Skyyacht:
Great post!
I live on Vancouver Island and I am stuck in the house because we have ten inches of snow that just fell in the last 24 hours.... We very seldom get snow, especially that much... and my fu..ing Suzuki Sidekick four by four is sitting in a garage getting a new transmission.....
By the way I must go out later and get the snow off my five Windmill Palm trees that are in my front yard.....they do not like snow..
Happy new year to everyone.....
Now back to my post.
Quote from Skyacht:
"I use my common sense to establish that the passenger is not a drooling half wit. "
That is about all there is to letting someone handle the controls, however if the passenger is a drooling half wit he / she would be a candidate for employment in the rule making section of Government and maybe if we let them play with the controls they would be so happy they would not want to regulate such entertainment out of existance????
Just a thought.....
Now to get serious, I was fortunate enough to have lived in the era when pilots and engineers explored and opened the far north here in Canada and Alaska. We did so by using every possible means available to us to get the job done.
When mechanical problems arose we fixed things as best we could to get us back into civilization. We had zero weather imformation available to us in many cases, we also had to fly in areas where the maps were marked " not charted"
In the later years of my time in the far north we salvaged wrecked aircraft by repairing them with whatever we could construct in the field. In 1971 we salvaged a DC3 that had landed short the season before and tore the left engine and the left landing gear out of the wing mounts... There was other damage also, two of us were dropped off at the accident site by a Twin Otter in early Oct. with everything we needed to repair it.
Fortunately there was a oil exploration camp nearby and we could stay there to sleep....the sun went down for the winter about a week after we arrived.......we built a snow house and used tarps to repair the engine including several cylinder changes and a new nose case and assemble the new prop we had brought with us...
Anyhow after fifty nine days we flew the the DC3 to Resolute Bay and all the repairs we had done worked, the left landing gear we had repaired by welding pipes and bolting into the rear spar for strength stayed firmly in place for both the take off and the landing ( no brakes or hydraulic pressure and no tail wheel lock. ) The most worrying repair we had made was we were short one cylinder that had a hole on the rocker cover, so we repaired it with plactic steel using styrofoam pieces from cups to follow the shape of the rocker cover. It broke three times during run ups...then on the fourth repair..eureka ..it held and continued to hold for the 110 nautical mile flight to Resolute Bay at thirty below in the dark, but we had a bright moon which allowed me to fly visual as we had no attitude instruments that worked..... We landed just before Christmas day and looked like something out of a horror show due to having frozen our exposed skin working in the bitter cold and wind.
The other guy was Ray Cox one of the best I ever worked with.
As I look back on the era that I managed to live through and survive without ever having had an accident I get just a little annoyed when I see our industry becomming dummed down to a mindless collection of robots meekly accepting the rules and restrictions imposed upon them by drooling half wits who have probably never ever ventured outside an office except to go to a nearby pub for a liquid lunch on their expense account paid for by us the taxpayers.
One more piece of advice from an old timer....to hell with granny, the best idea is to let some young thing handle the controls and thereby enhance your chance of getting lucky later on.
End of sermon for today.......
Chuck E.