Today’s Photo from Ted Grussing Photography:
Red mountains and continuing

By Ted Grussing

… the aviation stuff. A pilot friend of mine wrote me this morning and said that he kept waiting to hear about the oxygen … sorry and yes we were on O2. Normally I do not go on oxygen until somewhere between 10,000’ and 13,000’. FAR’s state that if you are above 12,500’ for more than thirty minutes you are required to use oxygen and it is mandatory at 14,000’ and above. I use the Mountain High Oxygen system which gives you a puff of oxygen at the start of the breathing cycle, insuring that it gets deep into the lungs. The units have a built in barometer which senses pressure altitude and you can have it on and set the altitude where you want it to start giving you oxygen and the higher you go the more it dispenses. A very efficient system and since it is not continuous flow I get close to 25 hours out of the onboard bottle. Oxygen is very cheap brain food! At higher altitudes you can develop hypoxia which is not a good thing if you are piloting a plane. My cockpit is not pressurized nor would I want it to be so, else I could not shoot out the side vents.

Last year I installed a new iEFIS system and again I chose the MGL Avionics unit and it is an extremely powerful piece of electronics. The screen is a touch screen and much larger than the older one I had and all kinds of neat new functions which I will not go into … much. I have a total of seven different screens that I can display simply by rotating the bottom right knob. The device stores maps for all of North America including all airports both public, private and dirt … if you can land a plane on a place it is in the database and of course all the navigation tools. In the upper right corner, it has the information on the go to airport which is Sedona. Tells me how far, how long it will take to get there and what time I will arrive and the heading to fly. The vertical tape on the left is again the airspeed tape giving me true, indicated and ground speed … vertical tape on the right is the altitude tape and at the top you have the air pressure in inches of mercury and at the bottom of the tape is the vertical speed indicator which is showing 300’per minute up and that agrees with the variometers on the left and right (Borgelt).

One of the coolest features on this instrument is the 3D modeling of the terrain. We were flying from Sunset Crater to the SF Peaks and on the screen you can see red mountains and a black line horizontal across the screen. The black line is the horizon and also where we are vertically compared to the mountains ahead of us. Pretty cool and a no brainer as looking forward you can obviously see that we are a couple of thousand feet below the peaks, but if as frequently happens the basin is filled with clouds and you cannot see the mountains it is nice to know what is in front of you and decisions can be made.

More instruments are showing in this photo … to the right and stacked are two Garmin units, the Transponder Mode C with a NavWorx ADS-B add on – this transmits my location, altitude, identification information and also receives from other ADS-B compliant aircraft and displays their information on the MGL Screen – it is good to be seen and to see. Below that is my radio and below that the circuit breakers for all the instruments, electric fuel pump, navigation and strobe lights and the landing light and to the right of them in a red cage the magneto switches; aircraft engines have two ignition systems – back up is nice in the air as you can’t really pull over to the side of a cloud and fix things … thankfully it is a glider too :+) Above those switches is the slave variometer unit  and above that the cabin heat, to the right and out of sight a wet compass. The throttle is below the iEFIS on the right side.

So enough of this stuff for a while, I did get quite a few requests for more of this, thus the continuation. This image is a composite as the shot of the panel got the panel but blew out the view in front. The images were taken less than one minute apart so this really is the view we were looking at. We were approximately over Lockett Meadow and continued into the beginning of the inner basin. I noticed some aspens were beginning to turn color and hoping for a good color show this year.

Much work on photos and websites Tuesday and today will be more of the same … more normal narratives (whatever that is) tonight.

Have a terrific day … smile and share a smile and kindness with others today … never know how you might make the day a good one for another person.

Cheers

Ted

Give me to gladly go
My way and say
No word of mine own woe;
But let me smile each day
— Max Ehrmann