Flying Session

After making some plans yesterday with a friend from work for today it meant that I had to be up and out of bed pretty early for a Saturday morning. Usually I like to sleep in at least a little bit more on the weekend, at least 8:00 AM or so but not today. Today is a flying day - the first real day of flying out at a big area.

Flying Field

As mentioned, today I headed out early and drove over to the south-west side of town up towards Mount Rose. There is a huge soccer field up that way that no-one goes to really, only kids and parents but they stay down toward the lower fields where there is a playground. This means plenty of room for flying and enough room to make mistakes and recover from them without ramming into the house, bushes or myself.

First things first I fired up my AR.Drone quadcopter to get some video of the area and warm up my flying muscle memory since I have been unable to fly for about 6 weeks. The drone was being a little bit of a pain in the ass to be honest and was giving me some grief. I was able to fly it through all 4 batteries but again, not without grief. I think I am going to have to suck-it-up and remove the modification that I put on it so I could control it with a traditional transmitter.

The more I thought about it today while driving home I think that is the cause of the majority of the issues I am having with flying it. Plus if I use the iPad or iPhone it opens up a ton of other options and cool things that I could not otherwise do. The only real negative is that you don't get the feedback to your thumbs which makes flying a little more difficult. Although I have only ever flown it this way in the backyard and space is tight back there. So by the time I look down to reposition my thumbs in the correct spots and look up, the drone is usually in trouble.

Next up my buddy took flight with his mid-size helicopter, the Blade 130x and had a bunch of great flights with it while I was again hovering around with my quad. I was getting the "itch" and wanted to start flying my Blade Nano CPx that I brought so once I landed I grabbed it and began setting it up. Oh I was going to take my 130x but getting home late last night and needing to setup 2 things to pilot plus 12 batteries was more than enough.

Anyway, I grabbed my Nano CPx and plugged in the battery - waited for it to initialize and was ready to take flight FINALLY in a large area where I could really work on my skills. I throttled up and it started acting really weird, twitching and glitching and so on. So I reset the battery and let it once again initialize and more of the same - meaning that I had a bad servo, fuck! another bird that would be grounded for the day - 8 batteries ready to go and now I have to order parts just to get it in the air again in a week or so. Bummer!

On the plus side my buddy pulled out his Align 450 Pro helicopter (1 of the 2 that he has) and set it up, let it initialize and throttle up. Dam that thing sounds sweet I have to tell you, smooth as silk and has a great sound as it builds speed to go into a hover. He flew around for 3 battery packs, doing some rolls, pirouettes and other more basic (but not easy by any means) moves.

He can do a lot more but had to keep it a little on the easy side until his new electronics come in. No matter it was great seeing one of the helicopters of that size fly. I cant wait until my skills are up to that level so I can get into some of the bigger birds also. Just have to take it slow, otherwise it's a very expensive learning experience to crash and burn the bigger helicopters.

Great day out at the flying field and now I really need to find an area like that closer to me. It's so much more fun, less stressful with a big open area.

Shotgun

After I was done flying I stopped by a local gun shop over on that side of town. They have a really nice 12 gauge, 6 shot rifle that I would really like to have and have been looking at / considering for a week or so. Not too expensive either, $400, which would be great for a home defense weapon that Cicely could easily shoot as well with little to no thought. Plus most times with shotguns just the sound of them cocking is enough to scare most anyone away. Not to mention they are a lot of fun to shoot in general. Whats-more is that shotgun ammo is actually one of the few that are relatively easy to find even during times of ammo shortages. Actually what am I saying? We are still having ammo shortages, but all along shotgun ammo has not seemed to be hard to find.

Anyway, I was ready to pull the trigger and purchase it when a thought crossed my mind - "can I take this out to any of the shooting ranges in town that I want to and when I want to or do I need to go to a special range or out in the hills and shoot my own targets?". So I called Cicely to see if she could look up some numbers of the local shooting facilities. She did and then called around for me and whatta' you know, you have to go to a special range or out in the hills - exactly what I was hoping would not be the case. I mean the one range out near my house will allow you to go, but you can really only fire them off and check function - there are no targets for you to shoot at. Then there is the special range / club over on the south side of town and is a good looking club and not terribly expensive if you are a member or not but the problem is that I heard they may be closing down this month. So I don't want to get invested into something taht may not be here in the near future.

Because of this, and how hard it would be to be able to simply go out and throw some lead down range I decided to skip on it for now. Put the $400 toward something around the house, something radio control, for the baby, or maybe another rifle or pistol of some sort that catches my eye. Trust me, there are a ton of them that do.

Kinda sucks because as I was saying, it's a pretty bad-ass looking rifle with great features and bolt-on accessories that were well matched to the rifle. Oh well there may be one at a gun show that will catch my eye. Had this particular one been in the sub $200 range I may have went for it because that would be worth not shooting it all of the time. But for the $400 price-tag, there are many other firearms I could get and would be able to shoot at pretty much any indoor or outdoor facility.

Dinner

So tonight we may try and go out to Steak n' Shake again and see how bad the line is to get some food and try the place out finally. I don't know if we will actually get in or feel like waiting depending on the length of the wait tonight so we will see. If so, I will be sure to add it to my entry tomorrow and describe if it was worth the wait, and as good as it is supposed to be. I cant remember ever eating at one back in Missouri but may have. I mostly remember (and miss) White Castle burgers but that is a topic / whine session for another time.

Landing

With that I think it is prime time to bring this entry back down to the ground and get my shoes on so we can head north-west and see how bad the line is for dinner. My dad went to Steak n' Shake the day they opened and said it was pretty crappy and he was disappointed. Basically the service was slow and the food was cold. He said that it was not even close to what he remembered it being back when we lived in Missouri.

Anyway, as mentioned it's time to get my butt moving and get out of here for dinner. There is a TON of traffic because it's our annual Hot August Nights event in town. Between all of the old cars putting around at about 1/2 the speed limit, then the people doing the same speeds while staring at the old cars and hot rods it can take some time to get from point A to B.

Photo: Photo taken from the video I captured today from my AR.Drone's front facing camera. This shot is of my buddies Align 450 Pro with Mount Rose off in the background. It's a little blurry because of the speed we were moving, but it's a cool shot none-the-less!