Marc's Public Blog

As you can see the flightpath went north somewhat to avoid restricted airspace, and then south for the way back to avoid thunderstorms over the rockies.

Flight From Palo Alto to Oshkosh

This year I picked the club's Mooney Acclaim and an experienced CFI. Unfortunately, the plane's payload is abysmal and between the two of us, we could only put 70 gallons of fuel instead of the full 102 gallons that would have allowed for a flight with a single refueling stop.
We left soon after 7 in light IMC conditions (typical morning overcast), and picked up some favourable winds which put us in KRKS with around 15 gallons to spare.

IFR Departure from Palo Alto

Lake Tahoe

Salt Lake City's Salt Lake

bis

Fuel stop #1

Weather wasn't bad, but we picked up our IFR flight plan for the second leg as there were still some clouds around our altitude. My forcast said that winds were less favourable at higher altitudes, so we stayed at 19,000ft. In hindsight I kind of regret not knowing what the true airspeed at FL250 was going to be. We only got around 200kts TAS at 30.5" MAP lean of peak.

IFR over the top

Bad weather on the way, but south of us

We were watching the weather on the way, but thankfully the bad weather was moving south and allowed us to land at Appleton without problems and on schedule (before 20:00). I totally could have landed at Oshkosh proper, but I figured we'd try Appleton this time (a reliever airport) to have more leeway on when we could arrive and leave. In hindsight, the $50/1H-ish cab ride each way actually made it longer and more expensive than staying at Bassler FBO at Oshkosh proper, but eh, you can't always know.

Second fuel stop

Weather getting worse, even closing up behind us, but clear ahead

On the ground at Appleton, just north of Oshkosh

Just 45mn before sunset or so

Flying the Acclaim wasn't too hard, but I totally sucked at landing it, apparently because I didn't quite get the nose up picture during the flare which I thought to be the same than the SR22/TB20, but wasn't the same at all.

Planes on display

The first day, I visited the Airbus 380 despite the hellishly long line.

The terrafugia roadable airplane was moving along nicely

heavy load carrier, mostly used for carrying water and dropping it over fires

the border patrol UAV

Overflies

Although I missed the simulated army overflies because I'm a moron, there were still many to see

Airshows

Of course, Airventure still had its daily airshows

The Redbull Helicopter, still doing what helis aren't supposed to do

The Spaceship 1 Carrier

Flight back home

Flying home was not going to be a piece of cake due to bad weather forecast, but thankfully it passed through in the early morning and we were able to take off by 11 local time. However, this put us quite behind schedule.

my flyties came in handy for staying on the grass

ready for a flight back

bad weather just passed us, ready to go

first fuel stop was Winter airport

fuel was self serve, based on the honor system (you wrote your own fuel use and receipt)

at least we were still able to fly high enough to benefit from O2 (headwinds died down as we proceeded forward)

a bit on IFR, allowing me to log a few approaches

Evanston, a good place for our fuel stop and deciding how to proceed ahead

I was joking that if we walked to the end of the runway, we'd be in Utah. I was actually right :)

thunderstorms over the rockies were nasty, but we found a course around them

well, kinda, with some help from ATC

clouds at FL200 gave us traces of icing, but nothing too bad

nice sky pictures though.

250kts in the descent, woohoo! :)

home, sweet home

Flight times were 8.5H to fly there (air hobbs) and 9.5H to fly back with the headwinds and weather detours. Not as fast as the supposedly 220-240kt airplane should have delivered (POH quoted 220kts+ for our density altitude, which was apparently a sack of lies, by a whole 20kts), but still pretty good and a personal record for me :)
A big thanks to my trusty CFI, Don Styles, for salvaging my poor landings in the plane, and teaching me about dealing with weather, which was part of the point of this trip (we rarely have "weather" in california :) ).

More pictures

The upgrade was relatively eventless after I realized that pulseaudio had broken my sound and some X server problem broke mythfrontend (alias mythfrontend='XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS="1" \mythfrontend made it all better).

And then, I figured I'd try network manager again, just to be fair.
Well, after close to an hour, I could not get it to manage any of my interfaces, even after commenting them out in /etc/network/interfaces and playing with its sparse badly documented config files.
I searched a net for a howto or something that would explain how to beat that piece of shit into submission, but it would not manage either my wired or wireless interfaces, and output bullshit messages in syslog like
NetworkManager: <info> Unmanaged Device found; state CONNECTED forced. (see http://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/191889)

Its /usr/share/doc still had no useful documentation, so I got fed up quickly and just removed the piece of crap, and re-installed wicd which was up and running 20mn later.

Network Manager probably only works for wipe-reinstalls, which I'm not about to do, and is otherwise the most unintuitive, badly documented, and still buggy piece of software I've had the displeasure of working with. Seriously, how many years will it be before it doesn't suck balls for people who try to upgrade and may have their own network configuration already?

In other news, I upgraded both my laptop and server magic to 2.6.30.1, but it proved to be slightly unstable on my laptop and majorly unstable on my server, which forced me to drive to the colo twice to power cycle it (BUG spinlock lockup on CPU#1 nicely prevents serial console sysrq), and in the end I just drove the server home in the weekend to make sure it was still stable on the old kernel (it was), and then racked it back 2 days later. So far, so good, so the good news is that my hardware is likely still good and that the problem is triggered by 2.6.30.1 (vs 2.6.27.8) and/or some changed config options.

Another small but interesting fact: I got comcast business to actually do reverse DNS delegation for my block of static IPs from them. I did have to walk the guy through replacing the PTR records with CNAMEs pointing to my name server, but in the end, it was done 10mn later on a sunday morning at 07:00. Honestly, I'm impressed.

After the first quick 1mn flight to check the weight, I added my camera to enjoy a longer flight with the bigger battery (I figured over 25mn since I get around 15mn with batteries half that size).
And then... well, I went downwind a bit too much before I realized that to fly back I had to have the plane point straight at me, at which point it would become absolutely invisible due to how far it was and its cross section becoming almost nil. I was however getting back slowly by making turns so I could see the plane when maybe 7mn into the flight, the battery crapped out and the plane went down so far out of view that I could not really tell where it went down.
The next 2.5 hours were spent with me walking all around the search area, which was quite big. I got to hike around Rancho San Antonio trails, go through the cemetary, jump 4 fairly tall fences that were stopping me from proceeding further ahead, and I brought my controller with me in the hopes that I could maybe hear the plane around me by moving the controls, but no such luck.
Instead, I got to see some hiking/biking trails, scale a few fences à la Jackie Chan, see several deer, more than 10 bunnies, an abandonned railroad track, a horse farm and more.
For now, I searched the Cemetery, Canyon Oak Way, Serra St, Madrone Ct, Manzanta Ct, the traintracks there, and the nearby power plant on California Oak Way.

But no plane :(

Map of the area I searched
and a couple of pictures of the area to give an idea:

Kind of sucks since I had my camera on it, a brand new battery, and $250-ish of electronics in addition to the plane itself :(
If I'm very lucky, someone will find the plane, notice my name and phone number on it, and call me, but I'm not holding my breath...

If someone somehow happens to have found a crashed remote controlled plane and found this post through google, please call me :) 408 7(zero)2 22(seven)1

(update) I went back this morning (the next day) to scope other pieces of the area, but it's basically not in anywhere easily visible. I however dropped 80 "have you found my plane" flyers in nearby resident's mailboxes, just in case it's in their yard, but at this point I'd say my chances of getting the plane back are below 30%.

(update #2) Got no answer from my flyer, or anyone who found the plane, so at this point, my chances of ever getting it back are below 5% :(

(update #3) I ordered a couple of SkyKing RC Lost Model. It would not have guanranteed that I get the plane back, but it would clearly have improved my odds.

Long story short, we did many laundry loads because we didn't quite know what was tainted and what wasn't, I first tried to wash the couch by hand and later had a professional detergent/steam/water cleaning just to be sure. Jennifer is slowly recovering but had to take some anti inflamation/reaction drugs, and five got two baths out of it, which made him a "lapin chat"

hair drying with licking :)

Anyway, Jennifer, while looking for usable snickers (having given on hiking boots), managed to find some non water proof hiking boots that seemed to be a good fit for her ankle, while I found wider toebox hiking boots myself. Neither are perfect but much better than what we had, so it was a good excuse to go try our new footwear over July 4th weekend.
Jennifer planned a half car camping, half backpacking trip for us through local state parks we had never been to, and that it would have been a shame not to see if they do indeed get closed with the budget cuts (but we sure hope not).

Here's the complete track of our trip, including the park visits and scenic flights:

Mt Diablo

hello you

feed me :)

China Camp

San Raphael Fair and Fireworks

Pt Reyes Day 1

those sea lions were really good at climbing rock

but food was scarce, and the newborns were not doing well

at all :(

view from our lunch spot

many stairs down, which were fun back up

the lighthouse is way down to be below the fog/haze layer when possible

we had a few fresh oysters there

a few oyster shells :)

Pt Reyes Day 2

lots of deer there too

hello

marshlands

Mt Tam Day 1

bay bridge as seen from the top of Mt Tam

West Point Inn

the cabins you could rent next to our campsite

Mt Tam Day 2

Nice Owl

Muir Woods

we were very tempted to pick up a couple for dinner :)

San Francisco/Wicked

You can see all the pictures from the trip here.

Nice converted T-Rex 700

with a nice FPV setup

A T-Rex 600 in comparison

Rancho does have deer :)