Airspeed

Tony Condon is as an ATP and corporate pilot who also serves as the president of the Kansas Soaring Association, headquartered at Sunflower Gliderport. We sat down and talked about long-distance cross-country soaring.

John Harte is glider CFI and chief instructor at Sanhill Soaring Club in Gregory, Michigan, just a few miles down the road from Hell. (Hell, Michigan, that is.) He's also a tow pilot, aerobatic pilot, airshow performer, and FAST formation lead.

Here's an hour and a half in conversation with John.

Kent and I are sequestered in our respective locations at SARS-CoV-2 sweeps the nation, so we thought we'd record a podcast episode.

We made an audiobook! Steve narrated the audiobook version of Thomas A. Bass's The Eudaemonic Pie. The book tells the story of a band of physicists and computer wizards in the late 1970s and early 1980s who set out to beat roulette in Las Vegas with computers in their shoes. A story of science, art, and the birth of the hacker culture.

The episode contains a brief account of the making of the audiobook and the entire prologue of the audiobook itself.

The second in a two-part series chronicling the long road to becoming a CFI. In this episode, our hero suffers more indignation at the hands of a check airman who calls off Christmas, after which he begins the long slog down the self-launch mountain, through the valley, and back up the adjacent peak of aerotow.

Here's Part 1 of the epic quest for the CFI certificate. It covers everything from deciding to go for the certificate up to the failed attempt to transition to a different motorglider at a faraway school. Part 2 is already recorded and will be up soon. In the meantime, enjoy the comedy and the tragedy that is pursuing a glider CFI ride in a world not equipped to make that ride happen.

Jack Hodgson takes the bully mic for a pre-show discussion of what it takes to put on a hometown airshow in some of the most complicated airspace in North America.

An eighth-grade language arts assignment from FOD becomes an Airspeed episode. A father's expectations for his son at 14.

David Allen (on the bully mic) and Dean Greenblatt (BIRD from the show) join Steve to debrief the first-ever airshow over the Detroit River.

This is the third installment of the series that covers - in near-realtime - the events leading up to the GM Detroit River Days Airshow on the Detroit River 20-21 June 2015. As before, David Allen of Other People's Airplanes has taken the mic and is running the show in order to keep things moving.