Everything Else, Photos, Trips

NJ Airport Adventure Quest – Update

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As I mentioned in an earlier post my current goal is to land at every public-use paved airport in New Jersey.  I have been making steady progress on the list for my last few flights. As of this post I am more than halfway through. Assuming the list is correct there are 37 paved airports in the state. I have completed a full landing at 21 airports so far. With less than half left to go I decided I should update you a bit with a pireps and pictures I took along the way.

Hackettstown N05 – While there wasn’t much to say about the airport itself I decided to take the plane up to 10,000ft for the first time. There was a wicked wind aloft that made for some impressive ground speeds for a little 172.

Millville MIV – Dubbed ‘America’s First Defense Airport’ Millville is a former military base that is now a public use airport. Checkout this page for more on the history of the base. While I was there I saw a huge Chinook helicopter practicing landings and hovering.

Cape May WWD – Formerly known as Naval Air Station Wildwood. Cape May airport has a museum on the field and the Flight Deck diner. We ate a the diner and can report it was good and had fairly typical prices for your typical NJ diner.

Solberg-Hunterdon N51 – Spotted the MetLife blimp while I was here. I think it was in town for the Barclays golf tournament.

Monmouth BLM – This airport has active skydiving. I learned that while you should never over fly the field during jumping you can continue to land. There were several planes in the pattern ahead and behind me all while chutes came gliding down. Pretty cool.

Gear and Gizmos, Reviews

Simple Free Electronic Logbook

Written by Pat on . 2 Comments

We all know that tracking our hours is not only useful it is also quite rewarding. While I am closing in on that magical 100hrs of total time I started thinking about a way to backup my logbook just in case. I have also run into several occasions where I needed to know my current total time or pilot in command hours. My current logbook is one I purchased from Sporty’s Pilot Shop. It is a simple yet well laid out book that you can see here. While the book is great for a hard copy I wanted a faster way to pull up my time and a way to break down hours more efficiently.

There are several online/software based logbook companies out there. I have two hangups with third party providers. The first is I am relying on that third party to handle my data. In the world of aviation it is sadly quite common for a company to just shut its doors one day. I would also have to download a backup anyway just so I didn’t have to worry about that. The second concern is purely financial. I am looking for something very simple and don’t want to pay for it.

So my next idea was to make an Excel spreadsheet. I could make something decent, throw in a few macros for some charts and have something that was very simple to extract data from later. Since I often backup my personal data to several locations redundancy was not a concern. Then I realized one thing: I couldn’t be the only pilot who ever wanted a nice spreadsheet to log time. That is where Greg Wilson and cheappilot.com come in. Mr Wilson has created a great yet easy to use and simple spreadsheet in excel. It apparently used to cost $5.00 but it is now free. What a bargain!

By far one of the best features is the automatic tally of landings within the last 90 days and instrument approaches which makes it very easy to check if you are current. So head over to cheappilot.com for the download and let me know what you think. Remember to ‘enable macros’ when you open the file in excel.

Updated 9/10/11

Once a year my flying club’s insurance company requires that I fill out a questionnaire. It asks for total time flying in the last 90 days and 12 months. I noticed this was not part of the original Cheap Pilot spreadsheet so I modified it. I attempted to contact the original author for permission to post the modified sheet but never received a response. I am posting it here because I think it would be useful.

Download it Here