Here are the stats on the ferry trip of N211SH, a Robinson R22 helicopter, from Long Beach, California to Bedford, Massachusetts:
- calendar time: 8 days, including one day of sightseeing in Tucson and half a day of photo flights in New Orleans
- flying days: 6.5 over the 8 calendar days
- flying time: 43 hours, including 2-3 hours of sightseeing in New Orleans and New York
- weather delays: 3 hours for turbulence to abate
- mechanical problems: none
Photos:
More to follow; I’m having trouble with my Photoshop scripts and the Canon EOS 5D image format, which is slightly different from earlier .CR2 Canon RAW format files.
Gallons of fuel consumed?
I don’t save receipts for gas. I expect that 6-7 gallons per hour is a good average figure, so that is about 280 gallons. At nearly $4 per gallon, it is probably best not to think about this.
“More to follow; I’m having trouble with my Photoshop scripts and the Canon EOS 5D image format, which is slightly different from earlier .CR2 Canon RAW format files.”
Huh? Instead you should be using Picasa and Flickr like the rest of the modern world. Using kludge-scripts and text-oriented blogs is so old fashioned…. The days of PANDA are over.
Is Picasa really that good? I’ve been thinking about using the new version.
Picasa works as long as you are processing photos on local harddrives. It doesn’t seem to be cooperating with my Buffalo TeraStation very well at all. Picasa sometimes freezes up and it also seems to sicken the TeraStation from time to time, inducing it into a ten-hour long chkdsk routine.
Picasa (latest version) handles the EOS 5D files, which puts it head and shoulders above all the competition in terms of time-to-market with this important feature. On the other hand, it doesn’t do any of the stuff that I need, such as putting my name and URL in the bottom right corner of each image. http://philip.greenspun.com/photography/photoshop-scripts/ lays out how I do that with Photoshop (now broken with the addition of the EOS 5D beta patch). I am not sure why this desire for attribution is so unusual that no packaged program supports it out of the box.
I don’t think you’re a big TV watcher, but the Nat’l Geo channel has a copter special entitled “Super Chopper” on tomorrow evening:
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/channel/blog/2005/11/explorer_superchopper.html
You made your blog compelling to read. Never a dull moment and I though I’ll be reading more lawyer stuff or Legal scenes. By the way, in my opinion, Picasa is great to used.
Fuel consumption for my ’05 R22 has averaged about 7-1/2 GPH for the last 6 months, cruising at an average of 80-85 kts. with an average of close to 2 aboard.