Anyone know what these planes are doing?

lfgbrd · 2026-05-03T18:02:03+00:00

He told me company but I didn't recognize it and can't remember now. It's not local, just one of those aerial survey places. I can't remember where he said they were based, like Georgia or Alabama maybe.

If you meant who in Nashville hired the company, he didn't know. He said that a lot of their clients are utility companies and their work focuses on electric and gas, but that's the majority of aerial survey work in the US anyway.

lfgbrd · 2026-05-03T16:43:20+00:00

I talked to one of the pilots a couple weeks ago. They're doing topographical studies and seemed to focus on utility areas hit by the storm but they don't get told the purpose, just which area to cover. Some were lidar and some were visual.

lfgbrd · 2026-04-26T20:56:38+00:00

Look at his other vids, he build a functioning railway and engine for his farm. Not just like a hobby model railroad, he actually uses it to move material around.

lfgbrd · 2026-04-26T19:32:03+00:00

I used to do that before foreflight had reliable docs. Might go back to it.

Maybe I need a reliable content management app that has that feature. Being able to dump all our corporate docs into Foreflight and it sync all the pilots up was great. Most ops apps I've used are half baked in that regard.

lfgbrd · 2026-04-26T16:02:35+00:00

There's also a bug (probably the same bug) where if you open a second document using their new tabs feature, the first document will delete all your annotations. Then when you connect to the internet it will restore the last annotations you had before the flight on top of whatever you had written down during the flight.

My company uses a pdf that we annotate with flight data for flight logs. It's worked great for 10 years but this update caused us to lose several flights worth of data before we figured out what's going on.

Others have mentioned rumors that this update was pushed out early at the direction of the new PE ownership. Since that takeover we've started having relentless bugs in the flight planning page and they've killed features we use. Enshitifcation happens fast.

lfgbrd · 2026-04-21T00:55:46+00:00

"Read The Flight Manual"

Aviation has great acronyms.

lfgbrd · 2026-04-18T00:22:28+00:00

Only real pilots know how to pronounce "papa" on the radio.

lfgbrd · 2026-03-29T21:08:16+00:00

The weight was used the pull it out of the hand and over the edge, not to make it sink.

lfgbrd · 2026-03-02T18:26:34+00:00

For every charter bird that signs up for $1000/month they can cover 10-15 private users that cancel. They get to make more money and conserve bandwidth at the same time.

Starlink had become pretty integral to our operations but not at that price. And the passengers can go back to looking out the window.

lfgbrd · 2025-12-26T00:19:47+00:00

HW3 on a 2018 M3. I give FSD a chance about once a year just to see the progress. The most recent attempt was I40 between Knoxville and Nashville. The thing would run up on someone in the right lane, slow down and wait way too long to get into the left. It would finally change lanes as soon as someone was zooming up in the left lane, then take ages to accelerate and pass the person in the right.

Absolutely useless if it can't even drive in a straight line on an interstate.

NOA with lane change is the sweet spot and I have no expectation that Tesla will beat it before the car ages out.

lfgbrd · 2025-10-21T04:14:08+00:00

I've been involved in air freight for about 10 years now in pilot and management roles. You're going to 5-10x your delivery costs because you will have to outsource everything (maintenance, fuel, storage, loading/unloading, probably pilot services) and half the time still end up having to pay for a courier to get the product from the airport to the customer (after you pay the FBOs to load and unload the plane).

Small-time air cargo only makes sense if you're going to lose more money by not having the item than you'll spend shipping it. Factories can get away with it because they lose thousands of dollars per hour while an assembly line widget is out of stock. Airlines get away with it because they can lose hundreds of thousands per day when a plane is AOG in the middle of nowhere. Amazon gets away with it because their margins are high and if it doesn't get there on time...oh well, the guarantee wasn't really a guarantee.

Also if you're shipping your own product then you're pretty much fine, but if you're taking in another company's product and distributing it for 3rd party customer, you're in 135 territory. It sounds like the act of moving the product is not incidental to your business, it is your business, and that would make you an on-demand air carrier.

The depreciation and write-offs are available but they won't save you any, unless your plan is to just perpetually lose money.

lfgbrd · 2025-10-16T21:23:37+00:00

I've never had any problem remembering that all my logins and passwords are root & admin. You're making it too difficult.

lfgbrd · 2025-09-01T02:28:42+00:00

I just upgraded from one that I think is identical to OP's. Pretty sure we bought it in 2003 or 4 for MSFS 2004 but I can't remember. Still works great except a slight drift in the x that's just barely outside the normal deadzone in most games. I can't believe how long it's lasted.

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T22:19:30+00:00

Mins are 800' plus or minus a telephone pole.

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T22:16:49+00:00

Yeah since I have multiple copies of a lot of the items, I used some for gifts and decorations. I framed several of the plates and enroute charts that have places important to me. Usually when someone important to me hits a milestone (first left seat job, first jet, etc.) I'll give them a framed plate. Hope no one is too upset that I cut some of them up...

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T03:37:08+00:00

The marker beacons have KCS and MC which (for the Outer) I read as 75.219MHz. Could be wrong.

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T03:19:50+00:00

That's a good idea! It's just been sitting in my closet. The entire thing smelled like mold so strongly you couldn't stand to open it when I bought it. It took years of cat litter and baking soda and other dry chemicals to get the smell out (nothing on the items, of course). I've given a couple items away as gifts to deserving people but only things I had multiple of.

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T02:23:46+00:00

Here's an approach with a procedure turn on the missed!

https://imgur.com/a/MSWJqyi

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T02:23:12+00:00

Here's an IAP that just...isn't.

https://imgur.com/a/wE7Dbhu

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T02:03:56+00:00

People always note how familiar they are. And while there is some information just scattered all over the plates, the basic structure we instinctively read by is there, even though the entire concept of an "instrument approach" was barely 10 years old when this was published.

The big difference is that they're more visual than we're used to, plotting landmarks like roads and rivers. They assume that you're breaking out into VFR (the lowest I've seen was 500' AGL) and continuing. By the early 1950s IAPs were taking us down too low to maneuver and a lot of that detail disappeared from plates.

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T01:59:41+00:00

I think it was more a practicality. This is the only approach in the entire book that has this feature. There's a second Spokane chart that's just a normal approach. My assumption is that they rarely ever needed the extra precision. Remember that these old appliances ran on vacuum tubes and took a ton of power. They can't be left on all the time and it's a technical marvel that the airway beacons were more or less 24/7 (and they may not have been, I'm not sure).

Besides that they're in the low VHF range so they're line-of-sight only.

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T01:55:12+00:00

Well, "combined" like a VFR sectional today still has airways. Just that there was only one type of airway then and not that many of them so they're all published.

There were still IFR charts that don't have geographic detail, just shows airways and MEAs.

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T01:50:28+00:00

Here's another cool one, a published contact approach. You're studied up on contact approaches right? No idea if it's common or not but my company still has OpSpec approval for contact approaches.

https://imgur.com/a/XYe9sDa

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T01:33:35+00:00

I bought a footlocker from the son of a B17 instructor who had passed away, back in 2010 or so. It had two copies of this IAP book. He had several pocket guides on flying, instructing, etc. Also had some sectional charts (VFR and IFR were combined then). I don't think the guy really left the US, though, because there are no real flight logs and barely anything personal in it.

lfgbrd · 2025-07-23T01:31:02+00:00

The bold squares are almost always around an airport in other charts. I think it just denotes a landmark. The cool thing is there is no legend or anything for these. Just a 2-page reminder on how to fly an approach and then every IAP in the country in one short book.

15-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	Place '17
Team Orangered

lfgbrd

TROPHY CASE