PropBlast

Most of the online site's I've seen have fairly bad pictures due to the time of day and weather when Cessna's new composite plane fly by but I found this night shot and had to post it:

Pretty sexy looking beast. God I wish I was in Wisconsin right now... Oh well...

Ran across an interesting new site by the folks at AvWeb. It is called Leftse.at (get it, left seat) and it seems to have quite a bit going for it. It is a very Web 2.0 type of site. You know the type. Lots of Ajax controls (many for little or no reason), social networking ("friends"), categorization ("tags" that are really more for social networking than like Deli.cio.us tags), Google map mashups, etc.

But they have some very pilot specific goodies. The aforementioned Google Maps mashup is part of not only the airport look up (shown aboe) but a aerial of the destination airport is also shown on the logbook page for a particular flight.

The logbook application is rather slick for tracking hours flown as well as currency. You can tell at a glance how many night landings and how many approaches you've done in the last 90 days as well as hours so far this year. You can define custom fields if you need to track multi or other hours as well. Once you've made an entry, you can even attach a mini photo gallery to your log book entry. That coupled with the expanded data you can put in the log entry make it so much more personal than the small amount of space available in most log books. And YOU can decide which log entries to make private so you can keep prying eyes away from your more sensitive missions.

Other features include setting up Chart Subscriptions (which I assume is the business model for this FREE service) creating a profile for your self including a photo gallery. You can manage friends, send messages all without the annoying MySpace interface<G>. 

I've run into a number of technical glitches on the site so far but it is a fresh service and hopefully they will get this all worked out shortly. Well worth a visit! Tell them MJG sent you!

This just in from TheLobby.com blog (presented by Starwood Hotels):

A New York Times reader recently asked a question that has been on the minds of many of us persons of height: Can tall people reserve special seats on flights without paying business-class fares? The answer is that it varies. Certain airlines, such as Taiwan's Eva Air, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways and United Airlines offer special "medium-range" seating for around one-third the price of a business-class seat that include up to seven inches more legroom than normal economy seats. New start-up MAXjet, a business-class-only airline that limits its flights to the JFK-Heathrow and Dulles-Heathrow route offers standard seats with 60 inches (!) of legroom as well. For other airlines, well, there's always sweet talking your ticket agent. It might be a bit old fashioned, but it does work more often than one would think.

Good to know for those of us who have to occassionally fly commercial and are NOT vertically challenged.

Seems lilke you could no longer spot a pilot by the lenght of their left (or right) arm... The big, honkin' watch syndrome that lead to these elongated appendages seems to have fallen out of favor but never fear. You can quite often still spot your fellow aero-addicts by the computers they carry around.

Seems that pilots are more inclined to using Tablet PCs than most folks. Today wasn't the first, and probably won't be the last, time that I've been approached by someone interested and knowledgable about Tablets only to find out they were also a pilot. While trying to squeeze out some work before work at the local Starbucks, a gentleman named Albert came up to chat with me when he saw me banging away on my HP TC1100 tablet.

Turns out he is a Citation pilot flying out of CRQ as a company pilot. He is a Fujitsu guy but as any good aviator would, he is looking for the Next Big Thing in little computers. His primary use is as an EFB, coupled with a Bluetooth printer that allows him to print out approach plates as necessary. Pity he doesn't have a TAA like our Cirrus<G>. Turns out this high flying jet still has "steam" gauges for much of the panel. Well, sounds like the company he flies for is planning on stepping up to something with more range to make trips to the owner's home in Hawaii easier. Life is rough but I can certainly imagine making a 5 1/2 hour commute with nothing to look at but whitecaps might get boring after a while...

Who am I kidding? Of course I would jump at the chance to fly for a living like this!