takeoff and landing

We are now in Papua New Guinea. Follow the link to our New Blog just for this trip. The new blog is www.png2007.blogspot.com.

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.

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!

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!