April 25, 2023 Mentors and Role Models

The Liberty Gazette

April 25, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: Over the years, I have received exceptional guidance from mentors and role models. My first flight instructor, Dennis Reece, was a fireman and taught flying part-time. A pilot’s first instructor can make or break the student pilot’s experience. Even though he taught part-time, he worked with me all the way through my private pilot training. I was fortunate to have had only one flight instructor during that formative period.

Mr. Galloway was an instructor who taught night classes in meteorology at Mt. San Antonio College. His methods of teaching a difficult subject made it fun. Dedicated to his students, he let them know they were important. Once, when I missed a class session because I was sick, he called the next day to see how I was and to go over everything he had covered in class. When he passed away, over 400 of his former students traveled from all over the world to attend his memorial service. I wish every instructor I knew was like him. 

Bruce Riggins was a missionary pilot for African Inland Missions who trained me for my commercial pilot certificate. His training was more in-depth than required to pass the checkride. He taught me survival skills, such as how to escape from a narrow box canyon and how to avoid them in the first place.

Chuck Gifford was the former head of the Aviation Department at Cypress College. I was already set to take my checkride for my flight instructor certificate when I began attending classes and Chuck convinced me to wait on the checkride so I could compete on the school’s flying team. Getting my instructor certificate would promote me to professional status, preventing me from competing in college. This benefited me as I honed my flying skills, expanded my knowledge, and learned more about teamwork and mentoring. After completing my instructor checkride he asked me to be a team advisor to pass along what I’d learned.

Travis Flannery, a Designated Pilot Examiner and instructor worked with me for the first twenty hours of flight instructor training. His grandfather-like demeanor and patience belied his 30,000 hours of teaching people to fly airplanes. He took me up in a Cessna 150, taught me, as he called them, “walk-down” stalls. The wing buffets and drops in a stall and the pilot corrects this by properly using the rudder. It’s a kind of dance. He also had me performing very precise steep-banked eights-on-pylons in high winds, building both skills and confidence in handling an airplane in any situation.

My parents top my list of role models. They encouraged my brothers, my sister, and I to pursue our dreams. They couldn’t pay for our college or flight training, but they were always there. They celebrated the highs and waded through lows with each of us. They were always willing to stop and listen, no matter the time or place, they made time for us. They gave us themselves, the best kind of role model.  

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

April 18, 2023 Wing-Walking School

The Liberty Gazette

April 18, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

If you shake a can of soda pop and open it right away, all the exhilaration contained in the can will burst forth, because some things are just too exciting to suppress. That’s the feeling of accomplishment displayed in victorious leaps and hollers, “Wahoo!” that Mike and Marilyn Mason see nearly every day as they teach wing-walking at Mason Wing Walking Academy.

If you’re over 18, don’t weigh more than 230 pounds, and are physically able, you too can learn to climb out of a Stearman at 3,500 feet above the ground, pull up onto the wings, and strap yourself securely there to join in the graceful dance of vertical climb until you’re weightless (that’s zero-g), pivot, and descend, as your classic dance partner leads you in a hammerhead. 

The Masons have been teaching and sharing their passion for a couple of decades, training wing-walkers to become members of this elite club. Theirs is the only wing-walking school in the world.

They do not use parachutes because if they inadvertently deployed while wing-walking, there could be disastrous entanglements with the aircraft. They do use safety harnesses and safety cables, and they’ve never had anyone fall.

Besides gusto and agility, what does it take to do this? $850 for an introductory course or $1,250 for a full course. The difference is in how many deck levels on which you get to cruise. Successful completion of the introductory course will qualify you to walk the upper wing of the biplane. In the full course, you will learn how to maneuver on both upper and lower wings.

You’ll also receive an unedited video and still photos taken from four GoPro cameras attached to the airplane. Two cameras will be shooting video and two will be shooting stills every half-second.

The adventure happens over scenic Sequim, on the beautiful Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Just imagine the earth seemingly spinning around you as your biplane gently rolls, pausing inverted for a moment of zero-g photo op. Due to the abundance of fresh air and the gentleness of the aerobatics, motion sickness won’t be a problem. You can do this in a day or make it a weekend if you can’t get enough of it. The first four or five hours you’ll be in ground school, practicing on climbing around the outside of the Stearman, attached to the safety harness and cables. When you have that down, it’s time to pirouette with your winged partner in the sky!

If you’re bored in your job, you might even consider wing-walking as a rewarding career. While there’s not a lot of demand for wing-walkers, you will impress friends and strangers at parties when you tell them what you do for a living. 

Is it for you? You’ll never know unless you try. Mike and Marilyn would enjoy showing you the ropes, er, cables, and celebrating with you like a shaked-up Coke bursting free on a beautiful summer day. See what they have to offer at masonwingwalking.com. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com 

April 11, 2023 Shower Not Included

The Liberty Gazette

April 11, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

In the 1950’s, NASA was looking for a better vehicle to return astronauts from space. Space capsules aren’t real maneuverable, and they’re subject to high re-entry forces due to rapid deceleration. That’s why they relied on parachutes to gently bring the capsules down. Conventional winged aircraft isn’t an option for re-entering the earth’s atmosphere because the wings would burn up during re-entry due to friction. So, in 1957 Dr. Alfred J. Eggers, Jr., designed a wingless aircraft he called a “lifting body.” Lift was obtained from the shape of the body rather than wings. The nosecone shape enabled it to glide back to earth rather than plummet. Its slower deceleration and ability to turn allowed for more landing choices, too.

But nay-sayers said it wouldn’t work without deployable wings and engines. The idea was shelved until engineer R. Dale Reed got permission to make a model to test the theory. NASA called it the M2-F1. It was a low-budget project with a big influence on space travel. To quote Lance Geiger, better known as “The History Guy,” it was “a time when pure engineering enthusiasm could make a bathtub fly.” 

The Director of the NASA Flight Research facility, Paul Bikle, was a man of common sense (and a world record-setting glider pilot). He knew that if they sought NASA funding and involved aircraft manufacturers, there would be so much bureaucracy that it would take too long, cost too much, and have a higher chance of failure than if he kept the project in-house and invited interested engineers and scientists to work on it voluntarily. Sure enough, they built it in just four months. Now they’d need a ground vehicle to tow it at speed to get it airborne. Like running and flying a kite.

After some time in the wind tunnel, and fitted with an ejection seat, the aircraft dubbed by the LA Times as Reed’s “flying bathtub” began test flights. They bought a Pontiac Catalina convertible and had it souped up to make 110 mph in 30 seconds while towing the 1,000-pound M2-F1 experiment piloted by Milt Thompson on the Muroc dry lakebed.

Bikle had put his career on the line with this horizontal landing space vehicle. After almost 80 test flights over three years, 1963-1966, the novel idea that opened the doors to further innovation was finally retired, a success. The Lifting Body program which Dale Reed had championed had proved to be a good bet for Bikle, as the knowledge gained led to the building of NASA’s space shuttles. 

R. Dale Reed wrote a book about his experience in 1997, “Wingless Flight: The Lifting Body Story.” You can see the M2-F1 at the Air Force Flight Testing Museum at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

In pop culture history, Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, was “rebuilt” after a crash of the M2-F2, the successor to the M2-F1. While that aircraft really did crash, the pilot, Bruce Peterson, fully recovered and continued to fly for NASA.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com 

April 4, 2023 A Guys' Camping Trip

The Liberty Gazette

April 4, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: In the spring of 1979, my friend Dennis and I made a weekend camping trip in the Southern Sierra Nevada. I rented a Grumman American Tiger from my flying club and flew over the city, desert, and mountains, from Fullerton to Kernville, in about 90 minutes. It would have been a five-hour drive.  

Leaving Los Angeles’ crowded and complex airspace behind, we traversed a mountain ridge and a small corner of the Mojave Desert. Edwards Air Force base, where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, was just east of our route. We slid above a nice mountain valley with the waters of Lake Isabella welcoming us. There, in a flat spot on the east shore, was Kern Valley Airport. 

Lake Isabella is fed by snowmelt from the peaks of the High Sierra. The Kern River, noted for some of the toughest rapids of any river in North America, fills the lake to capacity during spring runoff. For months, the south end of Kern Valley’s runway was under water and unusable. A new runway was under construction further up the shore where it wouldn’t be flooded (that runway was completed a year later, in 1980). When we landed, the lake was already lapping at the pavement. We’d stay only one night, otherwise we’d be stuck. 

Dennis and I rented an old, beat-up Ford LTD, unloaded our camping gear from the plane, and after checking out some of the hamlets scattered about the valley, headed up-river to a forest service campground. After setting up camp, we dug out our dinner. Dinty Moore Beef Stew. That’s when we discovered that neither of us had brought a can opener. I don’t remember what “Plan B” was, but we didn’t starve. 

As the shadows grew long, Dennis wandered off along the bank of the river. A while later, I followed. I found him sitting high up on the bank mesmerized by a beaver building a dam on the opposite bank. As I approached, I whispered, “Hey Dennis.” He answered, “shuuu!” and excitedly pointed to the beaver. I again tried to get his attention, and he repeated his “shuuu!” 

“Dennis!” I finally pressed, “You are sitting in poison oak!” His head popped up, he looked around, and jumped. The beaver paid us no mind and kept on gnawing at the vegetation.  

Fortunately, Dennis didn’t break out in a rash. The following day after loading the plane for departure, we had some trouble with the left brake. It got stuck after I had set the parking brake the night before. With the help of all the pilots hanging out in the local airport diner, rocking the plane back and forth, the brake finally unlocked. On takeoff, as we crossed the end of the runway, we could see that in just one day, water was already edging up over the asphalt. Had our brake taken longer to jar loose, we’d have been grounded for some time. As it was, ours was the last plane out. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com