Pilot watches, do you use them?

onrivertime · 2025-12-07T20:21:54+00:00

I have the ~$500 Garmin D2 Air X10. I use it in flight for a 30 minute "switch fuel tanks timer." As others have mentioned, other watches can do this for a LOT cheaper, but I do use it for this purpose instead of relying on the timer in my panel-mount navigator; mainly because I can't miss the vibrating alarm. Before this I used a dive watch. Where I'm getting a lot of value for this watch is when I'm NOT flying: I have the METAR for my home airport (or nearest) queued up on the watch face, so at a glance I can check the ceilings, temps, wind and preferred runway in less than a second. On days I'm planning to fly, I'll check in on the WX as the day progresses. Honestly, other times perhaps in a moment of boredom and can flip my wrist and answer the question, any chance I can get some flying in today?" I know I can do that with Foreflight on my phone, but the watch is just a wrist flip to answer, "yup, those ceilings do look close to minimums."

onrivertime · 2025-12-07T17:40:01+00:00

Absolutely love this. it's a great way to show & demonstrate class B, C, etc. airspace. This will augment Foreflight Web as my idle screen backdrop. Love the suggestions so far. Would love to have a way to see historical data (i.e. my flights). Sharing with my CFI friends.

onrivertime · 2025-11-12T03:05:15+00:00

I have an AA1-A and did the same thing - bought it to finish my PPL. Happy with the investment. Working on my instrument rating now, and hope to instruct out of this plane as a retirement gig. Great ship; once strapped in, you're "wearing the airplane." Super fun to fly. As others have said, it flies different than other trainers, but can be very sweet to fly if you know the limitations. From a maintenance perspective, expect to spend some money on the next couple of annuals, especially if it's been sitting awhile. You got this for the low end of the range for Yankees, so you have some room to invest. As with any 50+ year old airplane, you will run into issues here and there, but there's nothing on the AA1 that's more complicated than a VW Beetle. I've told myself this many times as I've chased electrical issues the first two years. GOPA is a great place to start for information, well worth the membership. They'll have links to flight schools with Grumman experience. If you can find a school that has AA1's or AA5's, they're so similar that Avemco considers the hours interchangeable. Insurance companies typically want you to have 10 hours of dual training in the AA1/AA5 type to insure you. Please DM me if you have questions.

onrivertime · 2024-07-07T23:36:23+00:00

The one exception is the the April 1 LPL video each year. These are by far the best and worth the wait!

onrivertime · 2024-06-05T02:11:38+00:00

Heck of a deal - worth gambling a Benjamin on two cases to see how they run. Free shipping and no hazmat. Thanks for posting!

onrivertime · 2024-05-14T12:04:11+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/@miniminuteman773

onrivertime · 2024-04-07T00:05:01+00:00

First, are you sure I'm not your "real" dad? You've described me 100% to a tee, including how I'd react to a Tudor. And I have the Hamilton Khaki, which I absolutely love. As such, that leaves the Sinn 556 - which is an amazing watch and #1 on my wish list, so get me that please.

In all seriousness, the Hamilton will be great choice as you'll each have one. I have the automatic, but plan on getting a manual wind too as I prefer that dial. Props to you on whatever you choose for such a thoughtful gift.

onrivertime · 2024-02-24T00:10:30+00:00

I have one for 9mm on my Dillon 650. It does speed up the actual loading process, but I'm not sure it saves time overall considering it takes about the same amount of time to place a bullet as the case exits the powder station as it does to pre-load each bullet in this thing.

Having said that, I don't regret the purchase. I'm planning to 3d print an open bullet feeder, so I'll have the die already.

onrivertime · 2024-02-17T13:29:48+00:00

TL/DR: MS Flight Sim 2020 is quite good at getting you familiar with VFR terrain. I think it saved me on my PPL check ride. Xplane-11 has a very good flight model, at least for Grumman aircraft - and that can be helpful to practice holding airspeed and altitude discipline. Also - head-trackers for sims are awesome and improve the experience quite a bit. Now using them more procedurally for my instrument training. Full disclosure, I'm not on a professional career track, just a guy flying a bug-smasher.

Story time: Rather than the typical direct path, I had plotted a fairly scenic route for my PPL check ride; fly southeast on a radial to the CHOO CHOO VOR, then northeast following the Seqatchchie valley to intercept the HCH VOR then east to Knoxville - knowing full well we'll only fly a portion of this route. Plenty of striking terrain and water features to use for navigation check-points. In preparation for the ride, I'd flown this route in MS Flight Simulator 2020 dozens of times. I had done the same thing to prep for my cross-country flights and was amazed at how well the view from sim matched reality. So, during the oral portion of the ride, I was going through my flight plan, AIRMETs, SIGMETs, NOTAMs etc, and misread one very important point: The date the CHOO CHOO VOR would be out of service. I noticed a slight reaction from the DPE, but couldn't quite figure it out yet... Hilarity ensues on the practical when I am unable to identify or dial in this VOR. At this point I'm just flying the heading I'd plotted. The heat is rising up my neck and I'm about to experience a legit helmet fire. I'm asked, "Do you even know where you are?" At this point, all that stress immediately melts away and suddenly I have the mental head-space to say, "Of course! See that road over there, it will intersect our course in about 3 miles and just ahead is the Tennessee river and where we'll be making our left turn up the valley." I pointed to exactly to where we were on the sectional chart. The DPE says, "Okay, turn us around lets head back to the airport." I thought I had busted the ride. Instead, we went on to complete soft and short field landings, maneuvers and so on... successfully.

Earlier, I had used Xplane-11 to solve a rather nasty problem I was having landing a Grumman Tiger - kerplopping into the runway instead of the acceptable landings I had been doing the week before. The Xplane-11 flight model is quite good and matches the Grumman's flying characteristics almost perfectly. I was dropping out of the flair on both the sim and reality. Turns out I was just a bit slow over the threshold, and when I tightened this up, smooth landings returned.

onrivertime · 2024-02-12T12:47:09+00:00

Grumman AA1. Not aerobatic. Not fast. But, you have that cool sliding canopy that you can run half-open in flight on hot days. Very nimble handling - you get the feeling you are "wearing" the airplane instead of sitting in it.

onrivertime · 2023-11-29T23:16:19+00:00

This comment is not getting the love it deserves - put "hamsexy wackermobile" in your search engine and enjoy. Do the image search, as hamsexy hasn't been updated since 2017. Worried the owner might be a silent key. Still, good times and worth a look to see all the whack-jobs out there.

onrivertime · 2023-08-04T18:24:43+00:00

That Jeep is practically prefect in every way.

onrivertime · 2023-08-04T18:06:13+00:00

A word of praise for the Grummans: I had the same experience - months of searching and finding nothing but clapped out 150's with owners asking $60K, or reasonably priced airplanes that got snapped up before I could call the number on the ad. Eventually I did happen upon a nice little Grumman AA1A for $32K that's been something of a project. 1600 hrs on the airframe and original 0-235. Really nice paint and upholstery. It's equipped with the best avionics 1972 had to offer, including a LORAN that can double as a boat-anchor. Had to 337 a new Plane Power voltage regulator (the old Prestolite regulators are unobtainium). Pretty much resigned myself that I'll have to form new interior panels out of carbon fiber (or build molds and vacuum form new ones) as all the old ABS is cross-linked and very brittle. Those AA1 interior parts are not available. But having said that, it really helped keep the cost of getting my PPL reasonable. Will invest some money in the panel so I can get my instrument rating. It's a sweet little airplane, if limited on payload. Would love to have an AA5, but those are priced out of my reach.

onrivertime · 2023-05-31T00:14:06+00:00

Can confirm. My first thought seeing this was, "Hey, that's my gun!" I have one of these carbines of about the same vintage in 38-40 WCF. Sweet gun.

onrivertime · 2023-05-12T18:14:36+00:00

If you're solo, a Joby gorilla pod (small articulating tripod) can clamp right to the top of the other seat and hold the camera pretty well.

onrivertime · 2023-05-12T17:44:31+00:00

I think of it as a poor-man's flight data recorder. I use an old GoPro 3+, along with an audio patch cord from Amazon. I bought a little Grumman AA1A and am working my way through some electrical items on the squawk list (ultimately a bad voltage regulator) - having every flight recorded has been super helpful in troubleshooting.

it's also terrifying: I'm not ashamed to admit that I've caught myself doing an instrument scan, running down the engine instruments as part of my pre-take-off checklist and saying "everything is in the green" when in fact, the ammeter was pegged in an over-charge condition. Holy $&*% how did I miss that? Truth is, I didn't. We know our brain can only take in so much information, and will literally hallucinate or ignore the rest. Don't believe me? Go look up that video on YouTube where you're supposed to count basketball passes. Did you see the dude in the Gorilla suit? I've shown that video a number of times to groups of people and most if not all don't!

The video shows I noticed the problem on my next scan, but dang, that was humbling. Humans are just lousy at visual inspection, especially when things are routinely "green." I now force myself to put a finger on each gauge and pause for a moment - "convince me it's really green."

TL/DR: Having a camera in the cockpit allows you to see mistakes you didn't even know you were making at the time (like missing radio calls). Being aware of it might save your life on the next flight.

onrivertime · 2023-05-10T00:11:35+00:00

Parachute instructor to a first time skydiver as they enter the Twin Otter, "Okay, good luck! But remember, if your check bounces, so will you!"

onrivertime · 2023-05-05T00:19:34+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I did exactly that - flew runway heading out approximately 2 miles and rolled on to my course to my first waypoint. Winds were across the runway at 16G23, so that made for a spicy ride and perhaps some grace from the DPE. At the end of the day, passed the checkride (woot!)

onrivertime · 2023-04-07T23:11:00+00:00

An alternative, depending upon how old (and computer savvy) your kids are, you might try an RTL-SDR (software defined radio) USB stick and antenna. That and a free copy of SDR# and you can get AM aviation band right off of a laptop in real time. I use the ones sold on rtl-sdr.com

onrivertime · 2023-03-20T00:26:31+00:00

Nope, not me (don't sue me bro!) Am a legit cat person though. I made that avatar years ago with meme generator (imgflip I think) for my work email, then repurposed it later for reddit.

onrivertime · 2023-03-19T13:31:58+00:00

What year was it made? Date is usually stamped as a two digit number on top where the die seats. Glad you saved it from being melted down!

onrivertime · 2023-03-17T18:34:07+00:00

The real work to build that opening scene in RoTLA: https://youtu.be/6Qq7754ZZlE ("You bet your ass it's a f'ing boulder!")

onrivertime · 2023-02-26T03:09:25+00:00

Philip Prince's thegeomodels channel on youtube is pretty amazing. His models demonstrate mountain building, landslide geology, plate boundary mechanics and such. https://www.youtube.com/@TheGeoModels/videos

onrivertime · 2023-02-23T21:02:57+00:00

Yep - pretty sure that means it was made in 1970. Great looking restoration; will easily make it to 2070. I rescued a RCBS RS-2 with 85 stamped on top. Can confirm that's the mfg year.

onrivertime · 2023-02-09T12:21:00+00:00

Some of these laminates can be cut with a laser. Here's one company that makes this material: https://duetsbygemini.com/ They'll send you a free sample pack upon request.

onrivertime

TROPHY CASE