GGB and cac4. You guys are talking about flying. I liked airplanes as a kid (4th grade and up to 9th grade) and built many models from balsawood strips (model kits from $0.79 to $1.29) and covered the wood models with paper. I even had a .049 glow plug engine that cost $4.95. No money to do anything more. Sure, I wanted to fly but reality faced me everyday so I didn’t get to do much of what I dreamed of at the time. Bikes and lawn mowers took over, then cars.
One thing that peaked my early interest in airplanes was I lived 10 miles form a Naval Air Station and watched the planes come and go that were on a flight path over our one house. The Willow Grove Naval Air Station had some dirigible / Rigid airships trrafic and the house wasn’t too far from Lakehurst, New Jersey. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
I did watch a series “learn how to fly” “building an experimental/kit air plane” and “build your own helicopter” on one of the “Learning Channel” TV network. I also watched almost all of the “History channel” programs about aircraft, aircraft companies and designers, and all of the history programs about helicopters and experimental aircraft.
This summer the B-17 Flying Fortress, “Sentimental Journey” was in town and I crawled/walked through it. Twenty minuet flights were ~$400. I just stuck with the $10 tour and souvenir book.
I have a neighbor that works for a bank and he flies the bank’s “Citation.” He offered to show me the plane he flies and maybe go on a short run.
My question for the people that do fly/pilot a plane is, before I go, I want to know how things work. Some people see the outside of things. I want to know how things work.
If you had an interest in flying and small jets, what you want to know before seeing the plane or flying in it? What questions would you ask once you learned some of the information how things work?
Chrom I agree, but that can be hard to do. A lot of the people who have had adventurous lives have had to spend a lot of their lives training and preparing skills to even have that adventure. It is hard to give up once it is over. I had this trouble (giving up working as an auto mechanic) when my back was hurting so much in 1986. Post 1986, I felt like I was mostly wandering around. I didn’t feel connected very firmly to my community and to people. When I couldn’t do auto repair work full steam and full time, I wasn’t grounded or connected like I had been.
Auto mechanics isn’t as exciting as flying but I spent a lot of time, effort, and money buying my own tools to carry out my trade. To have to give the 25 years I spent getting there was like losing an arm.
That is FWIW and general information about why guys live and breath what they do for a living.
