An exciting announcement!

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), where whoever wants to can try to write a 50,000-word novel in just one month. Many try, but only a few succeed, in large part because 50,000 words is an extremely daunting goal. (By comparison, this entire blog is "only" about 190,000 words, and I've been writing it for over five years.)

I won't be writing a novel, but I'll still be taking part in my own way. For the last several years, I've been writing a book called Flying the Mississippi. It has been a work in progress for quite a while now, as my real flying job, the return to school for graduate work, beating the 100 Workout Challenge, self-experimenting with learning research by attempting to master chess, the hours of work per month into this blog, and occasionally getting to spend an hour or two with the wife and dog has left little time to take it from the rough draft that it is to the polished, high-quality work it would have to be for me to admit to having anything to do with it.

It is a "learn by doing" book. In it, we fly together from the very start of the Mighty Mississippi at Lake Itasca all the way down to its unofficial end in New Orleans. Along the way, each leg has either a lesson in flying technique and/or the history and geology of the river. Everything from steamboat stories to short field landings is thrown in.

As you watch one of the most powerful rivers in the world grow from a small creek to a mile-wide monster, you'll fly over

• Paul Bunyan country
• Charles Lindbergh's hometown and land at the airport that bears his name
• Maiden's Rock, the site of an old Native American legend of unlucky lovers
• the "battlefield" of a war you probably didn't learn about in history class: the "Honey War"
• Mark Twain's childhood home
• an airport owned by the Busch family, makers of Budweiser
• the beginning of the historic Lewis & Clark Expedition
• the site of the most powerful earthquake in US history, which was so powerful the river "ran backward" for a time
• an odd bit of geography where Kentucky isn't surrounded by more Kentucky
• an old pirate lair
• a pyramid that isn't in Egypt
• the birthplace of blues and jazz and the home of Elvis
• the alleged burial site of Hernando de Soto, the explorer who was on the old $500 bill
• the location of Charles Lindbergh's first night flight
• Vicksburg, which played a major role in the Civil War
• the tallest capitol in the country
• the home of Mardi Gras

Along the way, you'll learn and/or perfect short and soft field landings and all forms of navigation from the old-fashioned or obsolete to the most modern: dead reckoning, pilotage, VORs, ADF, and GPS. You'll become a master at reading sectional charts, and even perhaps understand what that mysterious "magnetic variation" is all about.

You'll even experience an engine failure over a particularly-treacherous part of the Mississippi. I actually already turned this into a video a while back on the Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel:

This adventure takes place in Microsoft Flight Simulator X, and was designed to be flown with nothing more complicated than its stock Cessna 172 with a plain vanilla installation. I chose this aircraft because it requires no special installation of software or add-ons, so it will work even if you're an X-Plane or Prepar3d user. The 172 also lets you use it as a guide if you're lucky enough to take this trip in real life!

Starting this month until it's done, roughly every other post will be a chapter from the book! (It might be a while, since there are 66 legs.) You'll get to watch the work in progress and even make comments and/or suggestions before the final book is published!

I'll keep up a table of contents as the series progresses. The next post will be the book's introduction. See you there!


Like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook:

Follow @Lairspeed

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.