Flying Over the Hudson River in a '29 Biplane

Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome's 1929 New Standard Biplane takes us up over the Hudson River in upstate New York, September 4.

Dave's Logbook: The Best Medicine

My first time in a biplane!
Open cockpit!
Noisy? Oh YES.
It was also my first time to land on grass.
Bumpy? Oh YES.

Music: To-Wa-Bac-A-Wa - Louis Dumaine's Jazzola Eight

David says Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in upstate New York is his Happy Place, a living museum of aviation history: "This is what the inside of my head looks like."

September 4 was a great day out for him, and I've been wanting to document it properly since, but there's no simple way to do it. It just takes a lot of processing time, so I've been working on it sporadically. But in the meantime, I figured I could make a quick video by stringing together the clips from our glorious ride in the 1929 New Standard.

The video clip is part of the theme this week at the House of Fielding: aviation pioneers. (If you've seen our book and film collection, you'd conclude every week to be "Aviation Pioneers Week".)

David received a DVD box set from Mister M last Friday called "A Century of Flight", which is an excellent companion to the encyclopedic volume "Flight: 100 Years of Aviation" that he received from some of my family as a wedding present. Between the DVDs and the books and Airliner.net, David has been completely spellbound by the aviation corpora available to him. That is, until last Saturday when we were up in the Tri-Pacer:

"You know, I can look at thousands of pictures of airplanes, but then I just gotta fly..."

There really is no substitute for the Real Thing, but I must thank everyone again -- and you know who you are -- for keeping David enthralled while he's been grounded and in treatment. The archival footage film reels and the full-colour illustrations have captured his imagination and have been the Next Best Thing to being airborne.