Skip to content

Greg Brown's Flying Carpet Blog

Greg Brown's Adventure of Flying!

Home
About Greg
- About the Flying Carpet
- Contact Greg
AVIATION BOOKS
PHOTO PRINTS
PILOT ACHIEVEMENT PLAQUES
PHOTO NOTE CARDS
Greg’s “Flying Carpet” Podcast
“Flying Carpet” Columns
Piloting Tips
Become a Flight Instructor!
SEARCH Greg’s Website
SUBSCRIBE to Greg’s Posts!
SUPPORT Greg’s Blog, Podcast, & Student Pilot Pep Talk Group
Cart

1-GregReviewsHancePrints_629eSmw800

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Post navigation

Published in1-GregReviewsHancePrints_629eSmw800

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 644 other subscribers

Email Address

Search for:

About Greg

ABOUT GREG
- About the Flying Carpet
- Contact Greg
Shop

Greg’s blog posts

Greg’s blog posts

Greg’s Books

GREG’S BOOKS

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Greg’s Photo Art Prints

GREG’S PHOTO ART PRINTS

Greg’s Pilot Achievement Plaques

PILOT ACHIEVEMENT PLAQUES

Blogroll: Greg's pages

Become a Flight Instructor!
FLYING CARPET photo galleries
Greg's Student Pilot Pep Talk Facebook Group
Greg's Videos on Vimeo
Greg's podcasts & interviews

Join Greg on Facebook!

Join Greg on Facebook!

Follow Greg on Instagram

gregbrownflyingcarpet

Author, Columnist, & Photographer

Agricultural landscape, North Texas, from the Flyi

Agricultural landscape, North Texas, from the Flying Carpet

Contrasts: Beauty and the beast.

Contrasts: Beauty and the beast.

A bit of family history, resurrected after 3-1/2 d

A bit of family history, resurrected after 3-1/2 decades. My dad was a pilot before me, earning his wings before I was born. In 1962, he swapped the back seat of his twin-engine Cessna 310 for a 140 gallon gas tank and flew with his buddy Eddie Hays to Europe. They didn’t take the northern Greenland - Iceland route commonly flown by light airplanes, but instead navigated directly across the Atlantic via Newfoundland and the Azores Islands to Portugal. The longest overwater leg exceeded ten hours.

On the way home, they experienced engine roughness halfway between Lisbon and the Azores. With instruments reading normal, the two pilots debated which engine was acting up, not wanting to kill the good one 250 miles from land. Eventually they shut down the left engine, which proved to be the correct decision. Relaying their position through a nearby airliner, they proceeded to the Azores on one engine. It turned out that one cylinder had cracked almost all the way around, and was within half an inch of blowing off.

(You can read this story in detail, in my book, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane)

Following delivery and installation of a replacement cylinder, they flew uneventfully back across the Atlantic and home to Chicago, following which my dad's mechanic, Bernie Pepin, surprised my dad with a lamp he’d crafted featuring the broken cylinder.

Years later when my dad passed away, my mom was going to throw the lamp out. So I rescued it and took it with me. However the upper lamp portion was either broken or misplaced and the lamp had never been reassembled since, until now. (It's lived in various garages all this time.)

Recently I took it to a lamp store for repair, but they couldn't fabricate the curved tubing. However my friend Becky saved the day, having rescued this particular perfect-fit lamp assembly from a "broken chicken lamp," (?!) she donated it to me for this purpose. Back to the lamp store and now I've got my Dad's working cracked-aircraft-cylinder lamp!

Family photo...

Family photo...

Did I mention that the aspen leaves are changing h

Did I mention that the aspen leaves are changing here?

Load More... Follow on Instagram

Follow Greg on Twitter

Blog Stats

274,440 hits

Meta

Log in
Entries feed
Comments feed
WordPress.org

Follow Us

YouTube
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter

Buy me a coffee

Become a Flight Instructor!
Greg’s podcasts & interviews
Greg’s Student Pilot Pep Talk!

Powered by WordPress.com.