Tuesday, December 5, 2006


This week we have been in our landing gear seminar. We have enjoyed having Mike, our guest speaker from Missionary Maintenance Services (MMS). He really knows his stuff and we have been learning a ton about brakes and landing gear. This is our little corner of the hangar for class and practicals. You can also see our new Decathlon in the lower right hand corner. Once we fix it during the winter we will use it for our tail wheel and aerobatic training. It will be a blast to fly.

Some nights I work after school. This was a particularly fun evening because of the snow and they were the largest windows Paul, Ben and I have ever installed. It has been great working for Paul and we alway have a blast working together. It is not a terribly exciting photo but we were proud of it, and it keeps us flying.

Poor 89V did not make the cut and had to spend some time outside the hangar during a recent snow. Snow does not hurt the planes but it does mean that before you fly it you will have to spend some time warming it up again and cleaning all the snow and ice off.

Since the snow has come we have been doing virtually no flying. Occasionally we have to move the planes around in the hangar which means moving some outside and doing an elaborate airplanes on ice dance. It can be pretty exciting to push them around on the snow and black ice.

Meanwhile, back at school, we just completed our maintenance seminar on electricity. At the end of the quarter we set aside two weeks to focus on refreshing our maintenance skills with specific instruction on electricity and and landing gear. It is a great time to practice some of our skills that we don't use every day and learn some new tricks to make maintenance a little easier. This is a picture of our project boards. Each one represent a complete electrical system. They each have all of the components necessary for a specific system on the airplane. The boards allows us to touch, interact and better understand the whole system without taking the plane apart. They also allows us to create faults and troubleshoot common electrical problems we may face from day to day.

Here is the view looking back towards Idaho and a little of Spokane Valley as the sun set. It was a fitting end to a wonderful day of skiing. It might be a while till I get to do that again. Skiing hasn't quite caught on yet in Papua New Guinea.

This was the last run of the day. The sun was setting and you can still see the dense fog that kept us from flying the whole day. It was sad to be grounded but it was still nice to have a way to get above the clouds.

Last weekend we had our first Moody Ski Day. It was pretty informal but we picked a super day for it. I was planning on having my first solo in the Cessna 182 that day but the weather had other plans, so it was off to the slopes. We were greeted by a beautiful sunrise once we broke above the freezing fog layer that had settled like a thick quilt over Spokane.

Sunday, November 19, 2006



What a neat picture you can create with a cell phone. This picture also serves to mark the release of our latest Quarterly Update. <--Click there or on Quarterly Letter 6 on the right side of the page to download it. More interesting pictures are coming soon!

Sunday, November 5, 2006


Here we are at our park again enjoying another beautiful day.

For more pictures of the harvest party click on the picture for a link to a separate collection.

When we are not flying we throw great parties and have wood chopping competitions. (aka a dirt cheap way of having an instructor's wood chopped and loaded into their truck) The whole school turned out for a fun night of food, pictures, games, and wood chopping.

Here's me on a personal flight with my good buddy, Fran. Yea for not having to shave for personal flights!

Here is Pullman - great airport, lousy school. (Just Kidding) :) Go Dawgs!

Yakima is a particularly fun airport to fly into. You just line up on Mount Rainier and descend right on course. The other runway lines up perfectly with Mount Hood. I completed my first airplane mission at Yakima. I had to pick up a new compass from Cub Crafters for our Super Cub. We had a wonderful tour of Cub Crafters and for anyone interested in a light sport airplane that is a blast to fly - check them out.

In the meantime it is nice to soar over them safely and enjoy the diverse shapes all across the state. It is amazing to think about the amount of water that it took to carve all those valleys.

The winding rivers and rolling hills are so much fun to fly over. I can't wait till we begin our low mountain flying training where we get to dip down between the hills and learn a little something about mountain wave turbulence and really begin to navigate.

Here is one such scenic moment of Mount Hood on my way back toward Washington.

Here is my desk. I try to keep it pretty clean. Hopefully all of you pilots will appreciate the harmonious indications on those instruments :). For further analysis of this flight to Redmond, Oregon I am including a Google Earth model of the flight as recorded by my little Garmin e-trex. If that last sentence made little sense, fear not and enjoy the pictures. The flight was 675 miles and took me about 6 hours to fly. To drive the same route would have taken 18 hours and would not have been nearly as scenic.

It has been only recently that I have begun to appreciate the amount of airplanes over our heads each day. You can see from this picture all the contrails made from the jets traversing the country. The dark line out in front of me is actually just a shadow from the contrails made through haze. I took this a little southwest of Pullman coming up on the Snake River.

This past month has involved many hours of flying. The nice thing about the time change is that we don't have to wake up quite as early to be airborn at sunrise. This is a view out my office just a few minutes after takeoff. It was a wonderful day to be out flying on my own.

Here is another picture of the park

This is a park Leslie and I enjoy visiting often for long walks and duck feeding. This same weekend we attended our first marriage conference with Family Life. We had a very encouraging time and recommend it highly.

Fall has arrived. This is a picture of Downtown Spokane and our neighborhood. I took it on my way back to Felts after a long cross-country flight to Redmond Oregon. The colors here have been very beautiful this autumn.

Friday, October 6, 2006


Back flying

It has been a really good two weeks

Friday, September 29, 2006


We made it home just in time to celebrate my Dad's birthday with a trip to the Puyallup fair.

Here is my beautiful wife taking in the sun as we paddled around the island a little before sunset.

This is me trying not to drop my fishing pole, not tip in the canoe and hang on to my giant northern pike all at the same time. Yeah for supper.

Leslie and I took off the next day for Hoover Island. It was a much needed vacation from all of the crazy flying and studying leading up to my test. We enjoyed a full week of canoeing, sailing, swimming, reading, fishing, hammocking (sp?), eating and relaxing. It was fantastic.

My Dad was very proud of me and I think he was happy to be back on the ground too. I know I was :) The next thing on the to do list was a vacation.

Mom looks even happier to be back on the ground :)

Here is one of my first passengers. My Dad was playing Co-pilot. It was a pleasure to take my parents up a few days after I recieved my license. We had a blast flying around north of Spokane and enjoying the countryside. Unfortunately it was pretty smokey due to all the forest fires lately.

The real "BIG" news is that I complete my Private Pilot Certificate. So now I am a real Pilot. It was a big relief to pass the test and very encouraging to be past that milestone. I won't bore you with the details but the test consisted of a 2 hour written test, a 4 hour oral examination and a 2 hour flight test. Fortunately not all the same day.

September started with Awana. It is going to be an exciting and challenging year. I am co-director of the boys T&T program this year and it has been a blast so far. We have about 40 kids so far and it has been growing every week. I am going to learn a lot.

Let the blogging begin!
Also Let me start off with the fact that I feel like a real turkey that I have not updated this site in so long. I especially apologize to all my daily blog checkers that have been disapointed for that last month. What a crazy month it has been. It started a while ago with this wild turkey wondering through the streets of spokane. Pretty bold as November approaches.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006


This is my instructor Brian and I at a short stop on one of our trips around Washington. I found out today that if the weather holds and I continue to fly well I will be taking my Private Pilot test as early as the end of next week. I have a lot to learn and perfect between now and then but it is amazing how fast our education is progressing. I still have not had time to finish my first solo video. I will keep you posted.

It is Cross Country time. So far I have flown to Pullman (not much there worth writing about, go Dawgs), Walla Walla, Pasco, Moses Lake, Ephrata and Wenatchee. This is a picture from our stop in Wenatchee. I have had some great trips but I have not taken many pictures because the visibillity has been down due to all the wild fires. That and I have been pretty busy just flying the plane.

Back at school we are still working on this maneuver. So far we have the top position pretty well worked out but we are struggling with keeping our skyhawks inverted with those pesky gravity feed fuel systems. I will let you know when we work it out.

Ack it has been a while since I have had a moment to update the blog. I apologize to those faithful visitors over that last few weeks. Since I wrote last I have been engrosed with flying and maintenance at school. However, we did manage to escape for a weekend and see the airshow at Faichild Air Force Base. It was fantastic, and for the record, that is a F-117 pilot waving to me.

Thursday, July 20, 2006


It has been a while since I have had some time to post, let alone sleep (most of our days we start flying around 6:00 or 7:00am with an hour of preflight before that). So much has happened in the last week. For starters: I flew Solo! Which is an amazing experience. It was not the first time since I started flying in High school. Nevertheless, it was a great to do it again the "Moody way." We have been receiving a fantastic education. Every flight is carefully planned and executed down to the smallest details. It is very comforting to know that your lack of experience as a pilot is cushioned by a strong system of checklists and procedures resulting in very safe flying. I have been working on collecting some more video of my flying and when I get a chance to edit it into something a little less boring to watch I will put that up. Until then, this is a shot from my solo flight today. I was flying along about 20 miles north of our airport working on some procedures when I developed a new found appreciation for Flight Following (friendly radio people who sit in dark rooms all day and try and keep all the little green lights on their radar screens from bumping into each other). They called me up and said "Skyhawk 7275D, traffic is two miles, 9 o'clock, Boeing 747, Descend immediately at or below 5,000." That is airplane talk for: if you don't move it now, you are going to be a small splat on the windscreen of a very big jet. Thank you Flight Following! Another exciting day at the office.

Friday, July 7, 2006


Between the 4th of July, the world cup, work and school it has been a very busy week. My flight training has been progressing well and I wanted to give you a little feel for a typical flight over Spokane with a short video. I sped up many of the clips both to keep it short and fend off boredom (of course we don't taxi that fast). Also, I need to give a big thank you to David Crowder for the music and Steve Thimsen for letting me film his flying and move his CG aft (nice work Steve). This is my first attempt at aerial cinematography, hopefully it will improve with practice as I hope to bring you more "day in the life" vignettes in the future. :) enjoy! Low Res video or Higher Res Video

Tuesday, July 4, 2006


The first week of flight is over and I have been having an incredible time. This week seems like it has gone so slowly. We began with all the usual introduction and expectation talks and then got right down to flying planes. It has been over 90 degrees for almost every flight. There is nothing quite like sitting in that little oven. You would think that for a cool 150,000 dollars we would have AC. Nope, just a big fan on the front, and believe me, if that stops spinning it gets real hot in the cockpit. The only glitch in the week was that I came down with the flu right before my first flight. It probably was not some of my best flying but I survived and as soon as I returned to terra firma it was off to the couch back at home. I am all better now and I can't wait to continue on next week as we move into stalls and slow flight. More on that later.

Monday, July 3, 2006


Yup, this is still Spokane. My parents came out for the weekend and we took them around to some of the pretty places in town. This is Manito park near our house where Les and I sometimes go to feed the ducks and smell the roses.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006


Welcome to my office. This is what it looks like at 6:00 in the morning when I arrive for preflight. Moody is working hard to make sure we have the most complete and safe checklists in the business. I have greatly appreciated their attention to detail for safety and precision. I successfully completed my first Simulator flight today and tomorrow morning I will be taking my first flight. It will be mostly an introduction flight concentrating on basic maneuvers and following correct procedures. Nevertheless, I can hardly wait!
(Thanks for the flash, Dad.)

Monday, June 26, 2006


First Day of School! I survived my first day of Flight School. It was like drinking from a firehose. We had a blast and my class was very encouraged to get started on these very busy next two years. It was apparent right from the beginning that we are going to recieve an excellent and thorough education here at Moody. The first few days we will be spending a lot of time memorizing checklists and going over the basics. Then we will spend some time in the simulators and will be up flying by the end of the week.

Back at home, Leslie has been working on her garden stand to hold our wonderful collection of plants. Yeah for garage sales. We will show you the finished product when she is done.

My parents' cat, LB, was also anxious to be a part of the festivities.

Over Summer break we went home to celebrate Fathers Day! We had a great time with both of our families and had quite the party. Here is one of the highlights as my Dad tried to cut the cake. The frozen cake would not yield and in case you ever wondered, like buttered toast, frozen cakes when thrown into the air will also land frosted side down. :) Happy Fathers Day!

I know, pretty scarry right. What is even more terrifying - that face is now certified by the United States government to work on planes. I finished up A&P school and graduated earning my AA. Yahoo! More importantly I passed all my A&P tests issued by the FAA earning my A&P license. It is a big hurdle to jump and I am very excited about the next step. Flight School. But first...Summer for a whole week!