Cross-Country Helicopter Flight from Malaga to McMinnville, Part 3

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Another cockpit POV video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

Join me for the third part of my cross-country flight from my summer base in Malaga, WA to McMinnville, OR. In this video, I cruise from near White Pass in the Cascade Mountains southwest past Mt. St. Helens toward the Columbia River, dodging low clouds that force me to wander off my desired course and even getting into a tiny bit of scud running. Along the way, you’ll see remote forest with lots of logging activity, mountain lakes and rivers, rocky cliffs, snow-covered ridges, and even Mt. St. Helens. Along the way, I tell you about other flights, flying at the Grand Canyon, and what’s going through my mind as I try to get through the weather in front of me. I also bitch about my radar altimeter. Eventually, weather conditions get so bad in the direction I want to fly that I make a precautionary landing at a tiny airport I almost couldn’t find. I had three cameras rigged up for this video and I switch from cockpit cam to nose cam with occasional inset views of me looking at the camera. Audio is from direct connection to the intercom so you can hear me narrate the flight and make radio calls, plus dialed down volume of the helicopter’s engine/rotor noise.

You can see all of the videos for this flight here:
Part 1: https://youtu.be/pgKDciGP4eA
Part 2: https://youtu.be/CmupuFDXa4Q
Part 3: https://youtu.be/vyveMEm_MhQ (this video)
Pups in a Helicopter: https://youtu.be/eEVq9sRlJK8
Part 4: https://youtu.be/3KXR_D3SliA
Part 5: https://youtu.be/eghRyzhPigg

I should mention here that “cross-country” in the world of aviation is any long flight. For airplanes, it’s 50 miles or more; for helicopters, it’s 25 miles or more. This is only part of a 178 nautical mile trip.

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4 thoughts on “Cross-Country Helicopter Flight from Malaga to McMinnville, Part 3”

  1. Hi Maria. Great video. I noticed your voice is coming out of the left channel only. I usually set the voice timeline track on my video editor to mono to make sure it comes out of both left and right channels. It sounds better for the listener, especially if using headphones.

    Reply ↓

    • Sorry about that. I thought I’d fixed it in this video. I guess I missed one or more clips.

      The problem is caused by the hardware that connects the camera to the intercom system. I go into a lot of detail about the fix here: https://aneclecticmind.com/2020/06/14/the-video-editing-audio-workaround/ My new software, Davinci Resolve, makes it a lot easier to fix, but I still have to remember to fix it on every clip. That particular video is at least 4 clips long.

      Reply ↓

      • Good to see you are using Resolve. I was going to suggest that software to you when you were looking to change your editing software. I did my last video using it and it had a bit of a learning curve. However I found it stable and fast on playback so I really like it.

        I’m not able to check the software now but I thought you could change to mono at the track level by clicking into the left hand details of the track. I have all my voice recordings on the same track as I append in series. That way it is a single click fix from what I remember.

        Reply ↓

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