I just passed 1000 logged flight hours, over the six years I’ve been at it.

It has been wonderful overall. It has fulfilled its purpose of putting my mind to playful hard technical work whenever atrophy trotted by, and in the process given me some experiences found in few other ways.

It is hard to compact them all into a pithy blurb, except for poets which I am not: visiting airports from teeny to huge; seeing the land from low and up high; losing myself in the natural monster known as weather; full intellectual investment in safe practice; and even just enjoying the utility of rapid personal transportation.

I have not loved the logistical complications of airplane ownership and operation. The costs have been astronomical but affordable, now settling upon sustainable. I hope C-GXRP will give me, my family, and my passengers good service for many more years.

Here’s a pictorial summary of the Iranian missile fauxtography incident.

If this is the way palestinians do a prisoner exchange, perhaps israel should return the favour by executing hezbollah terrorists on their way back across the border.

Not to worry, there were no injuries, just a flash/bang in the wrong place, and a bit of powder-singed skin, when my Glock 35 misbehaved during a match last night.

What happened was that on the sixth or seventh shot at a series of targets, the handgun fired partly out of battery. (That means that its slide/barrel were not fully locked up when the firing pin hit the casing/primer.) As the brass shell casing was not encased in the steel chamber, the internal pressure relieved itself partly by blowing a hole in the side of the casing, blowing the entire magazine down and out of the gun, and making a pretty flash/bang just above my hand. Of course we stopped shooting right away and looked for damaged something or someone but found nothing, except this shell casing:

We opened up the pistol; it looked fine. The gun was later fired again, and appeared to work fine.

Those present at the match offered different opinions what might have caused the malfunction. Old caked-on dirt, preventing the retraction of the firing pin after the previous shot? Case failure due to “glock bulge”? I’m glad it was not a full Glock kB!. I can only control some of that, so I’m off to clean the guns for the first time in four years.