Springbreak in Texas

I am back from my Springbreak roadtrip in Texas. This was one of my usual roadtrip-type vacation and this time I took a brand new car with 129 miles on the odometer and returned it with 1755 more including 50 on dirt roads... Yeah Texas is big and interesting landmarks are far apart... Actually, Texas has the same size as my home country...

My wandering in Texas...

The roadtrip started at Houston Hobby airport and ended there. During the five or so days, I drove to San Antonio, Del Rio, Big Bend National Park, Fort Stockton, Austin, Port Lavaca, and finally Galveston on the Gulf coast.

The first surprise was the city of San Antonio itself. I never ever suspected it could be that interesting. From historical landmarks to fancy touristic places, from Missions to Skyscrapers, there is something interesting for everyone.

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Perhaps the most famous landmark is The Alamo mission which hosted one of the most famous fight of the Mexican-Texas war. A bloodshed fight epitomized by the movie The Alamo featuring John Wayne and Richard Widmark.

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Other landmarks include the Missions and mark the Northernmost part of the Spanish explorations of the 17th and 18th centuries.

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The Spanish Missions in Texas are a series of religious outposts established by Spaniards to spread the Christian faith amongst native Americans with the added benefit of giving Spain a toehold in the frontier land...

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Next came Big Bend National Park. Big Bend is situated along the Mexican-American border and lays in the middle of the largest North American desert : the Chihuahua Desert.

Balanced Rock is one of the many icons of Big Bend National Park

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Lion Warning...

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Scary right...

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Good way to let visitors feel allright when they are starting a three hour treck in the wilderness...

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No I did not spot any mountain lion. I would have loved to though...

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Even closer to the Mexican border stands the Santa Elena Canyon.

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The Santa Elena canyon was made by the Rio Grande river and now stands as the Mexican - American border. Millions of years of erosion have carved those 1000 feet high cliffs.

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Not that wide of a river as the reader might see. Not very deep too as I strongly believe that one could cross it while standing on both legs. But the surrounding environment is as wild and as arid as can be... so this might be a strong deterrent for aspiring illegal crossers...

Arid prairies in South Texas

One of the last stop was Austin, the capital of Texas. So obviously there is a Capitole...but besides the Capitole I was not able to find anything very special in this town... Keep Austin weird as they keep on saying. Ok ok...

The Capitole where "W" used to work as Governor of Texas

Finally upon return to Houston, I payed a visit to the Johnson Space Center which is hosting the space crew training facilities and the mission control center. It is in this very room below that all the Apollo program missions were monitored and surveyed in the 60's and 70's including the famed Apollo 11 and the Apollo 13 missions.

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As one might see, there are no keyboard, no mouse, basically nothing to communicate with the computers. In fact, computer screens were used to monitor different parameters but there was absolutely no interactions between the people working here and the systems. Also, the main computer running the show was a state of the art 400kb ram-memory equipped computer... Ah those days...

Mission Control Center. At the time of the Apollo missions, the average age of people working in this very room was 26. Would you believe that ?

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Nowadays, the center holds additional rooms. One of which is dedicated to the monitoring of the International Space Station and the other one is dedicated to the Orbiter missions. During my visit, the NASA people were busy taking care of the on-going Endeavour mission that brought the Canadian robot-arm Dexter to the ISS as well as a Japanese Laboratory.

You may find a movie of this trip here. Please enjoy!!

Presidential initiative...

Our President decided that each pupil entering school should adopt a fallen hero of our history. The aim is to keep our history and its memory well alive amongst the younger generations...

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As far as I am concerned, I decided to adopt Aminias de Pallene. Aminias de Pallene is a Greek sailor and a fallen hero of the naval battle of Salamis.

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I choose a Greek because in the deepest part of my heart I am convinced that our modern democracies are heavily relying on the ancient Greek model. In fact, as much as we are endebt to the Roman Republic for the establishment of our Rights, we are endebt to the Greek for the conception of our Democracy.

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My tribute to him. Long life to Aminias de Pallene....

Sunday Flying...

All right, this was my last Qual-preparation special flight almost entirely devoted to flight dynamics and flight enveloppe exploration... Well that sounds ambitious, in fact we just did a couple of manoeuvers while flying to Blairsville in Northern Georgia. Once more, I hoped it had been as useful as could be for my friends. I believe I can only wish them good luck right now.

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N6344F is a rather old Cessna C172

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Going back to Cessnas after a few flights in the Piper Warrior II, one can definitely feel those 20 added horsepower. From 160hp to 180 hp with basically the same operating empty weight, the climb performances aka the excess power is tremendously felt. The time to climb and the take- off roll are drastically reduced. Still, I like more the look of Pipers...
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Something's fishy over there?

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The other difference is the stability of the aircraft. The Cessna is way more stable than the low wing Piper. The damping in Dutch Roll is huge with no more than one oscillation to get back to trim condition. The spiral mode is unstable but on the edge of being neutrally stable. This is clearly shown when changing the pitch attitude : spiral mode with a pitch down attitude is almost stable, spiral mode with a pitch up attitude is only slightly unstable showing only a 1° per 10 seconds divergence...

Exhilarating Birthday

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Thursday was my birthday and that was a blast. It all started in the morning... I guess pictures speak for themselves...
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Waking up in a newly decorated apartment with balloons and banners hanging everywhere...
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Some new friends eagerly awaiting to meet me for breakfast... And guess what ? A new miniature plane for my collection. Ain't it cute ? And a new Babe too....

Babe presenting me my little birdie and my fortune cookie...
I shall be successfull at work did it say...

Celebrations should not stop at home : so here is my newly decorated office...

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Looks good right? You can feel the working atmosphere there...

And then an awesome surprise dinner was awaiting me at the Sun Dial restaurant. I got tricked for this one as they all made me believe this was to be a business dinner with my lab boss... Speak about Doc... instead all of my friends did show up...

With Akash and Greg...

I have contemplated the idea of having dinner at the Sun Dial for weeks. I really wanted to try it and I am glad I did it. Pitched at the top of the Westin tower in downtown Atlanta, the restaurant features an extraordinary view over the city and its surrounding. Food was also great and tatsy but most of all I was with all my friends and roomies.

With my roomie Alexia

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And finally the Birthday Cake

A heck of a Saturday !!!

Fleeing out of Atlanta in the morning, wandering along the shores of Lake Sinclair during a warm afternoon, eating lunch in the grass while enjoying the quietness of Mother Nature and returning to Atlanta late in the afternoon. Well that sounds dreamy, right? Well that is exactly what we did last Saturday...

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7,300ft, 80 kts and the VOR needle spot on target...

On our way out, we first flew to Stone Mountain and then headed direct to Milledgeville / Baldwin County airport. In order to avoid turbulence, we climbed high in the air reaching a cruising altitude of 7,500 ft once we cleared the Class Bravo airspace surrounding Hartsfield Jackson.

Our little Piper Warrior N4304B is seen resting and sunbathing during those first Spring days on the ramp after its flight from Atlanta.

Our little Piper Warrior is a low-wing single-engine aircraft. It develops 160hp at sea level and boosts a range in excess of 600 nm with 48 gallons of fuel. N4304B is equipped with the modified tapered wing - not the Hershley bar - and features a cruising indicated airspeed of 105 knots. Transitionning from high-wing Cessnas, the Piper seems a bit heavier on the controls and slightly less stable in roll. The low wing aerodynamics is particularly noticable during flare when the aircraft floats forever in ground effect over the runway.




After roughly an hour of flight, it was hight time for a lunch and we walked towards the shores of Lake Sinclair.

For once, the weather was with us and we enjoyed those enchanting views.

Quiet and rural Georgia may be charming. Far away from those clichés of the deep old South, one might encounter very welcoming people in these sleepy towns.

It is always good to enjoy some peacefull moments from time to time. Life in Atlanta is somewhat hectic and a bowl of fresh air is something welcomed.

Due to popular demand, I had to present this photo. Notice the organic and all-natural pine dust-sweeper in my shirt-pocket... There is an old story about double pine-needles and how they break and separate one from the other but I will restrain myself from elaborating...

Since I am a shameless person, a picture of myself with freshly collected pine needdles.

Soon enough, we were back in the air for some exercises. The overall idea was to get a feel for many of the manoeuvers that are introduced only through theory in class. It was also a good time to practise some manoeuvers with the Piper since I am not yet fully accustomed to its flying characteristics. I have only logged a couple of hours in Piper Warriors, 7.5 hours so far. From steep turns, to stalls, from phugoid-mode excitations to Dutch-roll mode excitations I think we did it all. I sincerely hope it will be useful at some point.
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During the return trip, I let my friend Alexia do most of the flying. In the meantime I was busy taking pictures and simply enjoying the view.

Seat back, relax and enjoy the flight as they say in commercial airliners... We reached 9,400ft on the way back. If it continues this way, soon enough we will need a pressurized bird...

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On our way back, we did a detour to Athens, GA so that we could practise some VMC-weather instrument approaches. And that was a real treat since we got radar-vectored to the final approach course exactly like we would in typical instrument operations. A big thanks to the air traffic control folks since this was a nice introduction to instrument procedures and communications for my friend. After the ILS approach and a full stop landing, Alexia did the take-off : congrats to her for a successfull takeoff after just a couple of hours in the Warrior...
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9,000ft over Georgia. The layer of haze is clearly visible over the horizon.

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I am glad I can take my friends for a hop from times to times. It makes me happy and sharing the joy of flying with my friends is something I both always look forward to and never get tired of. I guess it shows on my always-happy-after-flying face. And each time the story repeats itself : it takes me a while to come back to Earth and descend from those dreamy puffy little clouds where I like to hide myself.

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