Death Valley day trip

[cjsmith]

Once again I have been scooped by the much more rapid and thorough news service of rfrench. An entry of his with pictures.

A conversation in the cockpit:
me: I can't see him.
Rob: See the patch of green there?
me: I do not see anything even remotely green.
Rob: Okay, that rough stuff that looks like vegetation, over that way.
me: (pointing to TCAS) I mean I don't see this airplane that is about to hit us.
airplane: Traffic. Traffic.

There were a couple other kinds of flowers out, but mostly it was the yellow spindly one in Rob's picture. You can see the faint shadings of wildflower color from the air if you know exactly what to look for and are also good at imagining.

I didn't use oxygen on the way back, and I found out that it is possible to get winded and dizzy from putting on my coat. (14,500'. I am such a sea-level oxygen junkie.)

Comments

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

me: (pointing to TCAS) I mean I don't see this airplane that is about to hit us.

Sheesh. So, how did that turn out?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

We turned. He probably would have missed us anyway, just closer. :)

Traffic no longer a factor

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, one of the things I hate about being in a small plane is when you can't see the guy they tell you to look for, and then say "Traffic no longer a factor". I take that to mean "if you can hear this, you missed him. If you hit him, then you won't be able to hear this anyway"

-- Tim

ps: note to others: I've been in small planes all my life. I don't avoid them at all. I feel safer in them than when driving on the freeway. I just don't enjoy being reminded that I didn't see someone who could have hit us.

Re: Traffic no longer a factor

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

"If you can hear me, traffic no factor." Yeah.

I have Krause's well-researched (footnoted, even!) book on aircraft safety. One of the points she stresses is that "see and avoid" doesn't work. It CAN work if you're lucky, it HAS worked because we're not too crowded yet, but the human factors involved (the acuity of the eye and such) say that it is not what we should be relying on.

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Whoa. Don't be ruining my flying dreams with all this scary stuff about people hitting me! :)