Helicopter Flight Over Wenatchee, WA

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A cockpit POV video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

Join me for my first flight of the year — a brief tour of Wenatchee, WA. This is a cockpit POV video with an inset looking back into the helicopter. Includes cockpit audio and the sound of the helicopter running.

About Me and the Helicopter

  • I have been flying for about 20 years. My nearly 4,000 hours of flight time is in Robinson R44, Robinson R22, and Bell 206L (Long Ranger) helicopters.
  • The helicopter is a 2005 Robinson R44 Raven II — the same one that appears in the photo at the beginning of the video. You can learn more about them here: https://robinsonheli.com/r44-specifications/ I own this helicopter. It is the third helicopter I’ve owned since 2000.
  • My helicopter has ADS-B Out and is picked up by radar facilities. You can see my track for recent flights on Flightradar24: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n7534D This is a great site for tracking any almost any flight, including the airlines.

About the Video

I try to drop cockpit POV videos on Sunday mornings and “extras” with more info about owning and operating a helicopter midweek. (Some channel members get early access to some of these videos.) I also host occasional livestreams with Q&A chats. Subscribe and turn on the notification bell so you don’t miss anything new! And tell your friends. I’m trying hard to deliver good videos and grow my subscriber base.

Some links on my channel are affiliate links, including all links to Amazon (https://amzn.to/32PLHTD) and MyPilotPro (https://mypilotpro.com/shop/?wpam_id=13). If you click one of them and buy something, I get a small referral reward. It doesn’t cost you anything so I hope you’ll shop with one of those links. Thanks.

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Instant Pot Pork, Cabbage, Apples, & Onions

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Quick and healthy Instant Pot meal.

I made this yesterday. It’s a recipe I dreamed up and it came out great!

Ingredients:

I listed them in the title, but here are the details:

  • 1-2 tablespoons oil. I used light olive oil because I only buy olive oil. I use regular when I want the olive oil taste and light when I just need some oil.
  • Pork loin or tenderloin. I’ve said before that pressure cooking pork tenderloin is a waste of a good cut of meat — it’s much better grilled — but that’s what I had and that’s what I used. I used one of the two tenderloins in the package because I also used my smaller Instant Pot and, let’s face it, I’m feeding a party of one. If I wanted to make more, I could have used both tenderloins.
  • Salt and pepper. I use coarsely fresh ground sea salt and pepper.
  • Onion. I used one large one, cut into narrow wedges. If you cut it too small, it “melts” while pressure cooking.
  • Cabbage. I used half a cabbage because (again) I was cooking for one in a small Instant Pot. I cut it in half, removed the core, and cut that half in half. If you’re cooking for more in a regular sized Instant Pot, use the whole thing, cored and quartered.
  • Apples. I used 2 gala apples. I’d bought them and they were terrible for snacking. Kind of soft and mealy. Not crisp like you’d want an apple. I had two choices: cook with them or give them to my chickens. I peeled and cored these (saving peels and cores for my chickens) and cut them into 1/8 wedges.

Instructions:

  1. Heat the oil in the Instant Pot on Sauté.
  2. Generously salt and pepper all sides of the pork.
  3. Brown all sides of the pork. (Because I used a small Instant Pot, I cut the pork tenderloin in half so it would fit better.) This should take 5-10 minutes.
  4. Remove pork from the Instant Pot and turn it off.
  5. Add onions, apples, pork, and cabbage in that order. (In my case, I could barely get the lid on when it was done.) Do not add any liquid.
  6. Seal the lid and set the Instant Pot on Manual (or Pressure, depending on the model) for 30 minutes. Make sure the steam vent is closed.
  7. Clean up the kitchen. You shouldn’t have much of a mess. Cutting board? Knife? Don’t forget to wash your hands!
  8. When the 30 minutes is up, wait 10 minutes and then carefully release the steam and open the pot.
  9. Remove the pork and slice into 1 to 1-1/2 inch slices. Serve with vegetables and the juice created in the pot by cooking them.

You’re welcome.

This made enough for me for at least 2 meals. I suppose I could eat it with rice, but I’m really trying to minimize carbs and there’s quite enough in the apples and onions.

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Oh, you want a photo? I didn’t take one. But if you make this and send me a photo of it on Twitter (@mlanger), I’ll put it in this blog post.

Notes on Coronavirus Trends

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How can we open our economy when fewer than 2% of all Americans have even been tested?

There’s a disturbing notion going around right now. A lot of folks seem to think that because a few major COVID-19 hotspots are past their peak — or close to that point — we’re ready to open up the U.S. economy, get back to work, and get things back to normal.

The people saying this are obviously out-of-touch with reality.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love things to go back to normal. Part of my income comes from selling the jewelry I make at art shows. I’ve already had four shows cancelled — Borrego Springs in California in March, Art Under the Elms in Idaho and Apple Blossom Days in Wenatchee in April, and the Guild B Art Show in Chelan in September. I’m on the calendar for Leavenworth’s Village Art in the Park for two weekends in May, including the exceedingly profitable Memorial Day Weekend, but I suspect they’ll be cancelled, too. And even my helicopter business took a hit: the big airport event in June where I do hundreds of rides with one or two other pilots was cancelled. So yes, this is hurting my bottom line a bit, although admittedly not as much as the folks who have lost their primary (or sole) source of income because of business closures. (My main business is agricultural flying and that’s still essential here.)

But let’s be real here. Despite the constant steam of misleading information coming out of the White House multiple times a week, the U.S. is far behind many other countries with its testing for COVID-19. Just the other, the new official liar press secretary claimed on Twitter that over 4 million Americans had been tested. There are two problems with this:

  • It doesn’t jive with the numbers being reported on the far more trustworthy Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard, which is updated throughout the day every day for every country on earth. As the White House was claiming “over 4 million,” Johns Hopkins reported 3.7 million.
  • The percentage tested — even if it were 4 million — is still less than 2% of the total U.S. population of 331 million people.

One of the more insidious traits of COVID-19 is that a person can be infected and not show any symptoms. Or just show minor symptoms. So they could be walking around, infecting people around them without even knowing they’re sick.

And get this: under the rules in place in the U.S., these people don’t even qualify for testing!

Indeed, you have to be pretty sick to get tested, which is probably why nearly 20% of those tested actually have the virus and nearly 5% of those people die from it.

Wondering where I got those numbers? They’re from Johns Hopkins with a little extra math applied. I built a spreadsheet yesterday and will try to update it daily. Here’s what I have so far:

Covid Math
Percentage testing can only rise as we test more people, but I’d like to see it over 50% and we have a long way to go. I color coded (using conditional formatting) the other two percentages; green is good and red is bad.

My little spreadsheet doesn’t just offer numbers. It calculates percentages and identifies trends. The way I see it, we want the percentage of population tested to rise, the percentage of confirmed cases to drop, and the percentage of deaths among confirmed cases to drop.

Based on this data, we’re not even close to opening the country for business again.

The only way we will be ready is if we #TestEveryone, quarantine those who have the virus, and trace those people’s contacts to ensure they’re tested and, if necessary, quarantined, too. We need to keep those who carry the virus away from the general public and the only way we can do that is to (again) #TestEveryone.

So as much as I’d like to set up my show tent in Leavenworth for Mother’s Day weekend next month, I’m hoping that the U.S. can do what it needs to do to get this virus under control before then. And with the amount of misinformation and finger pointing coming out of the White House, I seriously doubt that will happen anytime soon.