Arlo Gilbert’s Blog

Today was another great flying day, my confidence (not over confidence) is really at an all time high with regards to my ability to be a good pilot in charge.

The flight began with a *pop*… about 5 feet off the ground my door suddenly popped open. Mind you that an opening door is is not a dangerous event but it is extremely noisy, extremely windy, and even more so it is extremely friggin cold when it’s about 15 degrees outside and you’re hurtling through the air at 100knots.

Thankfully the fantastic ATC crew at Westchester was able to get me back into the pattern for a quick landing, they are the best!

The rest of the flight was non-eventful, I practiced navigating using VOR’s (radio beacons), did about 10 landings that were good, some were great, some were so-so, all were safe though… then on the way back my instructor Al pulled out the dredded “foggles”.

For those of you who are not clear on what foggles are exactly, they are essentially like the hard plastic protective eye gear you would wear when sanding or doing wood work except that the top half is not transparent, thus you are able to see only what is below the dashboard (your instruments).

At first I was a bit nervous at whether the foggles would make me feel nauseus (imagine sitting in the back seat of a car that bounces up and down a lot while trying to read several books)… thankfully it was a breeze, and in fact I might go as far as saying that I prefer flying instruments to flying visually, it is much more precise.

Til later…

Ok so perhaps I didn’t quite land the plane like this but there were times that it felt like it!

After three weeks off from flying I was quite suprised that the flying wasnt so hard to pick up. I just gave myself permission to have a crappy flight if necessary and it turned out great. I owe a lot of that to my flight instructor Al. One piece of advice I can give to future private pilot students is that when you come to critical repetitions maneuvers like landings and cross wind landings… stick with one single instructor. Bouncing around between instructors is very frustrating for many reasons. During early training multiple instructors can be quite helpful, but for repetitions use one guy (or girl).

In any case, a cross wind landing for those who don’t know is as such:

Normally when a pilot lands a plane it is preferrable to have no wind or to have wind directly heading at you. This head wind helps to generate additional lift and resistance which both helps to slow the plane and to keep you nice and comfy on a cushion of air. A cross wind landing is when the wind is coming from either your left or right… this is particularly challenging because at any point a nice gust of wind from the left or right can force your wings up in the wrong direction and make landing very challenging… if this happens on the ground it can actually flip the plane and damage your wings.

Regardless though, we had some nice 25knot gusts and I got to practice some cross winds, it was fantastic, the landings were good, the flying was a bit bumpy but pleasant, and as always I am a wiz with the radios. I feel confident that I will be ready to begin soloing (means flying the plane alone without an instructor to save you) soon.

I’ll admit it, I took macro economics and micro economics in college. I pulled by with an A+ and a C- respectively, but nowhere in these courses did my professors mention the falacy of money… that is, that money isn’t real, it doesn’t really exist. It only exists because we place faith in it and because it keeps moving out of and into our hands.

Yes I know this sounds like the beginning of a governmental conspiracy rap, but the fact is that massive escalating borrowing is essential to our economy, without it, nobody has any money. If you don’t believe me, take a look at “The Money Masters” a very educational PBS movie that was produced by a group of respected economists. I digress however, a history of our economy is not the purpose of this post.

The purpose of this post is in fact relating to this new bubble we are seeing, it is ripe for a massive explosion. Period. End of sentence.

Consumers are unable to pay their mortgages, credit card debt is at an all time high, bank after bank after bank is taking massive multi billion dollar write-downs to account for their failed sub-prime lending… and in the midst of all of this we see companies like FaceBookgetting valuations of $15 Billion dollars.

I have no personal vendetta with FaceBook, but it is imho the equivalent of a flash in the pan night club. It has lots of users who use it because it’s free and currently “cool”, it has lots of advertisers who can’t figure out how to monetize those users because the fact is that those users are not there to shop or gain knowledge about a subject or product, they are there to hang out with their friends. They have revenues of somewhere in the mid 8 figures range (with no mention of their costs)… 

So where has the investing community’s mind gone that it places such value on this company that produces nothing, creates nothing, adds value to nothing and generally is unproductive?

In my humble opinion again, this is what happens when there are no sound investments and everybody is desperately seeking the next “big thing”. Facebook has value no doubt, probably in the neighborhood of 5 years net revenues (whatever that net is if it’s even positive), but I have as of yet heard a compelling argument as to why Skype was worth 4.5 Billion and Facebook is worth 15 Billion.

These valuations are simply made up, poof out of thin air an MBA earning his keep one evening says “xyz.com is worth this much. why? why not?”… and as long as our economy can support it and people believe that easy money comes from nothing, the the bubble will continue to grow and people will continue to be dazzled by flashing lights while ignoring important business fundamentals like “cash flow”, “liquidity”, and “profitability”.

The emperor has no clothes. The economy is fragile. Speculative nonsensical investing caused the sub-prime meltdown and speculative nonsensical investing and hype will cause the web 2.0 bubble to pop.

I just want to know one thing… can I please get in on the FaceBook IPO ?

I’ll be blogging as much as possible over the next few weeks to make up for my lack of posting.

I tend to be somewhat of a workaholic and it became clear that I needed a hobby to take my mind off of work and to give me something to talk about other than work.

Whittling, yoga, underwater basket-weaving… those all seemed a bit boring so I decided that I would learn how to fly airplanes.

What better way is there to spend time (and money)? Plus I am not a big fan of commercial flying and avoid it whenever possible… Yes, this could be the hobby for me, I can go visit people, get a $100 hamburger and a $500 piece of keylime pie!

While flying is certainly not inexpensive, small single engine planes are only a few hundred dollars per hour to operate at most… so I went to the guys at Performance Flight and took an “experience flight” where they take you up in a Cirrus SR-22 Turbo, get you up to about 4000 feet and let you actually fly the plane.

My experience flight was a bit of a mixed blessing, it made me a bit nauseous, and the summer heat did not help, but the prospect of being free of TSA security lines and having alternatives to the $2000-$4000 per hour jet charters was too much for me to pass on.

So I signed on the dotted line and began my lessons the following week…. more to come.

I am starting this blog a bit later than planned. Initially the intent had been to chronicle my flying experience from beginning to end… but that clearly didn’t happen.

Tomorrow I’m flying again after a 3 week hiatus. I have been flying Cirrus SR-20’s now for about three months and am very close to beginning my solo flights (or so my instructors tease me with).