Jeff Uphoff

Yup! I let the previous owner of my first Mooney (an M20C), a local who'd moved up to a 231 himself, keep a set of keys and encouraged him to take it up when I was away for more than a week or two. He was a CFII/ATP and a great mentor--hard to beat that. --Up.

Ah, I see that now. Damn. --Up.

Wow, is it just me, or is there not anything visible that looks like a typical forced-landing roll/slide? It's like...he came straight down? --Up.

At the very beginning of the half-hour block of audio, there's a plane announcing it will shoot the published miss, and then it departed the area. Nothing for 10+ minutes, then this plane made its 11 and 3 mile calls in the middle of the block, and then nothing more for the remainder. Sounded quiet there. --Up.

Yeah, I noticed that. Looks like landing speed rather than IFR approach speed. There was a bit of headwind, but not that much, it didn’t appear. —Up.

I just listened to the CTAF for KSRB via LiveATC and heard him make two completely routine calls, first an 11-mile final straight in for 4 and then a 3-mile final straight in for 4. And then...nothing more. --Up.

Oh, no! That's not terribly far from here. Weather doesn't seem particularly bad, either--"easy" ILS conditions, and the FlightAware track looks normal right up until it disappears. --Up.

I'm younger, but I was also doing this early punchcard/mainframe programming in the mid-70s, at age ~10. (My dad built out and then ran our local government's first computer center, which is how I had access.) --Up.

We had a programmable card sorter. NEAT/3 had page and line numbers on each card, so you could re-sort based upon those. But I still drew the diagonal line, too--learned that from my dad. --Up. P.S. If the keypunch was all steel gray and black with rounded edges, it was probably an 026. If it had some light-blue keys and was more squared off, it was probably an 029.

I started out programming IBM 026 & 029 keypunches using a punch card on their internal drums to define the punch-card layout for programming NCR mainframes in NEAT/3, a 60s/70s era assembly language. Never razor-edited, though--too much trouble when you could just dup/punch a new card easily. --Up.

That's not even remotely true. I started doing Linux development in early 1993--Linux was barely a year old at that point--and it and projects it leveraged, such as GNU and Athena/X, were already thriving and distributed worldwide over Usenet and various email lists. Heck, I felt like a latecomer to the party at the time! I coauthored some of Linux's initial networking documentation in 1993 and then cofounded the original security project in 1994, by which time multiple companies had already sprung up in the ecosystem, most notably Red Hat. By the late 90s/early 00s, there was a flurry of Linux-related IPOs (I was granted share allocations in them), and I was working with Linus at Transmeta and was even briefly his team lead in our Linux group. He, I, and a couple of others cofounded the Linux Kernel Organization around then, and I served on its board until 2012, when we merged it into the Linux Foundation--where Linus had already been a fellow for close to a decade. There's nothing "very very recently" about any of this. Fun aside: Linus and I knocked around Northern California a bit in my first Mooney, a vintage M20C, when we worked together there. --Up.

My recent super-cold-winter-day flight was at 15k (5 hours, Nebraska -> Virginia) and at peak. At that altitude, LOP was sapping to much power for me, and peak was still running super cool. --Up.

I usually feel the same way in my Ovation. In general, I've only found the heat to be lacking on really cold winter days well up into the teens where it's simply not making the power of its turbocharged brethren. That said, my feet still get cold at other times because a) I usually feel cold compared to most people, especially in the extremities, and b) it just doesn't blow that direction. --Up.

Ouch. Weather wasn’t the best around these parts yesterday.

I spent nearly a year spanning 2023-2024 commuting from KROA into the DC area, using mostly KHEF and KIAD, but occasionally others--KJYO, KGAI, KBWI, and even KCGS, which is inside the "no-fly zone" FRZ. If you're going around, but not into, the DC area, plan on heading northbound up the east side of the SFRA and southbound down the west side. There are ways to "cheat" and go opposite the flow (to avoid weather, mountains at night, whatever)--my typical one between the NYC area and KCHO was to file KRIC as my destination and KCHO my alternate, which always got me east-side routing, even southbound, and then once I was mostly past DC, I'd ask to "divert" to my alternate. Expect your altitude to be constrained passing south of the SFRA for KDCA traffic and on the west side for KIAD's. The through routes around the SFRA are busy airspace but IMO not crazily so. Note that even if you're going by (and not into) the DC area, if you're flying VFR within 60nm of the DCA VOR, 91.161 requires you take special training. See https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F/part-91/subpart-B/subject-group-ECFR4d5279ba676bedc/section-91.161. Sites like AOPA and faasafety.gov can steer you to the training. If you're going into the DC area, bring your A game. Take all the training you can find for the SFRA. (I have a FRZ PIN to go inside the "no-fly zone" to places like KCGS, and that's training and vetting beyond all the rest.) I mostly use KHEF there but have used KIAD ($$) a bunch, too, and it's fun to mix it up with the big iron there--you just fly really fast! (Note: KIAD almost feels cheap, fees-wise, compared to KBWI!) Under no circumstances do I ever fly in/out of the SFRA VFR--I'm an IFR-only guy there. I've been flying around DC's airspace since the mid-90s and so am pretty used to it. (9/11 messed it up considerably.) Happy to try to answer any specific questions... --Up.