My electronic mailbag recently included yet another pitch for a "flying car." If, in the last 60 years or so, you've read more than a few sequential issues of Popular Science, you know what I'm talking about. These contraptions appear on the cover of guy, tool-tinkering magazines about as often as Britney Spears gets top billing at People. (And no, I never thought I'd have occasion to include Britney in my blog. But maybe my Google hits will soar.)

Blade Runner, Jetsons cartoons, and "Welcome to Tomorrow" exhibits at world's fairs and Disney theme parks aside, the honor of inventing the car/airplane hybrid usually goes to Moulton (Molt) B. Taylor. He created the AEROCAR in 1949. (The first patent for a drive-fly vehicle seems to belong to Felix Longobardi, who proposed the idea in 1918.)

Taylor's design apparently had something of Robert E. Fulton, Jr.'s "Airphibian" in its genes. It worked, after a fashion, but Taylor spent the rest of his life trying to persuade someone to mass-produce it. When I was the editor of the Western Flyer (now the General Aviation News) in the mid-1980s, Taylor called me about once a month. While I held the phone a safe distance from my ear, Molt declaimed against the airspace-grabbing FAA, short-sighted manufacturers, and all the other obstacles that had kept him from filling the skies (and roads) with Aerocars. You can read an affectionate and detailed telling of Molt's story in A Drive in the Clouds by Jake Schultz. Or talk to my friend Hal Bryan, who knows more about--and revels in--odd aircraft than anyone I've known, except maybe Pete Bowers.

Anyway, Taylor's dream lives on in the sporty AEROCAR 2000 and in many other space-age designs, including the Skycar (Moller International) and the subject of that recent email, the Transition from Terrafugia. The latter machine is billed as a "roadable Light-Sport Aircraft." According to Terrafugia's Web site, the company includes graduates of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. At present, the Transition seems to exist as a CG model and as a virtual airplane that flies in the X-Plane flight simulation.

Now, I'm hardly qualified to pass judgment on the technical merits of any of these designs. Something like the Transition, designed to do its flying between airports and then drive to and from home, may become a practical solution for recreational pilots and even some commuters.

But no matter how much razzle-dazzle technology is brought into these machines, I remain a skeptic about them becoming more than curiosities, because the fundamental obstacles to their development and wide adoption aren't technological.

The core problem, which rarely seems to come up in breezy news reports (here's a typical example; another gushy account is here) about the inventors and their machines, isn't developing a collision-avoidance system or computerized controls that make the vehicles as easy to fly as a car is to drive. No, the fundamental issues are societal, political, and regulatory. And they're much more serious than the "auto-mobiles will frighten the horses" alarms of the early 20th century.

First, who is going to certify the machines and their operators and supervise maintenance? Granted, airphibian pilots of the future may not need as much training as today's private pilots, but driver's ed won't suffice, either. The FAA can barely keep up with today's air transportation system (about 600,000 aviators hold pilot certificates in the U.S.; some 240,000 civil aircraft ply our skies)--supervising flight schools, maintenance facilities, and manufacturers; regulating pilots and mechanics; running the ATC system; overseeing the airlines; etc. Witness the FAA funding debate.

More important, absent a major overhaul of the FAA regulations and ATC system, how would thousands of new hybrid air-ground vehicles fit into existing airspace? Urban areas lie beneath complex mazes of FAA-regulated airspace designed to ensure the safe and efficient flow of aircraft. If you were to own a snazzy Skycar, you couldn't just buzz around at will, especially over "congested areas" (see, e.g., FAR 91.119).

Airports already contend with complaints over noise and concerns about safety. In Seattle, one tony neighborhood wages a perennial battle against Children's Hospital in part because the medical center's helipads allow too many annoying rotorcraft to fly in at all hours of the day and night--even if they are transporting critically ill children. Imagine the furor if scores of personal air vehicles buzzed randomly overhead, taking shortcuts from home to work.

Even spectacular accidents like the recent I-5 pileup in LA are largely confined to roads and highways. Recall what happens today when an airplane crashes in a populated area (despite the frantic coverage that typically ensues, such accidents are occasional events that rarely harm people on the ground) and then imagine the hysteria if aerial flivvers plop into neighborhoods, schools, and shopping centers as often as cars break down and entangle themselves on the roads. And let's not get into how aerial commuters would avoid conflicts with airliners.

If aircraft/automobile hybrids are limited to aerial operations at existing airports, their utility quickly evaporates, especially in the crowded urban environments where they're most often promoted as machines to escape terrestrial traffic jams. Close-in airports are rare; those that do exist (e.g., Boeing Field in Seattle), are busy, complicated places.

Other issues abound: Could such new vehicles operate safely in inclement weather? If, for example, the Transition is indeed certificated as a light sport aircraft, it can fly only during the day (to operate a light sport aircraft at night, the pilot must hold at least a private pilot certificate) and only in Visual Meteorological Conditions (VMC).

And let's not get into such common weather hazards as blustery winds, airframe icing, turbulence, thunderstorms, and density altitude. Of course, one could argue that upon encountering bad weather, airphibian pilots would land and proceed on the ground. But that argument assumes judgment and skill not in evidence on today's highways and byways; wide availability of landing spots; and a discipline sadly lacking even among many current pilots.

In the end, air/ground vehicles like the Transition could save on hangar and tie-down costs, but that's about their only true advantage over existing aircraft, at least until the general public becomes much more comfortable with small aircraft and all that they imply.

Today's NY Times features a front-page story, "Saudi King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert," about King Abdullah's plans for a $12.5 billion University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. The story notes in part, "The king is lavishing the institution not only with money, but also with his full political endorsement, intended to stave off internal challenges from conservatives and to win over foreign scholars who doubt that academic freedom can thrive here."

The story makes for an interesting read, especially in light of my earlier entry about Pervez Hoodbhoy, chair and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan.

I just returned to semi-tropical Seattle from the Aviation North Expo 2007 in Fairbanks, where I spoke about stall/spin training and using Microsoft Flight Simulator as a training aid. As I noted earlier, aviation is modern Alaska's lifeline. Even the indigenous people are flying into Fairbanks this week for the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention.

The ANE conference focuses on safety, and Alaska pilots have more than the usual issues to deal with. Most short trips in the Lower 48 don't take a typical light airplane pilot far from civilization. Fly just 30 minutes from Anchorage (less from Fairbanks), however, and you usually find yourself far from basic services, to say nothing of most creature comforts--often in temperatures from another world.

As others have noted many times, the scale of Alaska overwhelms your normal sense of perspective. I have ferried small airplanes to Alaska a couple of times (pictures here), but the first leg of the airline flight home this morning from Fairbanks to Anchorage gave me a high-altitude perspective that I had missed on previous trips.

I have flown in the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest for more than 30 years, and I've made many cross-country treks around the U.S. mainland. I'm accustomed to wide-open spaces and tall mountains. But as I pressed my nose against the window at seat 6A this morning (even if you're a jaded road-warrior, always get a window seat on flights to, over, and from Alaska), I suddenly realized what was missing from the scenery below: straight lines.

In the sparsely populated areas of the American West, people have etched the landscape with roads, power lines, and the grids that divvy up range and farmland. Look closely, and beyond the glow of Las Vegas, even the moonscape that is most of Nevada betrays a human presence. We build visitor centers at the bottom of Meteor Crater.

But moments after departing Fairbanks by air, you see a primal vista that flows unbroken to the horizon. No straight lines.

I'm reminded of a wonderful book, Inside the Sky by William Langewiesche. Chapter 2, "The Stranger's Path," tells the story of John Brinckerhoff Jackson, in Langewiesche's words, "the greatest explorer of the aerial view." Jackson, who spent much of his life in New Mexico, once wrote:

"...What catches our eye and arouses our interest is not the sandy washes and the naked rocks, but the evidences of man."

Perhaps he'd never flown above Alaska.

(More pictures from this morning's flight here.)

I'm Fairbanks (as in Alaska) this weekend to speak the Aviation North Expo 2007. I've been to Alaska a few times (see pictures from a previous ferry flight to Anchorage), and it always astonishes me. I've usually had the good sense to head up in the spring or summer, so finding winter conditions in Fairbanks in October was still a surprise.

As was the warning posted outside the hotel. Given the temperature (still on the plus side of zero on the Fahrenheit scale), I don't think close encounters of the Alces alces gigas kind are likely.

Anchorage (beautiful yesterday, as this picture shows) is the temporary roosting place for what must be among the largest flocks of 747s plying today's skies. None of them is carrying passengers, however. They're all cargo versions, hauling stuff over the pole between Asia and Europe and North America.

Of course, for a pilot, the amazing thing about Alaska is how important GA is to life. It's not just a hobby. And the state, so vast, sparsely populated, and otherwise rustic, is also the test bed for much new technology, including ADS-B, the foundation of the next generation of air traffic control; GPS-based RNAV routes; and other developments. I hope to share more details as the weekend progresses.

I often get questions about how flight schools and other training organizations (e.g., the U.S. Navy) use Microsoft Flight Simulator in their programs.

I've collected links to many news reports, journal articles, and other information about that topic on my Flight Simulator in Aviation Training page at BruceAir.com.

That page also addresses questions about FAA approval of flight training devices (the FAA doesn't approve flight simulation software), how flight models figure in FAA approval (spoiler alert: the FAA doesn't care much about flight models, at least at the FTD level), logging simulator time, and so forth.

(By the way, if you're interested in some of the technical details about the 6-DOF flight model used in Microsoft Flight Simulator, see the article “Aircraft Simulation Techniques” on the FSInsider Web site. The document, written by one of the aeronautical engineers on the Flight Simulator team, is available as a .pdf file.)

Foggy mornings in Seattle (last week we had a couple of spectacular exceptions) are good opportunities to post pictures on the Web. Here are some links to some of my SkyDrive folders with lots of aviation-related pictures:

• Ferrying Cessnas to Alaska
• Mock Dogfighting in SIAI Marchetti SF2-60s with Air Combat USA
• Air-to-Air Extra 300L Photos (mostly courtesy of Pat DuLaney); more about the Extra 300L here.
• Ferrying a Diamond DA40XL from London, ONT to Seattle; more details here.

We are enjoying a couple of spectacular autumn days here in Seattle before the monsoons return. I live in the Queen Anne neighborhood, which boasts one of the most famous postcard views of the skyline (photo at right snapped yesterday afternoon from Kerry Park).

I'm off to the bookstore to get the latest by Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. Rhodes wrote the (still) definitive popular history of the Manhattan Project, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and its sequel, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. He mastered the science and technology central to those stories, but he's also a compelling story-teller. The Making of the Atomic Bomb won a Pulitzer Prize.

Rhodes is a brilliant and prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Among my favorites is Deadly feasts : tracking the secrets of a terrifying new plague, about the discovery of prions (proteinaceous infectious particles) the agents responsible for mad cow disease and its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The new and improved version of www.BruceAir.com is now live. I have updated the behind-the-scenes code (using Microsoft Expression Web to create and generate better HTML and CSS), reorganized pages, and--I hope--improved both the appearance and utility of the site.

Pilots (and virtual aviators) will find updated pages about Microsoft Flight Simulator and the role that FS plays in real-world flight training. Of course, you'll also find refreshed pages about my book, Microsoft Flight Simulator as a Training Aid. And I've overhauled the Aviation Resources page, an annotated list of (mostly free) information for pilots available on the Web.

I have moved the BruceAir aerobatic videos to one of my SkyDrive folders; you'll find they're easier to access and faster to download.

Instructors and students may want to check out my Goodies for Pilots page, where I've posted a kneeboard note-taker and PowerPoint shows.

Remember: "Every seat's a window seat on BruceAir."

Seattle enjoyed a spectacular sunrise over the Cascade Range today, as shown in this view (and another) from my house.

Given the forecast (see the Seattle NWS office Forecast Discussion), the scene recalls the old saying,* “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning.”

*(Which, apparently, derives ultimately from Matthew 16:2,3: 2...He answered and said unto them, "When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. 3 And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering.")

The FAA has long offered the Pilot Proficiency Program (known to most aviators as the "Wings Program") as a substitute for the Flight Review required by Section 61.56(e) of the Federal Aviation Regulations. The Wings Program expires at the end of the year, however, and many pilots are confused by its replacement, the WINGS - Pilot Proficiency Program.

The new program is entirely Web-based. You can get more information about the program and register at www.FAASafety.gov. The Web site keeps track of the ground and flight training that you accumulate during each 24-month period, and it provides the documentation you need to verify that you've met the recurrent training requirements that allow you to act as pilot in command.

Many of the online courses offered at www.FAASafety.gov meet the ground-training requirements of the new program. The interactive courses offered by the AOPA Air Safety Foundation are offered as references for many of the training programs. You don't have to join AOPA (but if you're a pilot, you should be a member) to take the ASF courses or use the other training and safety resources available from the AOPA Air Safety Foundation.

The new program offers three phases (explained here). Note that during the flight training required under the new program, pilots must meet the standards of at least the Private Pilot Practical Test Standards. All of the Practical Test Standards are available for download as .pdf documents from the FAA Web site.

You can also find the following references on the FAA Web site:

• Aeronautical Information Manual (.pdf version here)
• Pilot/Controller Glossary (.pdf version here)
• FAA Pilot Training Handbooks (Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, Airplane Flying Handbook, Instrument Flying Handbook, Instrument Procedures Handbook, etc.)

I also maintain an annotated list of (mostly free) aviation-related resources at BruceAir.com.

"Ask the Pilot," a regular feature of Salon.com, today offers the best analysis of snarled airline traffic that I've seen to date.

"Airport congestion and flight delays are making travelers insane. A look at what will and won't solve the problem" covers familiar ground (viz., airline scheduling practices, the shift of much traffic to small regional jets, and the need to update the air traffic control system). But it also addresses the issue that never seems to come up in op-eds and other surveys of the situation: airports--specifically, the number of available runways and associated taxiways and ramps.

(For a typical echo-chamber summary of the situation, see "Fear and Loathing at the Airport" at MSNBC.com, which sounds the familiar alarm and rounds up the usual suspects. "Nobody is in charge. The various players in the system, including big airlines, small aircraft owners, labor unions, politicians, airplane manufacturers, and executives with their corporate jets, are locked in permanent warfare as they fight to protect their own interests. And the FAA, a weak agency that needs congressional approval for how it raises and spends money, seems incapable of breaking the gridlock.")

"Ask the Pilot" writer Patrick Smith, who is an airline pilot, summed up the problem with an all-too-familiar example:

Two weeks ago I was working a flight from Europe to JFK. We landed shortly after 5 p.m. -- several minutes ahead of schedule, ironically -- only to spend the next two hours -- two hours -- taxiing from the end of the runway to our parking position. Our assigned gate was open and available the entire time, but the airport had become a spaghetti snarl of planes. Taxiways were blocked; aprons, clogged. It was literally gridlock -- with scores of 50- and 70-seat RJs jockeying for space with A340s and 747s.

But that delay had nothing to do with thunderstorms, creaky radar equipment, buzzing bizjets, private pilots and their putt-putt planes, or overworked controllers and understaffed FAA facilities.

"So why not build more runways?" asks Smith.

For lots of reasons, not the least of which are the long and contentious battles that runway construction projects inevitably trigger among airport authorities, politicians and anti-expansion neighborhood groups. At my hometown airport, Boston's Logan International, it took 30 years to get a badly needed, 5,000-foot stub of a runway completed.

No less daunting are the funding and technical issues. Taxiways have to be constructed; complex lighting systems installed; navigational aids put in place; flight patterns developed and test-flown. At Denver, the opening of a sixth runway carried a tab of $165 million. Denver, at least, had the room. A runway suitable for heavier jets needs to be two miles long. At LaGuardia? At Kennedy? At Newark or Washington National? Where would it fit?

What Smith doesn't mention explicitly is that the FAA neither owns nor operates airports. It helps pay for them through the Aviation Trust Fund, but it can provide money only after the local governments and other entities that actually plan, build, and operate such facilities get the projects rolling. There's no Bismarck to unify the airport fiefdoms that muck up the national air transportation network on the ground, where all flights begin and end.

Yesterday's Big Post About Science was awfully serious. As he often does, my college roommate, Philip Austin (today an associate professor in the Atmospheric Sciences Programme at the University of British Columbia), reminded me that science is fun, too. Phil's a dedicated, very smart fellow, one of those remarkable scientists who reads widely, writes gracefully (OK, his scientific papers can get a little dense) and persuasively, and is engaged with the real world. Today's email included a message from Phil with a link to a hilarious story, "Scientists Ask Congress to Fund $50 Billion Science Thing," from The Onion. As Phil noted, you'll want to pay special attention to the graphic "Giant Machine Creates Science."

Today’s cast of my RSS net collected the usual detritus from the Web. But among the haul of news and trivia, I found one remarkable item from physicstoday.org: Science and the Islamic world—The quest for rapprochement by Pervez Hoodbhoy, chair and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Hoodbhoy states his thesis as a question early in the essay:

The question I want to pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge?

...It was not always this way. Islam's magnificent Golden Age in the 9th–13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body's circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important element—although by no means the only one—that contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of injustice and victimhood.

You can read Hoodbhoy’s extended, thoughtful, and revealing answer to that specific question yourself (and you can find more of Hoodbhoy’s essays here and here). But two key passages in his paper state the problem more generally and suggest its implications beyond the Muslim world.

First, Hoodbhoy notes,

Science is under pressure globally, and from every religion. As science becomes an increasingly dominant part of human culture, its achievements inspire both awe and fear. Creationism and intelligent design, curbs on genetic research, pseudoscience, parapsychology, belief in UFOs, and so on are some of its manifestations in the West.

To confirm Hoodbhoy’s point, you have only to recall recent candidates’ debates; when asked if they did not “believe” in evolution by means of natural selection, Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls eagerly thrust their hands in air.

Hoodbhoy later states the core issue more specifically:

It's the thought that counts

…At the base lies the yet unresolved tension between traditional and modern modes of thought and social behavior.

That assertion needs explanation. No grand dispute, such as between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, is holding back the clock. Bread-and-butter science and technology requires learning complicated but mundane rules and procedures that place no strain on any reasonable individual's belief system. A bridge engineer, robotics expert, or microbiologist can certainly be a perfectly successful professional without pondering profound mysteries of the universe. Truly fundamental and ideology-laden issues confront only that tiny minority of scientists who grapple with cosmology, indeterminacy in quantum mechanical and chaotic systems, neuroscience, human evolution, and other such deep topics. Therefore, one could conclude that developing science is only a matter of setting up enough schools, universities, libraries, and laboratories, and purchasing the latest scientific tools and equipment.

But the above reasoning is superficial and misleading. Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.

Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or "butterfly-collecting" activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.

There’s the rub. It’s the subject of Lewis Wolpert’s wonderful The Unnatural Nature of Science, Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins, and Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries by Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg. And the fundamental (I use that word advisedly) argument is hardly new. C.P. Snow famously raised similar issues in 1959 in The Two Cultures.

The mathematician Jacob Bronowski played a variation on the theme in, among other works, his lyrical Science and Human Values (1956; revised and expanded in 1962). It’s worth quoting Bronowski, if only to encourage you to read his books (even if some of his delightful metaphors have been overrun by technology):

What is the insight with which the scientist tries to see into nature? Can it indeed be called either imaginative or creative? To the literary man the question may seem merely silly. He has been taught that science is a large collection of facts; and if this is true, then the only seeing which scientists need do is, he supposes, seeing the facts. He pictures them, the colorless professionals of science, going off to work in the morning into the universe in a neutral, unexposed state. They then expose themselves like a photographic plate. And then in the darkroom or laboratory they develop the image, so that suddenly and startlingly it appears, printed in capital letters, as a new formula for atomic energy…

The readers of Christopher Isherwood do not take him literally when he writes “I am a camera.” Yet the same readers solemnly carry with them from their schooldays this foolish picture of the scientist fixing by some mechanical process the facts of nature. I have had of all people a historian tell me that science is a collection of facts, and his voice had not even the ironic rasp of one filing cabinet reproving another. (10–11)

But to wander back to that fundamental point: A society (or culture) “…in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.”

We in the West may smugly assume (despite evidence exposed each day on television news and in the newspapers) that such attitudes prevail only in the Middle East. But read, for example, the doctrinal statement of Liberty University, which states in part:

We affirm that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, though written by men, was supernaturally inspired by God so that all its words are the written true revelation of God; it is therefore inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters. It is to be understood by all through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, its meaning determined by the historical, grammatical, and literary use of the author’s language, comparing Scripture with Scripture.

Hoodbhoy stated his question too narrowly, and we focus only on Islam at our peril.

My old friend Rod Machado has just released his latest book, Rod Machado's Instrument Pilot's Handbook. I'd known Rod for years before I recruited him to serve as the flight instructor for Microsoft Flight Simulator, and we've collaborated on a few projects (and overlapped at aviation events) since.

Rod Machado's Instrument Pilot's Handbook is the companion to his popular and comprehensive Rod Machado's Private Pilot Handbook, which I've used with many students and ground school classes. I've been waiting for his IFR book for a couple of years.

Although the FAA just released an updated (and much improved) Instrument Flying Handbook, it's still an "official" handbook with all that the word implies. Rod's book covers all of the same material (and much more) in his inimitable style.

Now, I reviewed the entire IFR book--every word--before it went to press (and I wrote the foreword), so I know all about Rod's penchant for puns and goofy jokes. But I've also grown to appreciate just how much he knows about matters aeronautical, and how much of that knowledge you can absorb even while you're groaning at one of his endless games of wordplay. And even if you don't read, the pictures alone will expand your knowledge.

To get an idea of what's inside the new book, check out the excerpts (.pdf).

If you're an IFR student or an instrument-rated pilot who wants to brush up on the arcana of flying in the clouds, you should get Rod Machado's Instrument Pilot's Handbook.

My friends at Seattle Avionics today announced a new version of their Voyager Flight Software System--my favorite preflight planning tool.

The latest screen shots look great, and Version 4.0 of the program apparently has a new DirectX rendering engine, so it should offer real-time scrolling and zooming, much like Google Maps and Google Earth. And the latest version can display geo-referenced Sectional and IFR charts.

You can see the new version at AOPA Expo in Hartford, CT this week.

I've used Voyager for many years to plan all types of trips, including long cross-country ferry treks and the annual peregrinations of my Extra 300L. It's an invaluable tool, and I'm eager to try the latest edition.

The monsoons have returned to the Seattle area, but fortunately, I took advantage of a break in the weather last Thursday to fly the Extra 300L from its summer quarters at Seattle's Boeing Field to its winter home at Boulder City, NV (61B), near Las Vegas.

You can download both the planned route* and the GPS track from my Garmin 396 from one of my Skydrive folders. The files in that folder are (small) .kmz files for use with Google Earth.

If Google Earth (a free download) is installed on your system, you can open them in that application and see both the planned route and track superimposed on the Earth.

I use the Voyager Flight Software System to plan my flights. That nifty tool lets me dump routs directly into the Garmin 396 and to Google Earth. Getting the tracks that the GPS records back into Google Earth requires a couple of simple steps, which I'll write about some other time.

You can zoom in and out, tilt the display, etc. to see my meanderings. You can also change the color and thickness of the lines after loading the data files in Google Earth. For more information about using Google Earth, see the product help page.

The track data was recorded every 10 seconds (if you if zoom in on the airports where I stopped, you'll notice some zigs--or zags--in the traffic patterns).

The basic route of flight: KBI-KCVO-KOVE-KDLO-61B

(*I planned to stop at KLHM in northern California, but according to a NOTAM, the runway was closed, hence the dogleg to Oroville, which has the virtue of relatively cheap fuel.)

Total flight time: 6.7 hours to fly 1049 nm (for those of you keeping score at home, that's an average ground speed of 156 knots). The Extra has enough fuel to handle legs of roughly two hours with reserves; the route above shows the fuel stops.