The long expensive season...

When does it ever end? Yes I'm talking hockey hockey. The kids seasons officially ended with games in March and while part of me was sad to see the end I am pretty darn tired from all the travel. 2 kids playing travel hockey gets tiring pretty quickly. Yet I know I'll look back on this year and love every minute. Between the 2 kids we had more than 100 games and more than 180 practices. The kids played in 26 different ice rinks in 2 states and it would have been 3 states except Frudoch missed a tournament in Pennsylvania and Poppy's team missed one there as well due to a screw up by the team manager. I don't even want to think of how much fuel we went thru for my car and truck. This winter we had our Subaru blow a turbo on the way to an early hockey game in Cleveland which added another $3k to the expenses and then had to sell said car as there was so much metal sucked thru the engine that it would fail. If I had to guess... we spent more than $8k on hotels, food, gas, supplies, doctors appointments, hockey equipment and car repairs. Never mind the time which has even more value. Why do we do it? Hockey is a great sport. Perhaps the greatest. Our vacation this year was staying home and resting after a long season. The best part..... Development camp started last week for both kids. Frudoch as an instructor and Poppy as a student.

Of course the next step is Mid Am development camp tryouts for elite players and for the first time Frudoch is invited. Should be a great measuring stick for him before tryouts for the 2011/12 season which are less than a month away. Poppy will skip girls Mid Am camp and will be looking to play all girls travel next year as no matter what anybody says a girl doesn't get a fair shake on a boys team. Even when she is better than the boys. Oh well it was tons-o-fun and its already going again so I need some sleep.

Steve McQueen Fans Unite.....

And head on over to Steve McQueen Film Festival for the 6th annual Steve McQueen film festival. Its a unique way to learn all about McQueen if you are new to his films or a great way to learn some of the back stories on his films. So much fun to follow along and watch at your own pace on your own time and discuss as the week goes on. Hurry though only another 6 days left!

We Had a GREAT Weekend!

Please see: http://www.lightthelamp.com
Quick update from my favorite CBJ blog. Of course I'll have much more to add about the weekend.

So as I said the update was quick. It also was pretty vague. I'll add a bit more here before blogging on. During the weekend of Hockey Day in America. The Columbus North Stars headed up to Detroit for another tournament in search of glory. As before they found it! Once again playing in the AA Squirt Travel division the North Stars (who are not a AA team and who are not a travel team) were able to beat all comers and win in AA. The team is exceptional for their unselfish play and teamwork. This group of Rec level players again stepped it up to take it to Travel teams from the CSHL and the Little Caesars league among others. They did encounter a first on the year though. In their 2nd game they never had the lead. They did come back late though an get a tie. Following the championship game they pushed their overall record to 14-0-2. We did lose a player for the rest of the season with a broken leg. He sucked it up and PLAYED in the championship game after taking a couple ibuprofen and one serious tape job. No kidding--he really broke his leg and we learned later it was a serious fracture to his tibia and a fracture in his ankle. Talk about tough! Here are a few shots of my favorite player--CHEETO!

I Flew on an Airbus A319.... and Lived to Tell

For those of you who have visited this blog or know me at all it should come as no surprise that I love flying and anything airplane related. However I am somewhat partial to Boeing and will go way out of my way to fly on any model of their jets. I generally fly airlines that have either all Boeing or mostly Boeing fleets. My airline of choice for the last several yeas has been Delta. This was great as they operated a mostly Boeing fleet since the MD-88's they had were now considered part of Boeing after McDonnell Douglas was taken over by Boeing. I have never mined the Embraer jets that Delta's regional partners have operated either and while not a huge fan of the Bombardier CRJ's have gotten used to them as well. When Delta bought Northwest the all Boeing fleet went away as Northwest had a mixed fleet including many Airbus jets. These are now all repainted in Delta colors and the A319's are replacing many of the older less efficient MD-88's throughout the network. Delta is also using the Airbus A330 on overseas routes and also on long haul flights to Hawaii thru Atlanta. For many years I have not had any interest on flying in an Airbus. In fact the last one I flew on was an America West A321 many years back when CMH was a hub for America West. I took that flight to Las Vegas and was happy to not need the services of the Euro plane ever since. Well unfortunately this year my trip to the SCCA National Convention meant I would either have to hang out in the Atlanta airport for an extra 4 hours or swallow my pride and fly home on an Airbus A319. I did the latter....... and lived! My trip out had me on an MD-88 and then a 767-300. Returning from LAS to ATL I was jam packed into an OLD 757-200 without the video system. (yeah it had CRT monitors in the ceiling with color so washed out that skin color was green) Since I chose to fly Delta from CMH to LAS I had to give up the option of non-stop as only Southwest flies that route non-stop. If you know me then you know I will only fly SWA if they are the ONLY airline to go to the place I need to go. I refuse to fly them and happily pay much more to avoid flying with them. An interesting side note is that the non-stop flight on SWA cost more than the 1 stop on DAL. Several others went with me to the convention and all paid more. Those that bought their tickets a couple days before me paid about $15 more each way. Those that purchased on the same day as I did paid about $50 more each way, and those that purchased about 3 weeks after paid a whopping $175 more. The bonus to me was the skymiles as I'm now at 100K and am planning a trip to Hawaii. Only when researching that trip I discovered if I wanted to go thru Atlanta I'd have to fly on an........................Airbus.... Oh dear.

Quick Post: Live From Las Vegas

Well I'm on my annual trip to Las Vegas for the SCCA National Convention and it came at the perfect time. This morning I left a snowy andbiterly cold Columbus Ohio for the sun and warmth of Nevada. Today was 57 degrees with temps forecast near 70 by the end of the week. Wow what a difference. Last week we had an ice storm with nearly one inch of ice covering everything and bringing down trees across my property.Today I ate In-N-Out Burger in a sweatshirt. Will I win anything? Probably not, but I feel like I beat the winter blues and not a moment to son. Forecast for home this week: highs in the teens with lows in the single digits to negatives...

The Future of Aviation!!

NASA recently awarded grants for the development of the future airliners. 3 firms were chosen. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman. The designs are all somewhat radical, but it does give us a glimpse of what the designers are thinking. The aim is to cut fuel use and emissions in half and areas impacted by noise by 83 percent with an aircraft that has the speed and range of modern long-haul jets (85 percent of the speed of sound, 7,000 miles) and payload (50,000 to 100,000 pounds) of a large single-aisle jet, such as a Boeing 757. Date of service introduction is planned for 2025. I think we may need to add a decade or two onto that before the design of the current jets are moved out.

First is the Boeing.

From the look of this my first reaction is what is going on at Boeing??? The design is obviously all about function rather than form. The looks of the plane are secondary to what it can do. I see this as more of a freighter, but then I wonder how do you load the freight into the middle. Obviously this is a design exercise so the idea is efficiency. The option of 2 or 3 engines and turbojets and turbofans is interesting on the same platform. Methinks I'll take a pass on this one and hope that Boeing concentrates its efforts on military if they go forward with this design.

Next we have the offering from Lockheed Martin.


At first look it appears to have one enormous engine, but that's just an optical illusion i believe. It looks like the second engine is obscured by the fuselage. The other net thing appears to be a box tail connecting both sides of the wing to the tail of the plane. I like the somewhat conventional style of the plane and think that most people will as well. Engine noise should be low in the front half of the plane and I'd guess the range would be fantastic.

Finally we have the version presented by Northrop Grumman.

I really like the V-tails on this as they remind me of the F22 Raptor. The twin fuselages though are downright bizarre. There does not appear to be and way to move from one to the other. The flight deck is separated as well which from a safety perspective eliminates the threat of a crew takeover by a hijacker, but also prevents the passenger from getting their buh-bye from the pilot. Also the engines are right by the pilots. Lots of noise for them as well as the first class cabin(s). It reminds me of the Virgin Galactic transport plane and the Boeing offering is the Spaceship One. You don't think...????? Nah.

Intensity

The hockey season is moving along with so many games and practices that sometimes I forget what day it is. Both kids are playing at higher levels than ever and are excelling. Frudoch is leading the Columbus Capitals in goals, shots, hits, scoring and assists despite playing less than half the minutes of the other forwards on the team. He was just switched from center to right wing so he is having to get used to having his back to the goal now and fighting off the defenseman. Just look at the intensity in this photo taken against Stongsville a couple weeks ago.


Poppy has been playing as a defenseman almost exclusively and her teams record stands at 6-1 which is great considering last year her team was 0-14-1 after the regular season. She also mad the Columbus North Stars select team and they have decided to play at the AA level in order to improve every player and really challenge the kids. Their travel schedule is really going to be hectic come January and February. They have played one game and steamrolled the opponents easily. These kids are going to be good.
As a parent I'm very proud of my kids although i'm getting worn out with hockey 6 days/nights a week from September to March.....

Goodbye to the F-111 Aardvark

Back in May I blogged about the upcoming final retirement of the last in service General Dynamics F-111 of the RAAF. Well that time has come for the beast some 46 years after the first prototype first flew. I won't rehash everything I wrote back then, but that day is now almost here. On Dec 2, 2010 the F-111 will be retired and for fan's of this massive strike plane its a sad day. These beasts were operated by the US Air Force in a few variants, including long-range strike, and with the EF-111 Raven variant, electronic warfare. In USAF service F-111s participated in the Vietnam War, the US attack on Libya in 1986, and Operation Desert Storm in 1991 against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. They were retired in 1997 by the USAF and lived another 13 years in the sky in Australia until now. The last former USAF F-111G was retired in 2007 by the RAAF.

As noted in the previous blog these will be replaced by FA-18F's built by Boeing and fitted for various roles until the real replacement for the F-111 arrives in the form of the F-35 JSF. The FA-18's are holding the door open and will do an excellent job in their multi role capacity. In fact the FA-18's have less range and are slower than the F-111 although they are much more efficient to operate and have modern communications equipment which transmits data seamlessly between airborne platforms. Perhaps more than any other deficiency, it is this shortcoming which has pushed the RAAF to retire the type even before its original replacement is ready to be fielded.

But to any airplane or airshow fan the most missed aspect of the F-111 is the dump and burn......