Greg Brown's Flying Carpet Blog
Greg Brown's Adventure of Flying!
Greg’s 2024 Fine Art Photo Wall Calendars!
Greg’s calendars are printed and sold via Lulu.com. Check for any current discounts here and here.
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Hey Folks, I’m proud to announce that prestigious Flight Safety, International (FSI) has licensed two of my aerial photos for exclusive global advertising!
The first is “Dusk Arrival,” to Sedona, Arizona (KSEZ), shown above. (I’ll reveal the second image when it shortly appears in print.)
Here is FSI’s first ad incorporating my photo, in this month’s Aviation International News:
Like all my Fine Art Metal Prints, “Dusk Arrival” ready-to-hang pricing starts at just $135, with super-affordable shipping throughout the Continental US all the way up to the largest sizes.
Check out all my Views from the Flying Carpet aerials* and Down to Earth terrestrial photos!* (*Pages take a moment to load.)
Many thanks to all who invest in my prints, books, and pilot achievement plaques!
Greg
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Hey Friends, check out “Arizona Red Rock Country, from the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness,” my latest “View from the Flying Carpet” Fine Art Metal Print!
Like all my Fine Art Metal Prints, “Arizona Red Rock Country, from the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness,” ready-to-hang pricing starts at just $135, with super-affordable shipping throughout the Continental US all the way up to the largest sizes.
Check out all my Views from the Flying Carpet aerials* and Down to Earth terrestrial photos!* (*Pages take a moment to load.)
Many thanks to all who invest in my prints, books, and pilot achievement plaques!
Greg
Subscribe here to follow Greg’s latest posts, photos, and podcasts!
Hey Friends, check out “Thunderstorm with Rainbow,” my latest “View from the Flying Carpet” Fine Art Metal Print, available in two variations!
I photographed “Thunderstorm with Rainbow,” from the Flying Carpet, en route from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I’m offering this print in 2 variations: “Wide View” & “Close View.” Can’t decide which to order? Consider “Wide View” for larger print sizes, and “Close View” for smaller sizes.
Like all my Fine Art Metal Prints, “Thunderstorm with Rainbow,” ready-to-hang pricing starts at just $135, with super-affordable shipping throughout the Continental US all the way up to the largest sizes.
Check out all my Views from the Flying Carpet aerials* and Down to Earth terrestrial photos!* (*These pages take a moment to load.)
Many thanks to all who invest in my prints, books, and pilot achievement plaques!
Greg
Subscribe here to follow Greg’s latest posts, photos, and podcasts!
Hey Friends, thanks to your enthusiastic reception, here’s “Miles and Miles of Sunflowers,” my latest “View from the Flying Carpet” Fine Art Metal Print!
I was returning my wife Jean and her tennis teammate Jenny from a tournament in El Paso. Five long hours round trip by Flying Carpet, and it was too hazy to see anything special… until 15 minutes from home.
There we encountered these vivid, horizon-to-horizon sunflowers sweeping from Lake Mary toward the San Francisco Peaks. Never have we seen anything like this before! This turns out to be Northern Arizona’s most amazing wildflower year in memory, and we’re thrilled to have captured even a tiny fragment of it from aloft.
Nowhere is the power of numbers more boldly reflected than in these fields of sunflowers captured from a speeding airplane thousands of feet in the air!
Like all my Fine Art Metal Prints, “Miles and Miles of Sunflowers,” ready-to-hang pricing starts at just $125, with super-affordable 2-day shipping throughout the Continental US.
Check out all my Views from the Flying Carpet aerials* and Down to Earth terrestrial photos!* (*These pages take a moment to load.)
Many thanks to all who invest in my prints, books, and pilot achievement plaques!
Greg
Subscribe here to follow Greg’s latest posts, photos, and podcasts!
Rarely do we light airplane pilots get to outfly the airlines, but it does occasionally happen.
A dozen years ago, the Flying Carpet suffered a spate of in-flight voltage regulator failures. This device meters electricity generated by the alternator to meet the airplane’s ongoing electrical needs and keep the battery charged. It also protects the electrical system against spikes or shorts that could damage electrical components.
Every few months our latest voltage regulator would fail in flight, disabling the aircraft’s charging system and sending us scrambling for a mechanic. Sometimes it could be temporarily reset by cycling the alternator switch, but usually not. Of course these failures always occurred at inopportune times, and caused lots of “what-if” stress every time we launched on a cross-country flight. Yet the intermittency stymied our mechanics in identifying the cause.
Then one day, a savvy avionics tech at Falcon Field (KFFZ) asked if I could hear our original-equipment flashing beacon cycling on and off through my headset. When I answered yes, he asked if those beacon pulses also presented via the ammeter needle. They did. It turns out that with age, the power supply units for old flashing beacons can internally deteriorate, drawing increasing electrical current as the circuitry fails.
Testing revealed that our beacon was drawing so much current with each flash, that over time it was causing each successive voltage regulator to disconnect the charging system and fail. Installing a new low-power LED beacon finally solved the problem, though it would take months of trouble-free operation before we could fully believe it.
Jean and I launched homeward from Falcon Field that day flashing our bright-and-shiny new beacon, arriving to rare IFR weather in Flagstaff…
(This column first appeared in AOPA Flight Training magazine.)
Greg
©2019 Gregory N. Brown
If you enjoyed this story, you’ll love Greg’s book, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane. Autographed copies available!
Nothing’s more rewarding for pilots than a mission.
“Shay needs a ride home for Easter weekend—do you know anyone driving to Flagstaff from Phoenix?” texted our friend Terri from Window Rock, in far northeast Arizona.
Terri’s niece Shay is a university student in suburban Phoenix. Along with joining family for the holiday, she wanted to visit an ailing relative and her cousin’s young baby. But Shay has no car, nor is there efficient public transportation for the 300-mile drive from Phoenix to Window Rock. She sometimes rides five hours home with a classmate, but this time he could offer only the return trip.
Flagstaff is only halfway to Window Rock, but from there Terri could retrieve Shay in an afternoon’s drive. None of my neighbors, however, expected holiday visitors from Phoenix. So I offered my young friend a Flying Carpet ride.
Delivering Shay from Glendale Municipal Airport (KGEU) directly to Window Rock would have saved Terri hours of driving, but for me it meant flying four hours in afternoon turbulence, half with an inexperienced passenger. So instead I proposed rendezvousing Shay with Terri at Winslow-Lindbergh Regional Airport (KINW), just an hour flight from Glendale and two hours’ drive from Window Rock.
Shortly after I landed at Glendale on the appointed day, Shay texted that she’d arrived–but was nowhere in sight…
Photo: Shay (r) greets her grandmother and Aunt Terri (l) at Arizona’s Winslow-Lindbergh Regional Airport.
(This column first appeared in AOPA Flight Training magazine.)
Greg
©2019 Gregory N. Brown
If you enjoyed this story, you’ll love Greg’s book, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane. Autographed copies available!
Years ago when I instructed part-time in Indiana, my instrument student Pete presented a surprise opportunity to fly for his company.
“We’ll start with rental airplanes while you help pick out a suitable twin,” he offered during a lesson. Having only 140 hours of multiengine experience at the time, I questioned why he chose me.
“As an instructor you are thorough, cautious, and safe,” said Pete. “You’ll need a type-specific checkout and we’ll initially pay a higher insurance premium, but those are good investments in my opinion.” I took the job, and ultimately we purchased a cabin-class Piper Navajo.
My first lesson was how much work it takes running even a single-airplane corporate flight department. I spent more time managing maintenance and logistics than piloting.
For one thing, radios were less reliable back then, meaning frequent visits to the avionics shop.
Then one day the landing gear wouldn’t retract after takeoff. Better that than not extending for landing, but flying the normally speedy twin home from the East Coast at 130 knots maximum-gear-extended speed was memorable for the wrong reasons…
Photos: Piper Navajo “cabin-class” twin.
(This column first appeared in AOPA Flight Training magazine.)
Greg
©2019 Gregory N. Brown
If you enjoyed this story, you’ll love Greg’s book, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane. Autographed copies available!
Thursday, I flew to meet a pilot friend for lunch. Sounds routine, doesn’t it? But Uwe Goehl, Canadian Airbus captain who flies the world for a Middle-Eastern airline, lives in faraway Abu Dhabi. We last met six years ago, so when Uwe enrolled in hot-air balloon training just across the state line at Hurricane, Utah, I jumped at the chance to reconnect. As always when bound for unfamiliar airports, I phoned ahead.
“As long as you’re not staying over the weekend,” said Art Granger, manager of Hurricane’s General Dick Stout Field Airport (1L8). “We’re closing the runway for reconstruction Monday morning—you wouldn’t want to get stuck here for three months.”
That got my attention. Sure, I planned only a day trip, but what if delayed by weather or an unexpected mechanical problem? I remembered my friend Julie, whose airplane was stranded at another airport when runway reconstruction started two days early and she couldn’t leave. So I arranged to meet Uwe at nearby St. George Regional Airport (KSGU), instead.
St. George is only 150 miles from Flagstaff, but over a stunningly remote route. Halfway lies none other than the Grand Canyon, followed by the uninhabited “Arizona Strip.” En route, only Grand Canyon National Park Airport reports weather, beyond which there are no airstrips, towns, nor even ranches for 100 miles. So while excited, I obsessively double-checked my survival kit, outerwear, water, and energy bars…
Photo: “Hurricane Cliffs and the Pine Valley Mountains, Utah” (available as a Fine Art Metal Print).
(This column first appeared in AOPA Flight Training magazine.)
Greg
©2019 Gregory N. Brown
If you enjoyed this story, you’ll love Greg’s book, Flying Carpet: The Soul of an Airplane. Autographed copies available!
