No flying for me today

When I got to the airport, the wind was blowing between 12 and 16 knots. For you non-nautical types, that's 14 to 18 mph. But that wasn't the problem, the problem was the wind direction.

The runway at Northampton runs from 140° to 320°. This is known as runway 14/32.

The middle of that arc is 230° and todays winds were varying between about 210° and 250°. This means that no matter which runway direction I used, I had three possible wind components.

I either had a strong direct crosswind, a strong direct crosswind with a small headwind component or a strong direct crosswind with a minor tailwind.

The problem was those possibilities were always in play. The wind direction was changing constantly.

Let's say I was landing on 14 and the wind was 12 knots out of 210°. I would have to fight the crosswind but I would have a slight headwind to provide additional lift. If the wind suddenly changed over to 250°, I would now have a tailwind with no lift and a bitchy crosswind.

If that happened at the right moment, I might land before the runway or end up slamming hard on to the runway surface.

Slamming onto the runway is bad but landing before the runway is even worse.

If I did that, I would hit the runway lights and then bounce off the lip of the runway which would probably collapse the nose wheel. When the nose wheel collapsed, the propeller would strike the ground and bend into a non-propeller shape. This would immediately cause the engine to cease up and probably damage the crankshaft or piston rods.

Assuming I managed to walk away from that debacle, I would then have to explain to my cousin Bob how I managed to destroy one of his perfectly good airplanes because I was too stupid to know that I shouldn't fly in those kinds of wind.

I like to think I'm not too stupid.

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Here are some more stats about this never-ending stream of garbage I spew out every day:

As you can see, Firefox has overtaken Chrome as the preferred browser. And despite Microsofts best efforts to piss off it's customers by filling their operating system with an incredible amount of bloat, Windows remains dominant.

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Enjoy these links:

• This radio guy ranks right up there with the Hindenburg radio guy.



• Maybe I should move there and become citizen #2.



• Only in Florida.



• It's nice of them to publish a "how-to" manual.



• I remember my buddy Tony saying he wanted to do this to our high school shop teacher.