PropBlast

Android phone fans (who just happen to be aviators) rejoice! We now have our OWN aviation apps review site. No longer do you need to slog through the marketplace looking for the newest and hottest Android app to use in your plane or to prepare for your next flight.

The fine folks (ok, me) who brought you PropBlast have launched yet another site. This one, we hope, will not only give you a one stop shop to find reviews and additional information about Android apps of interest to pilots and others who fly but also a place to carry on conversations about these same apps.

The site is loosely based on the popular AviatorApps.com website that specializes in aviation apps for the iPhone platform. Not having found a similar directory for the Android platform (my preferred device) we felt that this will fill a need.

Some of the features you'll find on the site include:

• Videos of the app in action (when ever possible)
• QR Codes you can scan from your phone to quickly find the app in the marketplace
• Information about the publisher
• Comments from other aviators
• Tags, Categories and Search to enable either browsing for or searching for the ideal app
• A complete roundup with links to all the reviews on a given app

We welcome one and all Avitors using the Android platform to comment on applications that we are reviewing with their thoughts and obvservations.

In the coming weeks we hope to have a comprehensive list up that will be added to as new apps come online and updates to already reviewed apps are made available.

Are you a developer of apps for the Android Platform? Please go to the Android Developers page to learn how to get your applications listed and reviewed in our site at no cost to you. If you are an advertiser who wants to tap into this market, please see our Advertisers page to learn how you can advertise your apps on our site.

Tags: android apps, yawsa!

Not only is AirShowBuzz TV is offering a chance to ride in a P-51 Mustang, but the ride is with "The Horsemen"; the world's only P-51 Formation Aerobatic Team!

This would be the opportunity of a life time and all it takes is a few moments of your time and a little personal information at http://www.asb.tv/p-51. They are doing this to celebrate the premier of their brand new TV show “The Horsemen Cometh”.

I LOVE the concept of this TV Series (not sure at this point if it is online only or if we’ll see this on the Military Channel, Speed or ??? anytime soon). unfortunately, they don’t seem to make it easy to find just the videos of the show on their website. Seems to me the show should have it’s own page, prominently linked from the website… Ok, I guess that I should take part of that back. Just hacking around with URLs, I tried http://www.asb.tv/horsemen/ and much to my surprise, it worked! Of course I would argue that this really should be prominently featured on their site as this is probably more relevant to most users than the advertisement to buy an AirShowBuzz TV commemorative coin.

On the whole, great photography, great airplanes, a must for any fan of the greatest piston fighter ever (IMHO). Oh, and here is what ASB.TV says about the show:

The Phrase “The Horsemen” often evokes images of mystery and power. Today, the Horsemen ride again, this time as the world’s only P-51 formation aerobatic team.

Now AirshowBuzz has harnessed the thundering power of the Horsemen’s three P-51 Mustangs to represent the heartbeat of a new beginning.

For the past year, AirshowBuzz has been quietly creating a pioneering network that will transform your computer into the next generation of television.

Soon AirshowBuzz.com will be called ASB.TV and just like the mighty Mustang, the new ASB.TV is powerful, graceful, and full of adventure.

ASB.TV is NEW TV. it’s high def, interactive, and revolutionary. The “Horsemen Commeth” promo is just a rumble of our thunder to come.

NOTE: Edited 8/13/2009 to correct the URL to the Horsemen microsite.

Tags: airshows, p-51, contest, free

I don’t know if you’ve been to Hulu.com yet but wow, is that a great service. Not only can I get caught up on some of my favorite shows, but it is a great place to view some great movies and documentaries. Of them, I thought that this movie would be of interest to my readers: Speed and Angels.

This Peyton Wilson documentary follows a couple of wanna-be fighter pilots as they go from pursuing their childhood dreams to fighting for their lives.

If you like this kind of documentary, you’ll probably also enjoy Fighter Pilot: Operation Red Flag.

Tags: hulu, documentary, flying, fighter pilots

If you are looking for a great FREE website that combines the best of many free and paid briefing websites in one location, you might find this to be it.

PICBrief.com is a free service of Hilton Software, LLC the makers of WingX software so you can be all but guaranteed that this site will work with phone browers. They bill it as being specifically for the iPhone or your desktop but I’ve also tried it on my Windows Mobile device and it works quite well.

You get standard information that you’d find in the AFD like communications, runways, locations, METARs, TAFs, AFD comments but you’ll also find links to the PDFS of approach plates, DPs, STARs, Minimums and airport diagrams. What really sets it apart from the others, aside from the aforementioned phone friendlieness is that you’ll also see thumbnails of a moving radar picture, a satellite weather picture, sectionals and enroute charts (courtesy of SkyVector.com) as well as a the currently active airmets and sigmets in the continental US.

Of course, like most websites, this isn’t a LEGAL briefing tool. You will still need get an official briefing from either Flight Services or from DUAT/DUATS. I personally like DUATS since it’s mostly text web interface displays quite nicely on my Windows Mobile phone AND it suffices as a legal briefing and it is logged so I can prove I got one if need be. Of course, that coupled with a tool like this and http://weather.aero will help me understand the weather information given in the briefing in more detail.

Give it a try and let us know what you think of this tool in our comment section below…

Tags: brief, duats, yawsa

Perhaps I should change my Yet Another Web Site Aler (Yawsa) to Yet Another Aviation Navigation And Flight Planning Web Site. There seems to be so many of them these days. Nah, YAANAFPWS just doesn't roll of the tongue as nicely as Yawsa...

Well, NavMonster is another in this new breed of mashables that uses Google Maps and any number of other databases to give you a quick and dirty flight planning tool.

Choose a departure and arrival point (hopefully an airport) and it will map it out on Google Maps as well as provide you with links to airport information on all the airports in between the end points of your route of flight. Shows you distance, initial true course and ETE (defaults to 120 knots but you can change this value).

Tabs provide you with Weather, chart,fuel, food & lodging, FBOs and Airport Data along your route of flight. Unfotunately, it falls a bit short in some areas. You can't hover over an airport to see the TAFs or Metars as other do. It also doesn't display airspace, which at least where I live, is a non-starter in a flight planning tool. I think I'll stick with tools like RunwayFinder.com, FlightCentral.net, WeatherMeister and Weather.Aero and my trusty FliteStar of course.

I just noticed that SkyVector (a great charting resource) has now added Flight Planning. Right click on your departure airport and your destination airport (and I would assume any waypoints along the way and it will tell you the distance between them as well as the initial True course. And of course it still retains the hover-over for TAF and Metars that I've enjoyed for a while!

Does anyone else have any favorite online flight planning tools they'd like to offer up to the group?

Tags: yawsa!, navigation, flight planning, weather

The artwork on this site is so spectacular, I just had  to run it bigger than the usual thumbnail.

I stumbled across this site while following a link, from another link from ... well, you get the idea.

The samples of aviation-themed tattoos is just amazing! This B-17 rib piece just jumps off the page at you. There are other tats of planes as well as some fascinating black and white portraits.

The sites' owner states:

I am a pilot, and I am tattooed.

That statement itself is a bit of a paradox in the mind of many aviation and pilot folks out there.  By nature, the hobby and career attracts conservatively-minded people who may never consider tattoos as a form of expression.

If you have any interest in aviation or tattoos, or both, you really do owe yourself a a trip to this site!

Tags: yawsa!

If you've missed the whole social networking phenomenon that is Facebook, MySpace and others, you won't want to miss out on this one as an avid aviation enthusiast.

myTransponder.com is billing it self as THE socail networking site for pilots, students, fans and others interested in getting to know others of the same ilk. While currently in Beta, you can submit a request for Beta access and will mostly likely get granted access to the site. I mean, they let me in, so how tough can beta screening be?

The site includes such standard features as profile pages, friends, groups, messaging, blogs, photo galleries just like all the others but everything here has been specifically geared towards it's target audience.

Tags: social networking, flying, yawsa!, community

Stumbled on a great new site when I was cruising around through ClearanceWiki.com. Ever heard of FlightCentral.net?

This site looks ready to take on AirNav.com for the one-stop shop for airport information. The biggest hurdle they are going to have to overcome, aside from the competition in this area, is the HUGE head start that AirNav has terms of the number of pilots (and FBOs and restaurants, etc.) that are contributing to the site.

That being said, once you've signed up for a free account on this system the home page becomes your own personal launch page. You can set up the MFD to quickly and easily display up to 6 different charts to get a quick glance at the weather in your normal flight areas. along the right side, you can also define your Favorite Airports, Favorite Links and Pilot Dates. The Airports will provide you with not only a quick link to the airport's page (SNA is shown) as well as the current METAR and a little colored ball indicating VFR, MVFR and IFR. Favorite links are obvious and the pilot's dates allows you to put up reminders of upcoming dates (medical, BFRs, inspections on plane, wife's birthday, etc.)

As nice as the front page is, the really cool stuff is found on an Airport's page. For example, you'll find at left my home field of KSNA. What I really appreciate is that it gives you a quick glance at the most important stuff right up top. The Runways section holds the pertinent information about runways (runway names, length x width and surface types) but if you are using a modern browser and you hover over a particular runway, you'll get a pop-up item that shows you the crosswind based on the current METAR! You'll also find a communications box up top, as well as a sectional and aerial view of the airport.  Below that you'll find blocks for Current Weather (showing METARs and flight conditions ball from this and nearby airports (as well as links to historical weather for this airport)), Forecasts with links to Radar, Satellite, Surface charts and Area Forecasts, and Winds Aloft information.

You'll also find a convenient little tabbed box on the page that not only lists the various Approaches, Arrivals procedures, Departure procedures and Other. All of these link to the actual PDF files direct from the digital TPP provided by the FAA. The files pop-up in the same "Lightbox" style shown above with the surface chart.

Each airport page also includes across the top the identifiers, an indicator of whether it is towered or not Elevation, coordinates, distance from named city as well as links to a pop-up (more Web 2.0 goodness) for the actual page from the current AFD, the official airport diagram, a link to the airport official website, NOTAMS, a link to add to your Favorites (see the front page description) and a button to open up Google Earth at this location.

There is one other button here and that is to visit the airport Community page. The Community page is a nice feature that shows a calendar of events, the number (and an list of first name) of different types of pilots that have registered on the site with this as their Home Airport, a chat window, an image gallery (coming soon), a blog and information about local EAA chapters and CAP squadrons. This is a great feature that will only grow in value as they get more participants in the site.

Running across the top of every page (with the exception of the Virtual Community and Pilot Lounge) there is a tabbed strip with quick links to take you to MyFlightCentral (the home page), Flight Planning, the Airports page, Weather and the Pilot's Lounge. Each of these tabs remembers the most recently viewed Airport or Flight Plan so you can move about the site without fear of losing the work you've performed on the site.

There is some rudimentary flight planning (basically distance between airports with True Course, time en-route and fuel burn (the last two if you have provided your normal cruising airspeed). What is really nice though is this is presented on a page that is suitable for printing that contains much of the elements you'd need to have all your ducks on one page to assist with departure and arrival airports. In addition to the close-up of the section you'll find boxes for Frequencies, Runways, Current (and historic) weather, Forecasts and Terminal Procedures for each airport.

Of course you'll find standard information like Airport Businesses, Remarks, Comments, and Fuel Prices (coming soon). This is the area where the needs the contributions and the frequent visitors that others like AirNav have since the majority of this information is supplied by pilots and FBO owners. I wish the folks behind this the best of luck with their new venture. I think this has GREAT potential and it is the upgrade that AirNav sorely needs. I think if either this company bought AirNav (for the content and traffic) or AirNav bought this company (for the technology to implement their content in) you would have an UNSTOPPABLE combination. I have to admire the chutzpah required to try and create a new (and in my mind better) airport/flight planning community-driven information site like this when there are so many other competitors in the arena already with such a big head start...

Wanna take a tour? Click here to watch slick video describing the features of this site. In the meantime, go to this site, join and start filling it up with information about your local airport!

BTW - Another "wish list" item I'd like to see? If they could cooperate with Leftse.at website to add an online enhanced logbook application for pilots to track their flight hours, wow, would that be fantastic!

Tags: flight planning, navigation, community

I recently added a new podcast to my phone (that I use as my MP3 player) to try it out and all I can say is WOW! Airspeed Online (available for podcast subscription for free at http://airspeed.libsyn.com/) blew me away from the first minute I listened to it.

Stephen Force, in addition to being an aviation and technology lawyer (as he often mentions in the show) is someone who's enthusiasm for all things aviation is only matched by the production quality that he brings to the show.

His background in radio and music appears quite obvious in how well his podcast sounds, as well as the mix of natural and studio sound brings together a fantastic job of putting you in the left (or right) seat as he flies or talks to other aviators. But what I find refreshing is just how good his writing is.

Actually, I take that back. His writing is fantastic! All you have to do is listen to his podcasts to marvel at the amount of time I would imagine he spends on putting these together. He is eloquent without being too slick and his self-deprecating sense of humor is perfect. To prove it, here are some of my favorite episodes, each for their own reason.

• Intro Flights - This is a fantastic resource to point potential aviators at to learn more about what to expect and how to get started.
• Understanding Stalls - Ever had someone who just doesn't get it? In particular, media near you that need some education on aviation and how things work? I'd love to see this podcast be a part of the general education at J-Schools...
• GA is No Threat - Another great educational piece that sooo many reporters could benefit from.. Even better, by familiarizing themselves with this information, most pilots could better assist local media in understanding GA.
• Take Your Kids To The Airport - Again, another superbly written piece that every pilot should listen to and take to heart. Every pilot should take their kids, and perhaps their neighbors kids, ramp flying any chance they can get!
• So Long 18 - You can truly feel his pain at the loss of such a trusty steed.
• Upside Down and Hair on Fire... - Well written as always but I found Mr. Force's excitement to be contagious.

The list goes on but there are the ones that when I was listening to them I said to myself "You've GOT to blog about this!". If you want to read the show notes at the address we showed at first or you can read his blog postings at http://www.airspeedonline.blogspot.com/.

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The old saw is that the last things you want to hear on an airplane is the pilot saying "Hey, watch this."

I think after reading this excerpt from Planecrashinfo.com's Unusual Crashes page, I'd add to the last thing you want to hear would be a jump-seat pilot snickering behind you:

As a prank, a captain riding in the jump seat engaged the gust lock in flight. The command pilot, not knowing the gust lock had been engaged, rolled the elevator trim tab with no response. When the jump seat  captain disengaged the gust lock, the aircraft went into into a steep dive, executed part of an outside roll and become inverted. Neither the command nor jump seat captain had seat belts on and they accidentally feathered No. 1, 2 and 4 engines when they hit the controls with their heads. No one realized it at the time but the feathering reduced power and allowed the co-pilot, who was strapped in, to pull out of the dive 350 feet from the ground.

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Ok, I'm not one to go gaga over "celebrities." Just the opposite lately as we've been seeing too much inappropriate behavior from the current flock of wild-child celebs...

That is why it is so refreshing to see an article about a celebrity that includes some really great writing about aviation. Check out this article about Angelina Jolie from Vogue's website. It describes her and "Brad's" love for Dagget field (in Barstow, CA) as well as tidbits about their flying life. Make sure you check out the slide show of images found on this page taken by famed photograperh Annie Leibovitz.

I love the comparison between Jolie's Cirrus being the family sports car to the Cessna Caravan that is described as the family mini-van. Gonna be hard-pressed find a mini-van with a 600 to 675 hp turbine engine that cruises at 184 knots.

Of course, the flip side is journalists who are obviously writing out of their asses. The ignorance and lack of fact checking just amazes me...

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Found a link to Richard Seaman's website, and more importantly, to his slideshow on the 2006 Chino Airshow. Fantastic stuff. Not only is there the obligatory photography, but some really interesting trivia about each of the planes like the factoid in his slideshow about this formation flight of a AT-12 and a P26.

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Of all the various airport websites I've seen, this one strikes me as being great! Not only does it have a design that is rather simple, it puts all the information a pilot needs right up front.

I can't tell you how many times I've gone to an airport's website to get information that would be handy to know before flying in there only to find a piece of "brochure-ware" that serves no purpose other than perhaps to stroke some administrator's ego.

Next time I'm in New York state, I'll try and make a trip to see this strip. I mean, how many times have you come across an airstrip where the terminal building/cafe is a converted barn! Can't pass that up! Go check 'em out at this link [http://www.skyacresairport.com/].

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Ok, so I know this isn't aviation related but thought I would post about it just to continue testing it.

I d/led and installed a beta copy of Windows Live Writer and WOW! This is a blog editor from Microsoft that works with a number of sources (Live Spaces of cource but more importantly it supports the metaweblog API so I can use it to maintain this site.

Some times using a dedicated client like this is easier than using the web-based admin interface. So far so good. If you want to check it out yourself, go here to check it out!

If the weblog tool I was using supported posting images, it would have handled that automatically but since it doesn't, I was able to set up a distinct FTP profile for each blog I edit upload images using that info! Wooohooo... Finally all the pieces fall together. This was something that I had been looking for previously in blog writing tools. And of course, it has spell check and other such goodies!

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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!

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Here's another interesting weather resource. You can set it up to show all the metars in a varying range from your home airport.

Pleny of other fun stuff here too. Check it out!

Tags: weather, flight planning