Comes Sky King!

Sky King was a television series that ran in the US in the 50's (see the Wikipedia link above for the convoluted history of networks and run times) that was based on a radio series by the same name. It featured the adventures of the titular character, a rancher and pilot, and his niece Penny, a pretty and blonde Robin to Sky's Batman. The plots usually involved some wayward criminals passing through the area, the local sheriff needing help, and Sky flying his airplane (first a Cessna T-50, then a Cessna 310) to the rescue, landing on a dirt road in the desert and punching the bad guys in the head.

I have a soft spot for the show since the first airplane I ever flew was a Cessna T-50, and, as my friend Glenn hates me pointing out, at Oshkosh in 1989, I not only got to fly one of the T-50's used in the series, I waved an original screen-used Sky King cowboy hat out the window when we taxied by the crowd.

The whole series is now available on DVD, or, thanks to the good people at American Flyers, you can watch most of the episodes online here - click the logo above to watch the first episode right now.

My thanks go to my friend Bruce of BruceAir for sending the link, and for undoubtedly giggling quietly to himself about my use of the word "titular."

If you're inspired by the flying in the show and want to take a virtual T-50 around the patch, Alphasim's version is now freeware and can be had at Simviation. (Note: the red one is our family airplane (though ours has never been on floats to my knowledge.))

In the meantime, why not reach for Nabisco?!? After all, the bright red seal on the package end means mighty good cookin' inside, my friend ... Or at least have a look at the NabiscoWorld web site, which is almost certainly the only place on the whole Interweb where you can download a recipe for Crunchy Stuffed Zucchini Boats whilst playing a spirited round of Nut Vendor.

That question opens (and recurs in) a book called Atlas Shrugged, by novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. Galt is described, indirectly, as the “…man who said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did.” In the story (does a 51 year old book, touted as the second-most influential of all time, need a “spoiler alert?”), Galt is initially presumed to be a myth, but turns out to be quite real. As the story unfolds, it’s revealed that Galt has created a haven, a gathering spot for the like-minded to meet and live and interact according to their own standards of value.

More on that in a second.

I first read Atlas Shrugged in 1987, when I was 19 years old. At that same time, I also dove into the flying stories of Richard Bach – Biplane, Nothing By Chance, A Gift of Wings, etc. Both authors became favorites of mine, joining Ian Fleming and Douglas Adams on the short list.

More on that, too, in a second.

Jumping ahead to 1989, my dad and I flew our 1944 Cessna T-50 to Oshkosh for my very first trip. I spent most of my time at the show gawking at Moths, and, on the way back, I got to taxi one in Bozeman, MT. I’d loved the airplanes all my life (so far), but this was first contact, and, even stuck to the ground as we were, I knew I was hooked. When I got home, I started really digging into Moth lore, and caught wind of some guys in Ontario, Canada called the Tiger Boys who were really into Moths, and even had a flyable Thruxton Jackaroo. I was fascinated by this and wrote them a letter, and got a very nice postcard with a picture of “TJ” from a man named Tom Dietrich,  suggesting that, if I was ever in the area, I should stop in.

Naturally, I took him up on it, though it took 17 years to do so.

More on that … well, you know.

Backing up just a bit, in 1993, a fifth favorite author was added to my top four – Richard Bach’s son Jonathan. When I read his book, Above the Clouds, I had the thoroughly non-stalkerish feeling that we’d be friends if we’d ever met. Six years later, when we were both working at Microsoft (and his sister was setup on a blind date with my boss), we did, and we are.

In 2004, Jon introduced me, via email, to a family friend he hadn’t seen since he was about 4 years old, a man named Glenn Norman. Glenn pops up in A Gift of Wings a couple of times, and features prominently in the movie version (yes, there was one) of Nothing By Chance.  Anyway, Glenn is also one of the Tiger Boys, and he and his partner Michelle Goodeve owned the aforementioned Jackaroo before Tom and his partner bought it to restore, beginning their collection.

Still with me? Sitting comfortably? Excellent.

When Jon made his email introductions to Glenn and me, we each rolled our eyes and said to ourselves “yeah, right” - this friend-of-a-friend business never works as well as the common denominator thinks it will.

We could have been precisely none more wrong – just like Jon, Glenn and I have been brothers ever since.

Knowing my love of the airplanes, Glenn immediately started inviting me to come visit and do some flying.  So, in 2006, when a business trip took me to Oshawa, Ontario, I extended my stay and made my first pilgrimage to Guelph. It was there and then that, after a mere 38 years of wishing (and doing next to nothing about it, frankly) I flew a Tiger Moth for the very first time. (Not to mention the Jackaroo…)

More importantly, I got to know Glenn and Michelle, met Tom Dietrich and his fellow head Tiger Boy, Bob “Knock, Knock” Revell, and, just like that, my family-by-choice expanded yet again. I not only met the Tiger Boys on that first trip – I became one. I’ve described the group as being somewhat like the Mafia (the Mothia … ?) only nicer, with Tom as the godfather, and me, at the time, becoming the newest “made guy.”

Since that first trip, I’ve been back every chance I could. I’ve obtained a “Foreign Licence Validation Certificate” from Transport Canada, so now, when I go (after a flight or two to clear out the cobwebs) I can legally fly their Moths on my own as pilot-in-command.  My last trip was just last week, right after Oshkosh, and, like all the rest, it was as much of a homecoming as it was a vacation. (I even tried to make myself useful by getting checked out on the Cyclo-Blast machine and prepping and cleaning doors for an Aeronca C-3 and a landing gear assembly for a Heath Parasol.)

In his way, then, Tom Dietrich is a real-life John Galt, and the world he’s built with his friends in Guelph is precisely the haven that Rand and Bach, each in their own way, sent me hunting for when I first read their books way back when.

What I didn’t learn until my third or fourth visit, however, was the name of the original founder of the town of Guelph: John Galt.

Things like that truly put the “Coincidental” in “Coincidental Floss.”

Now, instead of asking me what the "Floss" bit means, have a look at this low-res version of a video I assembled from pics and raw footage courtesy of Glenn and Michelle.

If you read the cleverly titled (because I titled it) blog Information Mike, written by friend and colleague Mike Singer, you'll see that, earlier in the Oshkosh week, we took a trip to a place called Fisk and watched the controllers there do their thing. If you haven't read it, click the link and give it a read now. I'll wait.

Anyway, while we were out at Fisk, politely conferring with the controllers, asking intelligent research-related questions like "Hey, Mister - can I look through your buboculars?", the idea of a visit to the control tower at the airport itself came up. And, by "came up", I mean we said "Hey, mister, can we PUH-LEEZE go up in the control tower?!?!" Foolishly enough, they promised to work something out. At which we point we gave them their binoculars back.

My turn in the tower came on Saturday. As it happens, they close the control tower during the daily airshow (the airspace is handed off to the show's "air boss"), so the best time to visit the tower also just happens to be (thanks to the view) the best time to be in the tower. It's a heady feeling, to say the least, watching an airshow from above - especially given the dramatically increased height of the new tower.

Two of my colleagues, Brandon Seltz and the aforementioned Mike Singer, went up that day as well, quite a bit higher than the tower ... and, at times, considerably lower! Brandon and Mike have been the driving forces behind some of the work we're doing with Dale "Snort" Snodgrass and American Topgun Productions (yes, I know, and no, I won't tell). Dale wanted a chance to say "thank you" to the two of them in particular, and, ignoring my jealousy-driven suggestions of memberships for each of them in the Jelly of the Month Club, decided to give them each a ride in a Mustang. North American, not Ford. The real thing, the one that Christian Bale points at frantically in the movie Empire of the Sun and calls the "Cadillac of the sky!" They each truly got the ride of their lives, and my therapist has told me repeatedly that the seething, bitter envy I feel is far outweighed by my happiness on their behalf.

Then again - they actually earned their flight, the chumps, while I, in good Socialist fashion, chatted my way into my hop in the Soviet Yak-9 by claiming that I needed it.

Saturday night afforded one last photo run through Aeroshell square, snapping sunset pics, before everyone started heading out on Sunday. I can't quite articulate why, but somehow, the image of the V-22 guys loading up a ladder they bought from the ladder guy really captured the spirit of AirVenture perfectly. So perfectly, that, even though I thought I had, I don't seem to have taken a picture of it.

You'll just have to trust me.

Sunday rolled 'round, and, thanks to some threatening weather, the grounds were all but empty. I knew a number of people (such as friend-of-friends Fern Villenuve, first team leader of Canada's Golden Hawks flight demonstration team - the first person I've met whose face is actually on money) who figured if they didn't leave Saturday, they'd be stuck in Oshkosh (not always a bad thing) for another week. Of course, I couldn't be absolutely certain that the grounds were empty without seeing it for myself, so I went back up in the control tower. Because I could.

Other exhibitors were quietly (and some not so quietly) packing up and shutting down throughout the day, but we kept ours going until the very end. You should assume that we did this because of our near fanatical dedication to reaching every last customer we possibly could, and not because we'd contracted with a company called The Production Network who, in the person of the incomparable Steve Mallinson, was completely responsible for the teardown of the booth.

Just as it has done the other nine times I've been, the end of AirVenture came too soon. Once we'd abandoned Steve shut down the PCs and headed out, we took one last end-to-end run on the golf cart, reluctantly returning it to the EAA, just as the first real storm of the week kicked in.

From Oshkosh, it was on to Toronto for a week or so but that's another story.

A room with a view ...	X-Plane's Austin Meyer poses with us proving that we can, in fact, all just get along.	Is there a word that means "the opposite of advertising?"	The Walking Taco seemed like an unnecessarily smug dig at the handicapped corn dogs of Reno.	Good night, Panchito.

I decided to go ahead and finish the story and just replace the previous post with this one. This event was clearly the most notable of my Day 5, so I think it deserves its own full-ish post. Congratulations to those of you who read the first version - it is now, officially, mega-rare, the rocket firing Boba Fett, the Beatles' Yesterday and Today Butcher Cover, the inverted Jenny postage stamp of blog posts.

On Friday the 1st, after a couple of days of false starts and missed connections, I met up with my new (best) friend, Jim Cook out of Auburn Alabama, and we had an absolutely beautiful flight in his Yak 9. "How did this happen?" I hear you asking (though it sounds suspiciously like "big deal!") Well, it went something like this: Jim came by the booth earlier in the week and introduced himself, and, thanks to my desire to go up with him in said Yak, we found common ground very quickly. As it turned out, we have mutual friends in people like Snort Snodgrass and Sean Carroll (not there actually are people like either of those gentlemen), and, while Jim was telling me a bit about his background as an Army aviator flying the Blackhawk, I was kicking him in the shins and demanding a ride.

When I met Jim at the airplane, we did a test fit. Jim describes the Yak as a "1.75 seater", and the backseat doesn't go out its way to favor anyone over about 5' 11". I slid down in, and found that my knees were about one inch too high to fit under the back of the seat in front of me. This kept from sitting down fully, and would have meant that the flight was a no-go unless I was willing to consider surgery. (I was.) Then, magically, my right foot slipped a little, and my right knee popped under the seat back. I figured out what I'd done, repeated it with my left leg, and, Yuri's-your-uncle, I was in. Wedged in, but in nonetheless. Then, just to show off a bit, I got back out.

After waiting about an hour for the fuel truck driver (Slacky McLostington) to show up, we gassed up, and it was time to commit aviation for the glory of the Rodina. I worked my way into the seat, repeated my knee adjustments, then affixed the four-point harness. Once I was set, Jim started the engine, and, after whining for a few blades, 12 cylinders of 1600+ horsepower Allison goodness came to life, the relatively small Yak rocking back and forth in time with the idle. Taxiing out, we S-turned along (like most of the best airplanes, you can't see straight ahead in the Yak 9 when you're on the ground, so you weave, veering left and looking right, then reversing that) behind the EAA marshallers on scooters. There was quite a crowd lining up along the taxiways, jockeying for position to take a picture, or just wave, especially the little kids. I waved back to as many as I could, not because I was deluded for an instant that they were waving at me, but because Jim had his hands (and feet) full, and because the airplane had no hands. "Stay in school and off the crack, kids, and one day you might be randomly lucky like me, sitting in an airplane like this through no particular hard work of your own, though probably not."

After the runup, we were cleared for takeoff on runway 36L. The power went in, the tail popped up, then the mains, and we were in a climbing right turn heading east over Lake Winnebago. Jim had cautioned me about the noise, recommending earplugs under my headset, but I was glad I'd forgotten, because the noise, the confident growling power of this machine was, in a word, glorious. The views were every bit as spectacular as you'd expect, and the the weather was "severe clear" in almost every direction. The only exception was at twelve o'clock, level: there was a "cloud street" around a mile or so long, with a string of small and obviously fascist cumulus puffs that were, simply put, asking for it. Jim wove us in and around and through the edges, doing loops, rolls, wingovers, and cuban 8s, the long forgotten pressure on my knees relieving any time we were inverted or went negative. The clouds knew when they'd been outclassed, and quietly did their part providing an all-too-rare sense of speed at altitude as we tore past. At one point, we nudged through 5 Gs, I clenched a little, grunted a little, and smiled a lot. 

All too soon, it was time to head back to the airport. We entered a long, curving right base for 36L; the curving approach keeps the runway in sight in a taildragger like this for as long as possible, right up until the point when you actually need it and touch down. By then, the theory is that the runway is probably where you think it is, and, if not, it's fairly close. Rolling out at idle, the engine popped, the short stacks clearing their throats for attention they already had. The tail came down, and we turned off, once again following an orange vest on a red scooter with a volunteer in between who led us straight back to where we started, then proffered us each a bottle of ice cold water once we'd opened the canopy. The water was welcome, a cool jolt that unfortunately wasn't quite enough to wake up my legs, which had dozed off somewhere over the lake. I clambered up and out, and didn't so much hop down off of the airplane as bounced on lifeless legs that, thankfully, remained straight.

Then it was time for pictures and handshakes, promises to stay in touch (we have, so far), and a blurry golf-cart trip to our booth for a few hours. I'd literally come back down to earth at this point, but part of me was still up over the lake, giving the imaginary Luftwaffe a bit of what for.

I took a lot of pictures of the airplane before and after the flight, got a few pictures from one of Jim's friends of us departing and arriving, and snapped some stills and video on my phone during the flight, then put these things together as short video, linked below. Now, I'm not a photographer, and, if there's one thing worse than a non-photographer taking pictures, it's a non-photographer taking pictures with a camera phone. And, if there's one thing worse than that, it's that same person shooting video with said camera phone. I'd apologize for the quality, but I think the images that need to will apologize for themselves.

Like it says in the clip, Jim - Spaseba, Tovarisch!

This one began with something that began a few years ago as a nice gesture, evolved into a tradition, and now, thanks to me and my soulless corporate approach to things, has become mandatory: the patented Hal Bryan AirVenture End-to-End Golf Cart Experience. As I wrote in my official guide to the show that I handed out to all of my fellow boothizens (as part of the care package that my friend and colleague Mike wrote about here), AirVenture is big. If you've never been, it's bigger than you think, if you haven't been in a while, it's bigger than you remember, and, if you have, you know I'm right. By giving them the lay of the land, the tour helps people decide in what direction to stagger during their precious free time in order to see what interests them, and also helps them become a little more self-sufficient when it comes to getting back and forth between the booth and the hotel, etc. We start in front of the Super 8, work our way around the north 40 camping area, then pass through the warbirds and across the taxiway to the experimentals. From there, we pass the tower(s) and the government pavilions, then straight across Aeroshell square. Next comes the light sport aircraft, the past grand champions, and then the antiques and classics. Continuing south, we head past the vintage campground and the ultralights, then, finally, to the southiest end of the south 40 camping. Then it's back north for a spin up through Aeroshell square, a look at the sponsor facilities behind Hangar C, a quick look at the Fly Market, and, finally, a trip round the two best-kept secrets of AirVenture, the EAA AirVenture Museum and Pioneer Airport.

I love giving these tours, because I love seeing this place, my home for 1/52nd of a year, through new eyes. Not to mention the fact that I love having an audience; when I'm narrating, I'll catch myself starting to gesticulate, making broad, expansive hand gestures that put a little bit of pontiff in my pontificating. Day 4's tour customers were Rick Hudson and Shawna Williams. Paul Lange was supposed to be there as well, but he was in a meeting that I can't talk about.

And speaking of which ... at noon, Mike Singer and I met with 8 of our colleagues from the EAA to talk enthusiastically about something that I shouldn't mention here. Just picture a lot of people in blue shirts nodding and trying not to interrupt each other.

After that, I met with a colleague and potential partner at the booth, gave her a demo and then met with her in the air-conditioned "Exhibitor's Comfort Center" for about an hour and a half. I won't mention who she works for, but it was the kind of meeting that started with "do you think we should look at working together" and ended with "well, yes, but, once we've actually dominated the entire world, what do you propose we do with it?" At one point, I actually used the word "synergy" and, to my shame, I meant it. Then I apologized, unnecessarily. One thing I can say without apologizing is that this company (I know her boss and one of her colleagues as well) is doing things that are undeniably brilliant. We're still not sure exactly *how* we'll work together, but we're all convinced that it's the right thing to do. If I could hire them to handle our marketing in the aviation community, I'd do it yesterday.

A bit later on, I stopped in at Flight1's booth to catch up with my friend Jim Rhoads, and he showed me their new Citation Mustang add-on (utterly gorgeous, and the first FS add-on I've come across with an opening toilet seat) and their new instructor's console. This last was running on ESP, and, after about 30 seconds, I came away convinced that this was the "killer app" the platform needs to get the attention of flight schools of all kinds. While I was busy being impressed, an older gentleman came up, followed by a few of my colleagues. The gentleman's name was John, and he'd come to Flight1's booth from ours to buy a copy of RealAir's Spitfire add-on (one of my personal favorites.) John and I had a wonderful conversation about his flying history, and about the role that Flight Sim plays in his day-to-day life. He enjoys it with the sort of passion that I'll happily remember any time that I find myself a little slow to get out of bed and head out to work. His gratitude was energizing and humbling. I hope I'm half as sharp as he is, when I'm half his age ... in 3 and 1/2 years.

Not a bad day's work, especially since it was my day off.

Wait ... listen ... do you hear that? It's the sound of me not complaining!

The view out my window, first thing in the AM	Because if you're John Travolta, you fly your 707 to Oshkosh	So many toys, so little time ...	The party was going fine until these guys showed up