Yesterday I finished scanning into my Mac mini all 360 pages of my 1997 book Flight of the Gin Fizz, the one about learning to fly, buying a small plane, and flying it coast to coast. I'm getting ready to re-publish it as an ebook for Kindle and Nook, probably in the late summer or early fall. The scanning task was not overly wearying; I simply scanned one chapter a day and quickly cleaned it up as best I could.
Now I must set to locating all the pilots encountered on my adventure 17 years ago and updating their stories. This probably will take quite some time.
Meanwhile, I'm looking for a couple of volunteers who are sharp of eye and generous with time to look over the 19 chapters and Epilogue for typographical errors. ABBYY Finereader Express is extremely accurate (I'd say 99.999 per cent accurate) but the odd typo still sneaks through and past me.
If anyone's also a pilot that would be a bonus. FAA regulations have changed and so has small-plane flying in general, and I need to find out what's happened since 1997.
I know that as a no-radio pilot I could never again fly solo past the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River past Manhattan, the traditional beginning of a transcontinental aerial odyssey. In 2009 a helicopter and a small plane collided just off Hoboken, killing nine people, and the FAA consequently decreed that all aircraft flying up or down the Hudson must maintain radio contact with other traffic.
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