Do something different!

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “put yourself outside your comfort zone”. I think it is very important to do that regularly, in every aspect of your life – not just work.

For a long time, all I did was take pictures of landscapes and it was a huge education to take pictures of people and animals! Last year (2024) when I was in Las Vegas for reInvent I got checked out at Henderson Executive (HND) and took a C172S-G1000 for a nice flight around the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, and back.

For someone who had only ever flown near sea level, the landing in Grand Canyon National Park airport (KGCN) was quite the experience. Having only flown at sea level or near sea level airports, my training was that you land with the mixture set to full rich. Not a good idea if you are landing at 6600′ – thankfully when I went there it was a cold day. I landed, and as I taxied off the active, I set the throttle to 1200 RPM and the engine died! It could have been a whole lot worse if that same thing had happened on final. I won’t make that mistake ever again!

This year I did another of these excursions and took a mountain flying lesson the South Island of New Zealand. For over twenty years, I’ve flown with simple rules like staying away from the mountains and trees and not flying in places where I had to bother about V_A. I’ve heard the expression that the most unsafe pilot is the one who has never banked a plane over 30 degrees – I was that pilot. So I was happy to get out of my comfort zone!

I flew a 1978 Cessna 172N which had been updated to have a Garmin G3X. It was carbureted (it’s been a while since I’ve flown something that isn’t fuel injected so I had to relearn carburetor heat but the G3X has a carburetor temperature probe that flashes red when it goes below 0C). It was quite unnerving to fly so close to the canyon walls and things – we were forced to stay low because of clouds above us – and there was a liberal use of check turns. I also did my first real soft field landing, using the grass at Wanaka instead of the hard surface.

After a quick lap around the pattern at Wanaka (NZWF) I flew to Milford Sound (NZMF). In case you thought this was a flight on a bright sunny day, think again. It was a cloudy day and we were in the valleys, under the cloud deck.