorite time of year. As many of you know, when I’m not flying, writing about flying, or talking about flying, I’m a tech and aviation lawyer. I usually find myself struggling a little to make my hours at the end of the year for any number of reasons, not the least of which lately have been the struggling economy and the fact that I spent an awful lot of time out at airshows and flying this year. So I’m paying the piper these days.

At least I can mark my case of Red Bull in the fridge with my Red Bull Air Race media pass! Man, that was a fun event. I’m sure they’ll be back and Airspeed will be there with bells on covering it.

Anyway, other than a trip on Monday to Chicago and back to see a client (flying commercially), I’m chained to my desk in a mad dash through the end of the year and plan to do precious little flying until January. That case of red bull likely won’t make it to Tuesday.


So I’m driving back from the TLC training event in Mt. Pleasant, where I do the annual legal officer’s presentation for the Michigan Wing of the Civil Air Patrol. I stopped by Uncle John’s Cider Mill just north of St. Johns to get some cider and donuts and stretch my legs.


As I park, I notice markers on the power lines much like you’d see near an airstrip. So I walk to the edge of the parking lot and, lo and behold, it’s an airstrip! I asked inside and, although it’s uncharted and private, you can call ahead and get permission to fly in and land right there at the cider mill. The strip looks like it’s maybe 3,000 to 4,000 feet long. It’s none too level in any particular direction and there are power lines at the western end, but it’s plenty wide and looks like it drains pretty well.


Here’s a shot from the turnaround on the highway to show the power lines and the proximity of the main cider mill building. I’d really pay attention to those power lines because the road is about 20 feet above the level of the runway, so those lines are probably a genuine 50-foot obstacle and they’re hard to see. Best to really study your POH performance data and weight and balance but this looks like a really cool little strip. Got to keep this in mind next fall.

Anyway, back to the grind. Probably two more episodes left this year. One will likely be the holiday episode that I skipped last year due to work pressures. Should have time to write that and do one other substantive episode, but that’s it.

Raise a Red Bull for me! Won’t matter what time of day you do it, I’ll probably be at the office when you do it.

Uncle John’s Cider Mill
8614 N US Highway 27
St Johns, MI 48879
(989) 224-3686
http://www.ujcidermill.com‎/

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Ghost Airports – A Tour of Paul Freeman’s Abandoned and Little-Known Airports Archive

December 4, 2008 by 1 Comment


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These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen online right here by clicking: http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedFreeman.mp3.

I’ve long enjoyed drifting over to Paul Freeman’s website dedicated to abandoned and little-known airfields (http://www.airfields-freeman.com/) and killing more time than I like to admit browsing the pictures and old aeronautical charts that are all that remain of these once vibrant airports.

I finally decided to block out the time to get Paul on the phone and talk at length about the site and what drives him to develop and maintain this wonderful archive.

If you can, try to listen to this episode at your computer and follow along. You’ll hear a lot of mouse clicking and other background noise as I follow Paul around the site and comment on what’s there.)

I was particularly struck by some of the military installations from World War II. We needed pilots in great numbers in the minimum possible time. We built facilities rapidly and used the heck out of them. Paved hexagons and octagons. Stars and spoked layouts. Or fields with nothing but an open space with a windsock in the middle. These fields made pilots efficiently and proudly. Then we abandoned them. I’m as happy as the next guy that they became unnecessary (i.e. that the war ended), but what an amazing amount of history is lost when you build a shopping mall or a subdivision on top of these grand dames of American history.

I think I’d like to go find a few of these and fly over them. Particularly Raco Landing Field / Raco Army Airfield in northern Michigan. You can practically see it from space! Look for the triangular feature in the middle of this satellite view on Google.

Please be sure to drop a donation to Paul using the link on his site! (Or the one I’ve reproduced here – Not entirely sure that it’ll work, so you’re safest going to Paul’s site.)


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You can contact Paul at thefreemans@hotmail.com.

Photo: Aircraft in front of the Wilson Aero Corporation hangar at Glendale Airport (Glendale Airport / Grand Central Air Terminal, Glendale, California). Photo is believed to be in the public domain. Airspeed’s DMCA Contact is Steve Tupper, reachable through the contact information in the profile sidebar.

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Aerospace Education Appearance – CAP Goes to School

November 30, 2008 by 1 Comment

This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio, please check out the other posts.

While many of you know about CAP’s flight operations (we handle more than 95% of the USAF-supervised inland search and rescue operations in the United States), we also boast, in addition to the cadet program, the largest aerospace education operations in the country.

I got a unique opportunity last week to do an aerospace education (“AE”) appearance at Hickory Grove Elementary School where my son is a first-grader in Mr. Gayta’s class. I was a “secret reader,” which means that, at 11:30, I knock on the door, all of the kids assemble on the rug by the reading chair and close their eyes, and I go sit down in the chair for the big reveal.

I then read for five or ten minutes from John, the Airport Kid by John Perry Jopling and Hazel Joan Jopling, who we met at Podapalooza 2008 at Oshkosh.

To help increase the impact, I went decked out in my CAP flight suit and turned the occasion into a bit of an AE appearance. I got a lot of questions from the kids and there were minor skirmishes over who would get to wear my cover (flight cap). Cole was the proud wearer in this particular shot, although the cover got passed around pretty evenly.

I took advantage of the opportunity to tell the kids as much as I could about their local airports and the kinds of aircraft and pilots that one could find there. We also talked about CAP and its missions.

I also made sure to hit on the opportunities for women in aviation, which took some of the girls by surprise. The names of Patty Wagstaff, Marsha Ivins, Samantha Weeks, and others therefore crossed my lips more than once.

If you’re a pilot, put your time and energy where your mouth is and take the message to the kids whenever you can. Who knows what fires we can light!

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