June 25, 2006
excess baggage
For once I've got better pictures of Rudder than of me this weekend. And there's a reason for that. I got kicked off an airplane today, rejected as excess baggage. He was scheduled to go flying, just practicing some instrument approaches. I was going to ride along and take pictures. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to get the plane until 9AM, and by then it was already about 98 degrees. (For background, hot air is less dense, so the plane gets less lift.) The instructor was one he hadn't flown with before, and he's the biggest (heaviest) guy there. When he finally showed up after Rudder was done preflighting, he took a look at me in the back seat and said, "Uh, did you run a weight and balance?" We hadn't (ecause it's not usually a problem with only three people), so he went back inside and ran one. Sure enough, we were over gross take-off weight for the conditions. Of course, I was the lightest of us, but I was also the least necessary so I volunteered to get out, go home, and come back to pick RUdder up after the flight.
It wasn't until I turned onto our street that I remembered the instructor wasn't required for this flight. Rudder had booked him because he wasn't sure if I was going to ride along, and because I'm aadmittedly a little rusty. But we could have sent the instructor off, just used me a safety pilot, and saved some money. I'm not technically current, though (despite all of last years' flying, I never got my biannual because I thought I'd get the IFR rating and thus wouldn't need to) so we'd have had to ask if that's legal. So maybe we did need him.
Anyway, here are my favorite shots of Rudder with the airplane:
And here's what I did instead:
(Tech notes: These are all as taken, no Photoshopping. They were taken with the haze filter we always keep on the camera to protect the lens, and with the UV fllter we'd put on at Tahoe because we were taking pictures in the middle of the day and didn't want that flat midday light. The UV filter probably helped with the outside pictures, but I'm surprised at how well it worked with the indoor picture. That's without a flash, and with the nearby window shaded; it was a longish exposure and I just tried to sit very still. In contrast, another shot taken with flash was dark and flat and cool in lighting.)
Posted by dichroic at June 25, 2006 11:12 AM