Why do I even look at this thing every morning.............
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1424782285.jpg

Glutton for punishment

Was that the Fedex truck?

Next Jan (2016) is about the earliest I would be able to get everything lined up...but wife wants me to keep working until Jan 2019. Bag lady syndrome I think.

I am ready.

Had fun this morning playing "Ready, Set, Go go go go" with Pepper this morning.

Say "Ready, Set, Go go go go go" and on Go stomp your feet and chase her. Then laugh and run back to starting place. She runs like crazy, then chases you back.

Pepper cheats, she takes off on "Set."

Our pilot was dating a lady for a while and he was going to take her for a flight at night over the city in his personal Cessna 210. He of course wanted to do a careful pre flight security screening and pat down on her. As he was doing that she asked if he was looking for guns and he said of course. If you don't have one we issue you one!

Rick, that should have no issues with the size of your tool boxes, other than getting them up there. Snow will move off the roads in fear when you drive it. Plus, you have one more vehicle in the line to get things unstuck. It is going to be a long drive to Tuscon in that thing.

Glen, you make your pilot buy his own plane? Just kidding, I imagine the camera takes up the rear passenger area.

Richard, sounds like Pepper is learning how to win.

So Joe, you next in line for this record?

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Wow, 1,400 lbs! That is one stout dude!

Brent, our company has a Cessna 206 with a 24 inch hole in the floor that came from the factory with the hole. Our airplane is a 1965 model that the company bought in 1969 for $17,000. Is worth a bit more now. The camera is the size of an end table and weighs just under 500 lbs. The lens alone is 300 lbs.

The pilot has his own plane that he had before he came to work here. It mostly sits in his own hangar. He flies about 500 hours a year for us so going to fly around for fun is not high on his list anymore. He does fly it up to Oskosh every year and spends the week there.

I will have to look him up at Oshkosh sometime since we are only a few hours away. Emily got her Young Eagles flight up there a couple years ago.

I knew the camera was pretty big. I imagine that airframe has a lot of hours on it.

Trying to decide which race to go to this year at Elkhart Lake. Spring, summer or fall. The summer one is the biggest but also the hottest part of the year.

Fall should probably have the best weather, if memory serves me well.

For most of the years we owned it, it did not fly that much. Just in the last 7 years since we got the RC-30 did we start flying a lot.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1424801653.jpg

That is a standard 12 oz water bottle there for scale. That is the supply side film magazine sitting there on the left. Our airplane is not a beauty queen. It is a work truck. Our pilot is one of the most particular and detail oriented people I have ever met. Since it is his butt in the seat and his license and life on the line he is very thorough. We just finished the annual inspection and it took a while. Every access panel comes off and every single bit of the aircraft is carefully scrutinized.

The company has been in business since 1947 and we have never once declared an emergency of had any sort of incident. Safety is foremost. When we received an offer to buy a much newer 206 with a camera hole and were considering it, the pilot said he would be interested in buying that old pickup truck of a 206. He likes the airplane and knows it 100% from spinner to tail and does not want to change to a newer airplane and just inherit someone's problem aircraft. I feel the same way about my old El Camino.

I would think since the engine is overhauled on a schedule and if you are doing the inspections, a different airplane could potentially be a new can of worms.

Woohoo! My new med bag finally shipped from SOE!

Talking with Thuy and moms docs, they radiation will be easier on her than her chemo was. She is doing great after surgery, and will have a month to recover before radiation starts.

Weird on the belt, worth trying a new belt on there to see if that fixes the issue.
What did you guys do before you were flying a lot? I thought you were an aerial photo company?

I want to take some Krav classes. Figure it would be the best to learn to gtfo of a bad situation if someone tries to mess with me in a house.

Exactly, We know what precisely we have. The system is set up for 24 volts which runs the camera and all the electronics. The camera mount is a cool piece of technology. It stabilizes the camera to point straight down and is a 4 way gyro so if the air turbulence makes the aircraft yaw or bounce around the camera keeps pointing straight down. and square to the flight line.

Krav is excellent for self defense, there are several different varieties available and they all do little things slightly different, but fundamentals are identical......and they're all solid.

We have always owned at least one airplane and done aerial photography and mapping. When we bought the RC-30 and moved up to a state of the art, calibrated mapping camera the flying services really took off. (Pun intended) Before that camera we had a RC-10 which was state of the art for 1960s and before that we had a old Fairchild which was state of the art in WW2. There will never be a step above the film camera we have now. No one makes film cameras now, they are going digital. A new state of the art digital aerial camera is 1.2 million and up and is obsolete is just a few years. They have an annual $70K per year maintenance fee as a minimum. They re just now getting to have equal quality as film but require a lot more flight time and more flight lines to get the same amount of data. They don't have any film to use but the airplane has a lot more flight time.

A big part of what we do now is just a flying service company for other aerial photography and mapping clients. We regularly fly a job and have the film shipped from the processing lab to the customer. We have been as far north as North Dakota, as far east as Georgia & Florida, all over Texas and New Mexico and parts of Colorado. We don't go past the Rockey Mountains or even into that area.

Anyone know where I could get a very small run (like 2) of a small vinyl decal done without it costing a ridiculous amount?