"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives."
William Dement – sleep researcher
Tag: Andrew Nicol (Page 2 of 4)
A brief update on flying in the clubs other Alpha (ZK-WJH) which I flew this morning. I did some glide approaches then went solo in the Alpha.
Observations
– The stall warning seems to function heaps better in this plane. I only heard it when I expected to.
– Only having two flap settings 10 & 35 Degrees is a pain on a glide approach. I duffed the first one because I put full flap down to early.
Still great aircraft to fly. Since I have done a solo I am back to normal PPL lessons.
"It is like climbing into a new car when you have been used to driving a car that is 25 years old." citied Roger (CFI) when I asked him about the new Alpha 160A (R2160) that the Waikato Aero Club has replaced the Cessna 152's with.
A week or so later he is proven correct when I go for my first type intro flight. The first thing I noticed when I clambered into ZK-WKF, doing my level best not to stand on the plush leather seats, was that everything looks new, there are actually some digital gauges and a GPS unit.
Marie kindly explains the various features and start-up procedure and before long we are off to the eastern training area for some stalls and a forced landing. 
I have now completed 3 type introduction lessons in the Alpha 160A and here are my brief observations (from a novice perspective)
- The view and the sunburn! The view is stunning on a fine day. My first flight out I could see down to Mt Ruapehu. With that comes the glass house effect, sunburn and heat. An interesting trade off.
- It has a control stick as opposed to a control wheel. Feels really natural straight away (must be the experience of computer joysticks from my younger days)
- HEAPS more right rudder. The larger engine and huge tail rudder means it takes a lot of right rudder to keep the aircraft in balance. It requires it so much so that you would almost expect it to have a rudder trim. Alias trim isn't there so its off to the gym to work on my right leg muscles.
- The STALL warning sounds way to early. You are flying a well configured aircraft on approach and suddenly the stall warning goes when you theoretically are 20 kts above stall speed. Scares the crap out of me.
- It glides like a rock (or slightly better). At the recommended 80 IAS you are dropping 1000 fpm, which doesn't leave a lot of time for a Forced Landing from 2500 ft. The club is teaching Forced Landings at around 72-75 IAS, but then the stall warning kicks in every 10 – 20 secs.
- Gone are the long flares on landing that I have been taught about in the C152. You basically point the Alpha at the ground and do a small flare just before touch down. If you were to flare at the same angle as the Cessna that rear of the plane scraps along the runner (no brownie points earned if you do that)
- GRUNT. The 160 hp Alpha verses the 110 hp Cessna can mean some pretty quick trips in the downwind portion of the circuit.
All in all a great asset to the club and a fun plane to fly. I'm looking forward to my cross country flights in it!
[Hat Tips]
Photos – Chris Nielsen
Waikato Aero Club
Alpha Aviation
This is a part of John Keys speech yesterday.
My father died when I was a young child. I do not remember him.I was raised, along with my sisters, by my mother, in a state house in Christchurch. Back then I thought I was poor and, by most standards, we were. As I grew up, though, I recognised that what my mother gave to my sisters and I was far more valuable than money.
She instilled in us the desire to improve ourselves by our own hard work, the confidence that we were able to do it, and the hope that it was possible to do so. She instilled in me an ethic of hard work and determination and a genuine belief that "you get out of life what you put into it".
How many kids in New Zealand are never taught these values? How many kids will grow up not knowing that anything is possible and not knowing anything but dependence on the state.
Imagine if we could teach parents to inspire their kids again! Imagine if they regained the appreciation for hard work that I think is getting lost in the youth of today.
John Keys impresses me. If he gets to be PM, what a hard job he has before him.
Finally I am reminded that I am so blessed to have the parents I have. They have always believed in us, supported us, taught us to work hard and encouraged us.
I have blogged before about the interactive mocca that you buy from the 'Naked Grape' in Tauranga.
Well, now I have found an interactive Muesli in Hamilton. It's a new cafe that opened in Te Rapa called AGIO, which is Italian for 'relax'. It does average coffee, but a great Muesli. Check out the photo from my cellphone. Just pour it into your plate and you are away!
Anyway, just because there is no point to this post, I got to thinking about the perfect cafe. I think the perfect cafe would be on leisure island, I have no idea of its real name, with a view like the one taken from my PDA below, and sell interactive mocca's and muesli.
How cool would that be?
Oh and I think there is a lesson to this post and my previous one. I really need to buy a small digital camera that I can take with me wherever I go. My 1 megapixel PDA with a dirty lens simply doesn't cut it.
There they are! The Marlborough Sounds. 
The picture from my PDA does it little or no justice, but I simply had to take some photos. The lady in front of me had a real digital camera and I thought of asking her to email them to me, but my courageous contemplation turned to weak actions.
I sit in the ATR, transfixed at the sight of the Marlborough Sounds out my window and grateful for the relief from a tiring day that woolgathering about the Sounds allows.
I have long dreamed of chartering a yacht and sailing around the Sounds. I dream of waking up on a still, warm, sunlit and cloudless morning surrounded by little islands covered in bush and farmland. The only sound is the sound of water lapping enchantingly against the side of the boat. I dream of jumping from the side of the boat for a quick swim to remind my body it is alive. Then I dream of the mandatory cooked breakfast that has smells and aromas and tastes that can only be experienced in location such as this.
It's a dream. A long held dream. Hopefully one day it will become a reality.
Just one person in any one company can make it or blow it. One person can sent you away feeling like the most important person in the world or make you feel like they don’t value your business.
Yesterday Alf & I were flying to Christchurch for the day. We had a heap to discuss prior to getting their so I left Hamilton on the 6am flight to Auckland to connect with the 6:50 flight to Christchurch. Alf was on this flight joining me in Auckland and I had preallocated a seat for him next to me, because we were checking-in in different cities.
My Hamilton flight always gets in after the Christchurch Flight is boarding and I am one of the last on the plane. I get onboard and some other guy is in the seat next to me! So texting Alf I find out he is in 17d. I explain to the cabin assistant Alf had been preallocated into the seat next to me, and could me be moved into the seat opposite. He said he will check with the Captain and while he is doing that some other guy comes from the back and sits in that seat.
Now the cabin assistant has a choice. Does he try to make something work, or just walk away. There are after all spare seats in row 2 behind me, and I’m sure one of them wouldn’t mind moving forward to row 1. He can help me or bug the snot out of me and do nothing.
He does nothing and says nothing further.
Alf and I missed out on really quality time together that we will never again enjoy 🙁 (secretly I think alf planned it to get some sleep) and we arrived in Christchurch less prepared than we should have.
Oh, the airline was Air NZ, not that this is a surprise because there is no other alternative for me out of Hamilton.
It all comes down to one person. How often does one person blow it in agoge and we don’t know or care? How often do I blow it?
Oh one last point. The guy sitting next to me heard all of this. He could have offered to move to the seat opposite (before the other guy came up), and been closer to the door, and had more leg room. Personally I would have offered to do that. But he said nothing and in a funny way I feel sorry for that guy.
By means of introduction, a gobblelygook is a device that sits in your sink, that you run water through and it mashes up the food into waste water. From there it is mixed with all sorts of waste water delights like #1’s and #2’s and other stuff and pumped to the sewage treatment plant. In Hamilton’s case the water is then pumped back out into the Waikato River upstream of the Auckland domestic water supply intact.
Auckland water … yummy yummy. The Wiggles should rerecord there song!
Anyway, the other day I was putting some left over food down the gobblelygook and a guest said I should save it for another day. They then said “think of all the staving people in Africa”. Now this is not a dig at that person, because I have heard this statement a number of times in my life and I am sure it is more about not being wasteful than anything else.
But if we were really to stop and think about all the staving people in Africa, would it really change what we throw away. For me personally eating stale bread the next day is not my idea of fun and if I did it would not help the staving people in Africa or another place one iota.
I guess the point of this post is that there are heaps of statements that we make that really mean very little unless we are actually prepared to follow through on them. If I really thought of the staving people anywhere, and was compelled as a result, I would do stuff and give stuff (not left over bread) that would actually make a difference in their lives. If I don’t then there is little point raising it as an issue.
The person who made the comment may already do all of that, I don’t know, but I was challenged about the throw-away phrases I use that do the same thing.
I know it is going to be a long day when I am half-way through driving to Auckland and the alarm on my phone goes off at the predetermined to tell me it is time to get up. I arrived at the Auckland office in record time 1:06, this is in part because the road was empty and my foot was slightly heavier than normal today. A sub 60 trip is looking on the cards one day.
The persistent noise in the background changes to the next track and Bono sings “Something is about to give, I can feel it coming, I think I know what it means.” I let the words sink in a little bit, and then start thinking about a decision I made on Sunday not to speak about Authentic Community. It was a huge decision for me, because I left a number of people in the lurch, but it was the right decision.
I seem to be making heaps of decisions at the moment, all the while aware that something is about to give. Some of them are well rounded decisions with great motives, others are strange decisions with little effect and a few are decisions that are simply out of character for the man I want to be.
It is interesting that each decision I make, makes the bigger decisions easier. It is like a self-perpetuating snowball running and pitching and bowling down a hillside. Each decision increases the size of the ball, each decision increases its momentum, but with each decision the ball also becomes less controllable and has the potential for a more damage if it hits the wrong thing rather than just coming to rest at the bottom of the hill.
It is the uncontrollability and potential for harm that kept me awake after Jayden woke me in the early hours of the morning.
Anyway, I am not sure if this is a post about decision making, or a post about reasons why you shouldn’t blog with a lack of sleep. I think I will go have a doze on the couch in reception until Marc arrives.
Sweat Dreams…
Last Thursday after we got into the Fast 50, I took a few people from work out to dinner with me to celebrate. At the table was Hav who just has an immense passion for agóge; Rob jnr who has such a detail mind and who keeps so many things I hate doing on track; and Cherie who is simply one of the most bona fide people I have ever met. Anyway I am sitting in this restaurant with a funny look on my face, watching my friends and just soaking it in and totally overwhelmed. There was something about the moment. A sense that in spite of everything hard we have been through, we're going to make it. I know this sounds a little corny, but you know what I am saying. It was an ordinary moment in an ordinary setting that for me became infused with something bigger. With community. Inspiration. Hope.
In two weeks time I have to talk on authentic community and I was chatting to a friend of mine yesterday about what that means. Community literally means 'in common'. People who gather together with something in common. Authentic according to dictionary.com theoretically means "not false; genuine". To me it means more than that.
It means being Real.
Honest.
Vulnerable.
Loyal.
An authentic person doesn't wear 'masks' to make them appear to be different than they are. They are honest and real about their struggles and failures. They seek help and are vulnerable.
I asked my two team meetings recently "How are you going? Really? " and generally I received genuine. Real. Honest. Vulnerable answers.
I think this small business called agóge. This business with people from all over the world, with varying educations, from different religions and diverse upbringings is starting to become an authentic community. A community that could actually make a huge difference in peoples lives.
It humbles me.