What kinds of flying "fun" have you or "your friends" engaged in?

[minitour]

dude, YOU, err YOU suck quict that BS we know you did it, quit tryin to cover it up

If the glove don't fit, you must acquit

-mini

 

[TDTURBO]

Back in the day, my sole purpose renting aircraft was to do a vomit comet until 10 shy of Vne. It was like my own personal roller coaster, I loved every second of negative G dives. Until now, I was unaware the the float would stick, no wonder it took so long to restart over Aurora in that Warrior 15 years ago.

Man have I been lucky, I never even thought of that, we would do this sh!t at night too.

When God is ready to snuff me out, I guarantee it won't be quick and will be most unpleasant.

I cheated death more times than I can count, I hit a tree in an 1100 HP Supra at 100 mph in a spin an walked away only pissing blood. It cleared up in a day or so. No lasting effects.

Then I was on a Moped in Mexico showing off doing wheelies over speed bumps for the locals,

I swear to God I was only going 2 mph, I ended up slamming my leg into the parking block with my leg fully extended at 2 mph, no big deal right? Hitting it causing a comminuted medial tibial split fracture that laid me up in bed for 5 months wearing an Ilizirof external fixator with transverse pins, 9 of them. I had to go to work after 5 months being in bed because my associate Dr. came down with Kidney stones.

So after 5 months hanging from a ceiling, I get a call that we have no doctors. As soon as I started to get up I fainted from being in bed so long, not to mention the excruciating pain and contaminant Pancreatitis from the Morphine allergy.

I went to work and the patients that I have never seen before, since I was out so long, were asking why a patient was grabbing their file, the nurse at the desk said, "No, that's your Dr., he had an injury and will be your primary until the other one is well. I had to walk around with this halo around my leg for 11 months until it healed.

I figured it was just God slapping me in the face showing me who was in charge. I made lemonade out of Lemons and learned Spanish, day trading and computers, otherwise I would have never found the time.

I used to think I was immortal, the older you get the wiser you become. I learned a lot from that most unpleasant experience.

After all I have been through, racing motocross for 10 years, dangerous technical cave and wreck dives, car crashes over a hundred MPH, I thought I was invincible!

God sure set me straight with a 2mph crash that laid me up for over a year, I guess he thought I was getting to cocky,

I agreed.

I learned and will be a much better person from it.

Weird where life takes you and how life turns out, isn't it?

 

[Corona]

Cloud surfing! Sorry, can't elaborate.

C

 

[Flechas]

I love cloud surfing!!

 

[VNugget]

How would the float get stuck up? Stuck down, I can see...

 

[Flechas]

How would the float get stuck up? Stuck down, I can see...

Because when you push on the yoke it would tend to "float" just like you and everything inside the plane.

 

[GravityHater]

I've always wanted to land a 150 on a semi. I'll give $5 to the first person who does that and shows me the video.

a mooney did that on the highway near El Paso in the last 6 months. Well I think they got one wheel on and it was an accident. No video either.

 

[Bill Mostellar]

Chickens can fly (link and text)

From another thread: http://forums.flightinfo.com/showthread.php?postid=6866#poststop



Here's a potentially interesting thread...Without fear of FAA intervention or UN inquiry, tell us about the, or one of the, most stupid thing you ever saw done in an aircraft.

I'll lead off with a slightly edited rehash of my earlier post on flying chickens. I promise I will tell the skydiving watermelon story soon, but first things first.

Chickens CAN Fly!
While this story will undoubtedly irk the local members of PETA, I'll tell it anyway for the aeronautical moral involved. And please--no FAR quotes on how dropping objects that could endanger someone on the ground. It wasn't me, our intrepid aviators launched the victims over a large grass runway, and besides, this episode was safer than the "skydiving watermelon" story, which I'll tell later.

There I was, in Gastonia NC (20 west of Charlotte) on a calm summer day 21 years ago. That is to say...we were bored to death. Like all bad ideas, this one started harmlessly enough.

"Hey, chickens can too fly" said Howard, part owner of the Stanley Steamer, a hideously yellow and green painted 150 standing rather sulkingly on its haunches on the ramp.

"No way!" was the retort from the rest of the crew, including CJ, our local expert on these matters. "Bull&$#&!)", he added with flair. They were buddies, which explained their disdain for each other's opinion. Both middle aged, one would think they would not worry about these things.

But worry they did, and the conversation degenerated to the inevitable "triple dog dare" phase, after which CJ disappeared for an hour only to return with a portable coop with, you guessed it, three white, mature, and unafraid chickens inside.

While Howard and CJ attempted to wrestle said coop into the back of the 150 (that in itself was entertaining), the rest of us placed small wagers on the outcome of these hapless birds. None of us were too worried about hurting them. I for one figured they would survive this, the first true "Survivor" episode, albeit without camera, producer or tribal vote.

Soon the birdmen, cum scientists, took off, carefully gonkulating the winds aloft, corriolis force and chicken visual descent point, climbing a bit above pattern altitude to begin their experiment. After the fact reporting indicated that Chicken #1, contrary to common belief, did not truly want out of that coop. Pecking a bit on the way out the barely-held-open door of a Cessna one knot above stall a thousand feet aloft, he finally exited the trusty craft aided by CJ's well developed right arm.

Now, I have heard numerous times that chickens are nearsighted. Don't know how any scientist has actually figured this out, but I trust their judgement. After all, are they the ones who have brought us the dinosaurs in Jurrassic Park? Didn't they invent those nifty Kevlar doors for JetBlue? In any case, I think the "chicken vision" issue came into play during this test.

Chicken #1, newly freed from the confines of Witchita's finest and falling rapidly toward mamma earth, suddenly figured that she was in freefall and had best start flapping. Unfortunatley, her crosscheck failed to note that she had already exceed Vne/Mmo. Chicken #1 suffered immediate, severe structural failure of the right wing. Entering a unrecoverable spin, she impacted the ground at warp six. No smell of fuel was found at the crash site.

After confering with our airborne scientists, nay, executioners via unicom, we concluded that a single experiment was not sufficient to verify our hypothesis (or validate our bets). Chicken #2 was prepared for takeoff.

Upon exit, Chicken #2 fell like a proverbial stone. As it neared the gound, however, it became apparent that Chicken #2 was literate. Simply put, she had obviously read Jonathan Livingston Seagull (vintage Richard Bach, pre-mushy phase). She saw the ground rising to meet her and began a gentle wing extension. Ahh--the sensation of flight... All of us "chickens can too fly" folk were cheering her on--everyone was yelling "pull, pull!" Ever closer to high speed dirt, Chicken #2 actually recovered out of it's dive, and, like an asymptotic curve in math, actually skimmed in ground effect for about 200 feet before entering a stand of trees at about 40 to 50 knots. After that the woods grew very quiet. We stood in reverence.

Nobody had the heart to throw #3 out, since our experiment was becoming too costly for our bird friends. We figured that we could chop off their heads and eat them, but throwing chickens out of a 150 at a grand was just too much.

Howard and CJ landed with ungenerous tales of feathers, chicken pecks and loud protestations from the about-to-be launched. We stood around in the afternoon dusk, still arguing the answer to our original question, which was evidently not proven either way to anyone's satisfaction.

And then, in the quiet peace of a southern airport at sunset, a small miracle ocurred. Chicken #2 emerged from the darkness and walked, somewhat unsteadily, out of the woods and onto the grass. She had soloed! Whaa-Hooo!

The celebration was huge, and #2 was allowed to return to her friends that evening. I'm betting that none of her coop-mates believed her story, though.

This story is absolutely true, though I cannot vouch for what ultimately happened to #2.


More stories are welcome!
Copyright 2002, Flipper
__________________
Check 6,
Eagleflip

 

[Bill Mostellar]

From another thread (link and text)

http://forums.flightinfo.com/showthread.php?postid=21480#poststop

The Most Stupid Thing I Ever Saw, Vol 2
With apologies for my tardiness, here is the skydiving watermelon story I promised to write long ago. Actually, I re-read Avbug's treatise on the finer points of pumpkin jumping and critical stem-failure. That’s a great story! Mine may not be worthy, but is mildly entertaining. As usual, names have been changed to protect the guilty from federal enforcement action.



Summers in North Carolina are unusual in many respects. The air, so clear on a spring day after the cold front has passed, is reduced to a smoggy haze reminiscent of an El-Lay afternoon. Thick as molasses, the humidity shrouds those unfortunate southern souls who work outside with an unwanted mantle of a pure heat. We’re talking Oppressive with a capital O. Normally sane people, who simply want to mildly entertain themselves by, say, washing the car, gardening, or throwing themselves out of a perfectly good airplane at 7500 feet, are reduced to barely reasoning explorers of this world.



Ah, the musing of hot, dimwitted teens...That's where the story begins.



Now, to digress slightly, I have to address that "perfectly good airplane" comment. All skydivers have heard that retort from their WuFFO friends (e.g. what for you fall from airplanes?) and thought idly in response, "well, I guess because it's fun..." NO! That isn't the answer. Think! Look at every jump plane you've ever flown in. What does it look like? Yep, it’s a veritable junker with wings.



The fallacy in the "perfectly good airplane" comment is that the WUFFOs have never seen a jump plane up close in the first place. Heck, if they had seen it, they'd probably want to jump out of it without a parachute. Sorry to diverge on a tangent, but the truth has to be told.



Back to the story at hand. To wit, think about rural Nawth Carolina in the dim past of the late 70’s, reeking of grape Nehi, textile mills and firmly entrenched in the religion of NASCAR. (“PRAISE his holiness Sir Richard Petty!!”) Situated about 40 miles north of Gastonia, Laney's was a grassy strip about 2,000 feet long, uphill, and possessing a medium-sized dogleg that made brake pad manufacturers squeal with delight over the new business after a few landings there.



It was a typical small drop zone, inhabited only by a great fellow who was smitten by the jump bug so deeply that he purchased a largely wrung out 172 to haul his buddies up for a load. Painted a rather garish yellow, it was quickly dubbed Tweety Bird. The Bird had no interior save the rather dingy pilot's seat and smelled of sweat, nylon and apprehension.



(Most of the latter was mine--It was from Tweety that I almost "frapped" myself when I had only 30 jumps, doing relative work with a snaggle-toothed redneck whom I thought knew the art but decided to keep making contact with me down to a thousand feet. The resulting short ride under canopy and long walk back to the drop zone taught me that God indeed looks after fools and skydiving youngsters.)



As we all jumped, played and sweated in the mid-afternoon heat, someone deadpanned "Hey...why don't we take the hackey sack up on the load and do a bit of hack on the next jump?"



"Naw, you dumb $#(^, even I know that a hackey sack won't fall as fast as we do" came the quick reply from Mitch, one of our more experienced jumpers. Naturally, the wheels were already turning in his mind. Regions of his brain, long thought dormant since the fifth grade, began firing in a near-fit of synaptic hysteria.



It was an epiphany. You could almost hear the angelic choir singing in the background. He said rather softly to no one in particular, "I read somewhere that you can jump with a cantaloupe and it'll stay with you."



There was a brief pause in the surrounding conversation, much like what you experience if you were to accidentally break wind at an art gallery showing. Not that I’ve ever done that.



"You're kidding!" Paul, the adventurer, pounced on the thought. "You mean we can do ar-dubbya with a cantaloupe? COOL!" He was grinning like a baboon eating bark.



The rest of the crowd came to life. Despite the hostile summer environment, they were awakening to the prospect of an original thought. This was exploration--a new, potentially dangerous and certainly illegal activity. What was not to like?



Their eyes began to glow with the thought. Like crazed 6-year olds experiencing Coke-induced fructose frenzy, they were out of the summer slump and into the fray in a heartbeat.



Paul was the first to rise to the challenge. "We can just dive out with it, like Superman."



"No way, dude. That cantaloupe will just slip outta your hands as you leave the plane. Nope, the exit's gotta be more stable than that." said Mitch.



"OK, OK," someone from the crowd said, "Like we can jump with the cantaloupe from the V (sitting backwards to the airplane at the juncture of the fuselage and the right wing strut) while everybody else goes out normally. Then we can pass it around between the four of us.”


Continued in next post...

 

[Bill Mostellar]

Continued...

The subtle voice of sanity was briefly heard. “Hey dude, you won’t be able to hang onto that ‘Lope during opening shock.” I think I said that, but then again I don’t want to make you think I was actually thinking sanely at that point.



The crowd, spirits momentarily dimmed by that allegedly adult sense of, gulp, responsibility, paused for reflection. Hmm. What does that FAR say? You can’t drop an object if it presents a danger to anyone or anything on the ground. How do we get around that?



It was at this point that the only semblance of safety, reason, or risk mitigation raised its head. Mitch said “OK, ok…here’s the plan. The wind favors us exiting to the northeast. If we get out there we’ll be over the trees and the cantaloupe won’t come close to the houses or road. It’ll just fall into the forest.”



Heads nodded in agreement. Safety had been practiced. Risk averted. Guilt expunged. We were free to perform the world’s first cantaloupe jump. Score!



While Mitch sped off to the ubiquitous farmer’s market to purchase said ‘lope, we all envisioned a fast paced game of pass the vegetable and other hilarious (i.e. sophomoric) hijinks. After a long while, interest waned and some of our jump brothers drifted off to find food and suitable companionship for the evening. Perhaps common sense was making a slow return to some, and they stole away quietly so as not to earn our scorn. Finally we saw Mitch return in his white clunker.



“They didn’t have a cantaloupe. I got a watermelon instead” There was no dissention among the remaining unclean—the watermelon was of the kind of round variety and only slightly larger than the original veggie of choice. The fact that we were moving from vegetable to fruit was apparently not an issue.



In the end, there were only two skygods (Mitch and another, now anonymous feller) who elected to perform the jump. I did not manifest on the load due to my gradual descent into weekend poverty, as was normally the case, so I can only attest to what I heard and saw from the ground. Tweety Bird lumbered downhill and was soon aloft, passing over the power lines and banking left into the simmering heat of the afternoon. We waited impatiently, oblivious to the potential danger our cargo posed to the innocent denziens of the pine forest.



Seeing the plane finally settle onto a course into the wind, I shouted “Jump run!” to the remaining few watching.



As the jumpers exited from 7,200 AGL, we immediately noticed two things: we couldn’t see the watermelon, and both guys were not in RW formation. In fact, they weren’t even falling anywhere close together. As they fell lower, we could tell that they were both in max tracks, a nose down freefall position where you can accelerate to a truly high-speed dirt velocity. Jumpers use it to catch up with a formation way below their altitude. At 180 MPH, you can eat up a lot of altitude in a heartbeat, and these guys were smoking downhill like Picaboo Street after a Chapstick endorsement.



It turns out that as they exited Tweety, Mitch had a tough time holding on to the watermelon. Somewhat bulky, its mass was far too much to counter with a standard freefall position. Mitch immediately assumed to Greg Louganis one and a half front pike position. The French judge’s score was low.



Mitch, sensing he was losing the fight, decided to return to the plan—he’d let go of the watermelon and freefall beside it. Cool! What could go wrong?



One would think that a more or less round watermelon would not favor one side or another. Not so fast, oh teenage wonderboy. This puppy was apparently denser on one end, because as soon as Mitch released his charge, it quickly turned on end and accelerated like a scalded-a$$ ape. Mitch, unwilling to let his dream slip away, followed.



The second jumper was much higher than Mitch and eventually gave up on the chase. He flared out to a standard freefall position and dumped at three grand to watch the subsequent proceedings.



We on the ground became gradually aware of two distinct sounds. We heard the flapping of Mitch’s jumpsuit in the wind, a frenetic popping of fabric under intense pressure. And then we heard the watermelon. A “whine” began to grow. It was blend of Stuka dive bomber and pressure cooker. The watermelon was not only falling, it was creating its own death rattle. Then we saw it.



Mitch finally gave up and opened at 2 grand. We noted that the watermelon was well past the FAF and stabilized on approach. In one of those sudden moments of enlightenment—such as your first kiss or that first truly greased landing—we now became aware that something very hard going very fast was approaching us from 12:00 high. Very high. Hmm… “oh my Buddha! Run! RUN!”



I’d like to say that we watched it hit, but that kind of observation is kind of difficult to make while running for your life in the opposite direction.



Presently we heard a muffled “whoomp” and turned, expecting to see shards of green evidence littering the packing area. Finding none, we searched in vain until Mitch landed and said it had landed in the woods after all. He laughed in our faces and called us names such as chicken, scared sons of unwed mothers, and bedwetters for running from a simple watermelon. We cared not, knowing in our hearts that had that son of a gun hit us, our obituary would have read “Killed By Watermelon,” and nobody deserves such an ignomious fate.



Not much was left of said watermelon, and we decided that perhaps skydiving with unattached fruit and veggies was better left to the folks from California, some of whom jump with their dogs as well.



As I said, life in North Carolina was kind of slow at times. But it wasn’t boring.

Copyright, Eagleflip 2002

__________________
Check 6,
Eagleflip

(and if the title doesn't say "Moderator Input," it's just my opinion...)


What's scary is that I'm married to a girl from the same town.