Just in relation to the title of the thread, as Peter said quite early on the answer is yes. The weather this weekend (13-14 April) just called out to go skiing as the season finishes this weekend for a lot of resorts. EasyJet flights all full – I took my plane and my grandson had his first ever flight with my wife and I. See https://www.euroga.org/forums/flying/15586-what-have-you-done-with-or-on-your-aircraft-this-weekend-april-13-14-2024
Congrats @hazek and @Darkfixer!
Can’t wait to read your reports!
Yeager wrote:
Excited to hear that you found a great opportunity – sounds great. Best of luck with it all and enjoy. Looking forward to you updates en route. Cheers.
Thanks, you’re right, I should report back in a year and so I will do that too.Capitaine wrote:
Congratulations hazek. The M20M is a 🚀
Thanks, excited to ride that thing. :D
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Congratulations to a fellow Mooneyac! The TLS is a great machine, you’ll love flying her.
Thank you :)) Can’t wait.
Darkfixer wrote:
Congrat Hazek for the Mooney Bravo…One of my favorite Mooneys, was very close to get one…
Signed contract of a Mooney M20K Encore instead that suit my needs little better, pre-buy within 2 weeks.
Thanks and awesome for your K, should be fun to fly just as much from what I read.
Congrat Hazek for the Mooney Bravo…
One of my favorite Mooneys, was very close to get one…
Signed contract of a Mooney M20K Encore instead that suit my needs little better, pre-buy within 2 weeks.
Congratulations to a fellow Mooneyac! The TLS is a great machine, you’ll love flying her.
Congratulations hazek. The M20M is a 🚀
During my PPL, someone from a neighbouring club felt very unwell and landed in a field. In 17 years it’s the only inflight heart attack I’ve heard of, and the pilot got out ok.
LeSving wrote:
The probability of me getting a heart attack or similar while she is on board, is small of course
Although it is not impossible, the chances – especially of someone who has a current medical – are very small.
Consider the number of HGV’s that career off the motorways each day due to a heart attack?
And from observation, they are far more obese and unfit than pilots.
The evidence seems to suggest that, surprisingly, people rarely have heart attacks whilst they are active/concentrating: More likely to collapse when they get out on to terra firma or in their sleep afterwards.
Airborne_Again wrote:
As you hint, it is not rational as it is much more likely that she would be killed if you had a heart attack while driving a car. But there we are.
I didn’t mean it’s completely irrational. From a psychological point it is very rational, because the eventual outcome of things is very nightmarish. If I did have a heart attack, she would be left up there with no way of helping me, and no way of helping herself to survive. She probably could manage to keep the aircraft flying, which doesn’t exactly help the situation, because she couldn’t land it without the the risk of dying being very high, in most cases 100%.
With that chute, the situation is turned around. Now she becomes 100% in control of something she knows she can do (pull that handle). This would give me the best possibility of survival, and it would give her as good as 100% chance of survival. From a nightmare with an infinite possibilities that all ends in certain death to a concrete action that ends in survival is like night and day 
The probability of me getting a heart attack or similar while she is on board, is small of course, but why do CAT fly with two pilots? A passenger with normal cognitive capabilities and given a bit time to think about it (typically your wife), will look at the chute as a “second pilot”. It will give her 100% chance of survival even if you should die up there. Thus, flying becomes business as usual (you will die from a heart attack many years before she does )
LeSving wrote:
The only thing that scares my wife, is me getting a heart attack and she sitting there alone and incapable of doing anything. Now is that rational? is it a reasonable/probable event?
As you hint, it is not rational as it is much more likely that she would be killed if you had a heart attack while driving a car. But there we are.
My experience is the opposite. But YMMV. Luftfartstilsynet may be more reasonable than Transportstyrelsen.It didn’t use to be that way, and it certainly is not always that way. But what has happened in recent years (10 years perhaps) is many of the persons working there with GA, are GA pilots themselves. Who would have thought ? Actual and real first hand experience can be a good thing ?
That’s of course extremely important. Transportstyrelsen has become more and more legalistic the past 10 years, say. More influence by lawyers who read regulation text without understanding what’s behind it. One of the best and most GA positive guys among the rulemaking staff got fed up a year or two ago and moved to oversight. There he will visit clubs and schools and talk to the pilots who actually do light GA flying. That’s much more fun, of course, but it is a loss for the rest of us as he was a moderating force.
An example of how totally crazy things can be these days: A helicopter company was abusing the introduction flights concession to do what in practice was commercial sightseeing flights. This pissed off other operators who were spending a lot of money on an AOC. So Transportstyrelsen used its prerogative to regulate introduction flights. It first proposed a rule that would require introduction flights to be a minimum of 30 minutes in duration. I kid you not. All ostensibly for flight safety reasons….
This caused an uproar as it would actually be detrimental to flight safety by putting pressure on pilots to continue a flight even if pax became scared or nauseous – not to mention that 30 minutes is more than a typical beginner pax can meaningfully take in. The final rule said minimum 15 minutes, which is still completely stupid and without any flight safety benefit whatsoever, but we can live with it. (They introduced other nonsensical rules as well, but this one was the worst.)
