Flying Through Clouds....

L

Lionheart

SOH-CM-2014
Hey all,

This is a cool little YouTube video someone made. He is flying his WT-9 Dynamic through some soft non-dangerous clouds at sunset. The background music you will recognize from Avatar.

[YOUTUBE]tR8rPoEn5Vk[/YOUTUBE]
 
Beautiful !!!

Dad was a fighter/bomber pilot and I grew up on Airforce bases.
Back then, the TV stations would shut down around midnite with a film of a plane flying thru the clouds and some guy reciting the poem "High Flight" and then the National Anthem. Dad would let me stay up for that.

On my sixteenth birthday, I soloed in several aircraft: Piper Cub & Cherokee 140, Aeronca 7AC, Cessna 150, 172, and a Stearman.

The Stearman and I got along really well (plus, she knew how to do crosswind landings) and we spent many hours dancing with the clouds........
I would always climb above and do a few 360's to check for traffic before dropping down and exploring.....

Sometimes I'd pretend the Stearman was my WWI fighter and I was a famous ace.
One day I chased a Fokker thru the clouds, ending up in a narrow cloud valley that stretched forever.
I had him in my sights and was about to squeeze the trigger, when a 707 came out of one side of the valley and disappeared into the other...........the visual was about 1 sec. max.
I hauled back on the stick and got outta there pronto.

What's really cool is skimming over a long flat layer and having it suddenly disappear.....leaving thousands of feet of nothing below you.

Breath-taking.

Thanks for the video, Bill.........

You brought back some nice memories.......

LD
 
The closest I have come to living what the video depicted was the time I was stuck behind an old Ford farm truck that had not a single oil ring left on any of the engine's 8 pistons....it smoked like a 45 acre brush fire, but didn't smell like a nice big camp fire in any way. 3 miles of sucking burnt oil...not a nice drive at all. Took 3 days to get all the oil residue off my windshield, but my front bumper never rusted!

OBIO
 
People who have never flown just don't know the true beauty of clouds, sunrises and sunsets. :)
 
When I was flying the T-37 in UPT we used to play a game with the clouds. The game was to fly the edges of the clouds without actually going in them (VFR - Illegal :d ) My IP would ding me one point if I touched them and two points if I went into the clouds.

That was so much fun. We would soar above the tops and zoom into the valleys and around the edges, rolling onto our backs like a graceful bird. The purpose behind the frolicking was to learn to be totally comfortable in the airplane, regardless to your attitude and orientation to the ground.

I later did this in GA aircraft. However, it isn't as much fun when you don't have the power or agility of a acrobatic aircraft. You can do it in FSX also. It will help you develop "feel" for the airplane.
 
Some cool stories... Thanks for sharing.


When I was a kid, we lived in San Diego, and dad had restored a Stinson 10-A and a Fairchild 24R. He used to take us up on Sundays and if there was a calm cloud cover over the coast, we could sometimes go near it, play around in it. Once, there was a very calm layer all over San Diego. It was totally flat on the bottom. We were in the slow old Stinson. We got to the very bottom of it (climbing) and then up through it we went. Flying under it was really wild, like the sub in the movie Ice Station Zebra. When we poked out through the top, there was nothing but what looked like hills of snow for as far as the eye could see. It was amazing, clear, and beautiful up there. Totally different from the cloud cover below. We would gently turn, putting the wingtip in the 'snow' (clouds), tap the tops of the small hills, then drop through now and then and check the bottom side.

What a blast that was.

I was in 1st grade at the time, so it had a pretty wild effect on me.



Bill
 
OBIO said:
The closest I have come to living what the video depicted was the time I was stuck behind an old Ford farm truck that had not a single oil ring left on any of the engine's 8 pistons....it smoked like a 45 acre brush fire, but didn't smell like a nice big camp fire in any way. 3 miles of sucking burnt oil...not a nice drive at all. Took 3 days to get all the oil residue off my windshield, but my front bumper never rusted!

OBIO
Click to expand...

LOL ... you just made my day! :applause::applause::applause:
 
What's really cool is skimming over a long flat layer and having it suddenly disappear.....leaving thousands of feet of nothing below you.

Breath-taking.
Click to expand...
Luckydog:

I used to do that too when I flew a lot!! I knew what was going to happen and No matter how much I planned for it, it always used to make me pucker!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND YES, your right - BREATHTAKING!!!! I can remember immediately checking all my gauges etc - make sure everything was all right!!!! lol Always used to get me...


That was so much fun. We would soar above the tops and zoom into the valleys and around the edges, rolling onto our backs like a graceful bird.
Click to expand...

John:

I can remember going with my brother in his Mustang quite a few times to go "dancing" with the clouds.. Especially big / puffy ones!! Climb up one side and roll over the top and down the other!! Lot of fun!!!

Bill
 
Bill that is exactly what I miss about flying. I used get up early in the morning flying out of Livermore and climb up above the fog over San Francisco. I had a beautiful star-studded velvet canopy just as the sun was coming up. As the fog rolled out usually clouds rolled in over Mt. Diablo and over into the Sacramento river area extending all the way to hills above Lake DelMar and down to San Jose. It was gorgeous beyond belief! I would fly over the hills to Tracy and back to Livermore. In the Spring it was glorious! You would really have to be flying to appreciate the magnitude of the beauty of flying in the billowy sea after riding in a velvet canopy sky. Thanks for sharing...awesome little aircraft
 
Really and truly, when I was a kid I used to have a recurring dream like that flight although in the dream I was flying a fighter jet just skimming through the edge of fluffy white clouds. Closest I got to that was a parachute jump, popped the chute at about 8 thousand feet close to sunset and drifted down in and out of the edges of layers of some pink sunset fair weather cumulus cloud...it was beautiful.
 
The closest I have come to that is the day on the Appalachian Trail in VA,I was on top of the Priest at 4000 ft.It is a narrow ridge covered sparsely in trees and the clouds were being blown quickly across it at ground level,I can still feel them on my face,moist and cool 20 years later.

It was a beautiful,cool morning.:USA-flag:
 
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