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Flying (Lots of pics so it may take a while to load) I started flying when I was in high school. I worked at a gas station and spent most of my money for flying lessons. Even then, I only got an hour or so a month. I finished my student pilot's license just before I left for the Air Force and didn't finish my full pilot's license until many years later. Our flying has taken a backseat lately due to kids, school and work but we still love it when we get time. Laura has her rotary wing license and I have fixed wing and rotary tickets. Below are some pics of the airplane and heli we use to own. Hopefully, we will have another some day when things slow down.  This is Laura and me in front of our little R22 heli out in Gilroy Ca. when we lived there. We actually flew this from Cartersville, Ga to Gilroy, Ca when we moved out there. It took us 4 days and we landed in Palm Springs Ca. on our 10th wedding anniversary. We were flying on 911 and got called on the radio to land due to all flying being cancelled. We sold it to a guy in the UK right after Niko was born.   This was the cockpit of the R22 and a pic of me taking off to go fly about. Laura and I both loved the heli and hope to have another some day.  This was our little Piper Tomahawk. We had this for many years. Before the kids came along, Laura and I use to fly down to Destin, Tybee and other fun places for weekends. It was badly damaged in a hail storm right after this picture was taken and the insurance company totalled it. I miss the heli most must I still miss the THawk too.  Here is a very pregnant Laura just about a month before Kaspir was born. That's Niko checking out the interior.  Niko (at about 2 years) likes the Tomahawk too and says he is ready to fly.  This is me holding Niko (2yrs) before going flying in the Schweizer heli with my instructor. I was working on my commercial heli ticket. Right after this, Laura wanted to go fly although she was about 6 months pregnant. I said OK but take it easy and next thing I know, here she comes in doing an emergency autorotation. Said she needed some practice :-) Miltary Flying I went into the Air Force right after high school and was lucky enough to land a slot flying on KC-135A and KC-135R Tanker aircraft. Later I switched over to the reserves and flew on KC-10A Tankers. I was the Inflight refueling specialist otherwise known as the Boom Operator. Basically I was responsible for weight and balance, cargo, passengers and a few other jobs on the airplane but the best part of the job was flying the boom. We would fly all over the world and refuel other aircraft inflight so they didn't have to land to get more gas. This was really important for smaller aircraft that needed to cross the pond (that's what us crew dogs call the ocean you know). They can't carry enough gas so we carried it for them. Usually we navigate for them too since we had better nav systems. During the desert war, we would refuel fighters and allow them to stay on station much longer than they could have otherwise. If everything went right it was pretty calm but at night or in rough weather or when you had a newby receiver pilot things would get pretty harry. We always said it was hours of boredom interspersed with moments of shear terror but I loved it. To this day I still say it was the best job I have ever had.  This is a picture I took from my "office" also known as the boom pod. I refeuled a bunch of these F117 Stealth fighters right after the first round of the war.   Thes pics are of an F16 and an A7 Corsair II that I refueled. I know the F16 was done over the desert but I really can't remember where the A7 was.  This is me (on the left) infront of one of our KC-10s right after an employer flight. I took these guys from work including my friend Steve Abernathy (2nd from left) on a flight that included an inflight refueling. I don't remember what I refueled but I remember that we had fun.  This is what you get when your crew gets picked to go to Strategic Air Command Bomb Competition. The commander says "go take promo pics" and the squadron photographers go corny right off the bat. None of us would have been smiling if we had known how badly we were going to do on that competition. Still, it was 4 or 5 days of parties in Louisiana so it wasn't a total bust.  This is a shot of F4s getting refuelled by a KC-135A over Germany. We use to go there often and it was one of my favorite places. I think this was taken from our aircraft on one of the distinguished visitor flights. 
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