People have asked me how I recorded the
“Miracle on the Hudson” in my logbook.
Between you and me, I put it down as “Jan
2009, Airbus, 37. 1 hours.” No earth-shattering comments here. No words of wisdom.
But that reflects how I felt about the incident, so it is appropriate for me.
I have always been rather sparing in my
entries. At best they are bare-bones documentation. Here to there, time and aircraft.
Not a lot really to grab a hold of, but I have a
friend who has just the opposite approach.
AN AVIATION DIARY
We’ll call him Larry because that is his
name, after all. Larry is one of those people
who use their logbooks as a diary of their
aviation lives, and he certainly has had a varied and interesting one. We worked together
30 years ago for that cargo airline I mentioned earlier, and we’re still friends.
Recently, I was asking him some questions
about those days for a column. Larry always
was better at record keeping than I was; a
better pilot, too. He went to the trouble of
copying off all his log pages and putting
them in the mail.
Wow, what a record. Larry’s comments
were only limited by the size of the
remarks line of the logbook. Each page
was rich and full of detail. A sample? “IFR
Procedures, Thunderstorms, deviation,
moderate turbulence, sleet, snow,
ice, ILS 30 LBF.”
That’s one line in
Larry’s world.
Sounds like quite
a night!
Larry even
recorded the
progress of the
turkey we bought
and cooked for
Thanksgiving dinner one year, after flying a
trip to our maintenance base in Billings,
Montana. It had one of those little poppy
things that was supposed to pop up when it
was done. Ours didn’t pop. As I recall, we
didn’t know enough to thaw the turkey
before putting it in the oven. We cooked it
for 10 hours. The entry? “Thanksgiving
pay! Lunch at Sambos. Roasted Turkey at
Alliance, finally done at 1AM.”
When I was
recording my time
monthly, one page
would suffice for a
year and a half of air-
line flying, but now
that I am flying more
varied aircraft, the
pages have become
richer. Probably the
most interesting one
is my current page
XRX
www.zaon.aero
(800) 496-9430
