About Me

In 2003 I retired after 34 years of teaching high school science. My flying experience began in 1966 at Ithaca New York where I was attending graduate school at Cornell University. My private pilot, single engine land certificate was obtained in spring of 1967. Since then I have added private-glider, commercial-glider, commercial-airplane, instrument-airplane, flight instructor-glider, flight instructor-airplane, and flight instructor-instrument airplane ratings. I have accumulated 10,000+ hours of flight time which includes such varied operations as glider towing, banner towing, mountain flying, cross country and high altitude glider flights with one flight to 37,000 feet in the Pikes Peak mountain wave. It has also been a privilege to have provided over 7,000 hours of flight instruction since 1976 to basic, commercial, instrument, and flight instructor students.

My Panel (Before and After)

The original panel in the Lance was pretty much a conventional six pack. When I purchased it in 1995 it also sported a state of the art (then) Argus 7000. Several years ago when one of my students upgraded his panel with a G530, he gave me his Northstar M3 GPS which replaced an aging loran C that came with the Lance. With the new panel the M3, ADF, DME, Argus 7000, 170B self contained VOR and #2 Narco com became history. In their place are an EDM 800 engine analyzer, Garmin 530W, Garmin 430W, new audio panel and, of course, the Aspen PFD and MFD.

My Aspen Experience

Many of the pilots with whom I have flown own aircraft equipped with various makes and models of advanced technology avionics. As a result I have been fortunate in becoming familiar with numerous black boxes. When it became possible for me to upgrade my panel I chose Aspen because of the ease of use, the amount of flight data available, the compact format which greatly facilitates the instrument scan, the quality, appropriateness and flexibility of pre-set data points and prompts, and the fact that all of this is provided at a price that beats the competition.

On our annual fishing trip to Canada this summer my son, Grant, was flying the Lance. I had spent about three hours familiarizing him with the new panel before the trip. I was flying another airplane. At our second refueling stop and after about three hours of IMC, Grant mentioned to me that flying was just too easy any more! He had just completed a successful approach to the airport behind an airliner that had to declare a missed approach because of weather conditions and equipment limitations. We still carry paper charts, but they normally never leave the chart case. The Aspen equipment is a critical component of a flying platform that simplifies the complex duties of flying safe, successful, and situationally aware instrument flight: it is absolutely worth the expense.