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13:52
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Cockpit Conversation 
I'm leaving tonight for Oshkosh and am hoping to meet some of you there, although some of you are already there and not reading this. I started to arrange a time and place for a meetup, and then found
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12:11
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Cockpit Conversation
There's a lot of restricted airspace in Utah. The salt flats are inhospitable and useless for agriculture so the military use those big flat salty spaces for bombing practice, and secret alien experim
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11:15
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Cockpit Conversation
I did a long day's flying in Wyoming recently. I've never been very fond of Wyoming, but my
opinion is coloured by two facts, which may mean I'm not being fair to the state.
The first time I ever s
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11:00
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Cockpit Conversation
If you can read a technical aviation report, you may want to go straight to
this one. The four and a half page National Transportation
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13:02
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Cockpit Conversation
Wow, I'm going to Oshkosh! It's very last minute, and I'm only going to be there for three days, but I will be at the
EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh this
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12:18
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Cockpit Conversation
The other day I responded to one of those e-mail surveys on consumer preferences. They asked me
if I had access to a vehicle, and that qualified me to do the survey. They didn't ask me if the
vehi
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10:22
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Cockpit Conversation
Geographically, Salt Lake City is quite amazing. On one side, mountains rise to over ten thousand
feet. They're literally right against the city: the north-south VFR route is called the mountain
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13:20
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Cockpit Conversation
I'm just back online and going through all your comments and e-mails. One, with the subject line Aviation scholarship turned out to be not the usual desperate would-be student hoping I could co
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11:50
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Cockpit Conversation
They have the cable, so then they install it, and I can leave, right? Wrong. There's paperwork, about a half a day's worth, and the installation job turns out to be a lot more complex than replacing
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20:53
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Cockpit Conversation
The airplane should be leaving today, and the boss wants me to help with the work however I can. So I check out of the hotel and come to see what I can do, even though I'm fairly certain that "stay ou
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20:12
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Cockpit Conversation
Remembering that the inspector from my company was turned back at the border, you may be able to understand the level of stress in my boss when it transpired that the inspector from this
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19:46
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Cockpit Conversation
I met up with Chris again while the airplane was in the shop, and we had a closer look at Utah by daylight. The plan was to hike up Big Cottonwood Canyon (which is apparently the smaller of the two ca
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17:28
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Cockpit Conversation
The flying is busy, letting me see the tall still-snowcapped mountains, the salt plains around the lake, and the peculiar purple water in the salt lake. It must be some kind of mineral in the water. I
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14:56
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Cockpit Conversation
From Salt Lake City I arrive at a small Utah FBO where I receive excellent, almost fawning service from a staff who are almost all also students in the aviation program at a nearby university. My airp
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14:42
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Cockpit Conversation
The Utah state bird is the
seagull, appointed in
honour of a flock of seagulls that saved the early settlers' crops fro
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17:52
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Cockpit Conversation
I landed in Salt Lake City with 200 psi of oxygen left in my tank, so I called for oxygen service. I was cleaning out the airplane when they arrived with a cart full of long green oxygen tanks,
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15:45
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Cockpit Conversation
I mentioned my relationship with my oxygen mask. I have described before the nasal cannula method
of supplementary oxygen, and trust me, having a drinking straw up each nose is preferable to having
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18:11
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Cockpit Conversation
My client calls me in my hotel room at nine this morning and says, "there's nothing for you to do today. You have the day off." I thank him, and assure him I'll have my cellphone with me if he needs a
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14:54
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Cockpit Conversation
There is virtually no Sunday bus service in Salt Lake City, but my call for local Salt Lakians (I forgot to ask what they were called, so I made that up) produced Chris, who reads the blog, and Bill,
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16:00
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Cockpit Conversation
They've been telling me we are going to Nevada next. I was given a day off in which I didn't do much but swim laps in the (big! outdoor!) hotel pool, and draft flight plans for Reno and Las Vegas. The
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7:49
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Cockpit Conversation
I can't remember if I showed you this toy yet or not, so I'll make this entry really short. My
customers were departing by airline early in the morning before my legal rest period would be
complet
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10:03
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Cockpit Conversation
During preflight today I noticed a gigantic insect on the empennage behind the rear door. It was translucent green with long legs and swoopy antennae and maybe wings. It was almost the size of my cell
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12:05
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Cockpit Conversation
Today I have for you three "recut" movie trailers. They all contain actual footage from actual well-known movies, with accurate voiceover descriptions of the movies, but somehow the movie you actually
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10:28
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Cockpit Conversation
As I walked out to my airplane at the FBO today, the whole parking line behind my aircraft was filled with snarling fighter jets, almost cartoonlike with their painted teeth, and very real guns and mi
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16:15
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Cockpit Conversation
I've been sent to pick up an airplane that has been waiting idle for me. I've paid my parking fee
(a suspiciously symmetrical $100: I suspect they just pulled the number out of thin air), finished
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8:16
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Cockpit Conversation
I took this picture last year, but it's still a pretty accurate depiction of my life on th
