The Web is a Crap Shoot Sometimes
Although I’ve always dreamed of owning a plane, I’ve recently moved from dreaming to doing some semi-serious window shopping. That means I no longer look at the ads in Flying Magazine but instead read the classifieds in the COPA monthly newsletter. It’s still a pretty far-fetched possibility, but at least it’s no longer a “pipe dream”.
In any case, since my interest in an aircraft purchase has re-kindled, I’ve been looking for more and more “real” information on the web. That is, interesting articles and such from real people; not some article written by a paid writer who happens to fly or someone who flys for a living but also writes. I don’t know if that makes sense. Maybe I should have just said that I don’t want information from places Flying Magazine or from AVweb. Although both sources (and others like them) are good sources of information, you rarely get the raw feeds. You know, the unedited information where read about what it’s really like to own your own aircraft, for example.
So where was I? Oh ya, the crap shoot. Part of the whole plane shopping thing is to look around and see what experiences other people had had with plane ownership and what they had done with their plane. Perhaps it only made sense to own if I would use the plane for business. Or for long cross countries. Whatever. Unfortunately, all I came up with was a cool site about a guy who flew his Cessna 170 across Canada. It’s not that there wasn’t anything out there necessarily, it’s just that there is so much web noise, it’s practically impossible to find anything worth while. A search for ”general aviation flying in canada” doesn’t turn up much that satisfies my search for “real” knowledge.
But today, I came across a gold mine of information. And of course, once you find the “entrance” to the mine, well everywhere you look you find gold. In this case, the mine I found has revealed Land and Hold Short, Aviation in Canada, Cockpit Conversation and Up in The Air, among others. Granted, only one of the authors seems to own a plane but it’s a start.
Sun, 13 Mar 2005 06:19 Posted in Flying
