Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Fly



Today professor treated my research partner and I. He took us up in his 1960s mooney air plane! I had never flew in an airplane so small. It had only four seats and we had to climb onto the wing to get in. He showed us the campus and the area where we collected half of our samples from. I also got to steer for a bit!

View of campus.




The area where we collected half of our cottonwood samples from.




It was a whole different experience than flying commercially. You can really feel everything; every bump, turn, ascension, and coming down. It was fantastic.

5 comments:

  1. Oh my! How exciting! I've flown those teeny tiny planes before to Nantucket. Still commercial, but still small and scary! haha What an adventure though! That's so cool you get to know your professor first hand and that's so nice of him to do that. Your campus is so green and pretty!

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  2. One thing that is so great about MN is that it is very green! So much different than back home (: Yeah, I've flown in a commercial airplane that had rows of two seats and one seat on the other side. Not sure what it was called but it was small. This was awesome though!

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  3. What a great experience, Ashleigh -- the plane ride, that you got to take the controls for a bit, and to have an aerial view of your Minnesota home since last August. So cool!

    When I was in grade school, my dad got his first plane. It was a two-seater. From there, every couple of years he would upgrade to the next larger version until he had a six-seater with landing gear.

    I was the only one in the family that liked to fly with him and that wouldn't get motion-sick. (My mom would go occasionally, just to make him happy, but she was terrified.)

    Flying with my dad was one of the only ways I could spend time with him; he was not an easy man to have as a father. In the sky, he was at peace and able to leave his stress and irritations behind and just talk to me. In the sky, he connected with his heart. Those were good times.

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  4. I never knew he was a pilot: That is so great! I'm glad that he was able to open up in the air instead of not at all.

    I got to feeling a bit sick towards the end. It was a hot day and the sun was shining. The vents didn't pass much air through the plane. Yuck.

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  5. Yes, I am glad he could feel something, as opposed to anything ever, in the air.

    I remember well the hot, stale air in the cockpit and did not like it one little bit. It made me happy to get out of the plane!

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