Eating ranks very high on my list of favorite activities, somewhere just below flying and being with the love of my life for the past 36 years. Having had more lectures from NASA dietitians than I care to count, I am well aware of the need to maintain blood-sugar levels when doing stressful flying such as IFR approaches in low weather. My wife and I plan with care our snacks for our long cross-countries.
We normally fly our trusty 1978 Mooney 201 on relatively long trips like the monthly commute between our home in Houston and our condo in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Usually we plan a dawn takeoff in order to make it from Houston to Tallahassee or Jacksonville before the typical afternoon thunderstorms build across the Gulf Coast and down the middle of the Florida peninsula. The first leg tends to be the long one: four-plus hours.
On my space flights, those four hours would have taken me around the world nearly three times. While orbiting the blue globe, I learned that it was much easier to snack than to go to all the effort of cooking a big meal. Thus, pop-top cans of tuna and pudding, along with M&Ms and peanuts, became the norm for most of my less-active orbits. I brought this habit home to my general aviation flying as well.
For our Florida trips, Kit and I typically leave the house very early after a light breakfast. We carry lots of fruit. Fruit provides its own wrapping, so we need to carry only a plastic bag for the peels. Snacks like Fig Newtons or cookies supplement the fruit and take care of my sweet-tooth cravings. We also carry a thermos of coffee (yes, we open it very carefully when at altitude) and a thermos of orange juice, along with three Sporty's Pilot Shop Little Johns and a Lady J adapter. The light breakfast, combined with not eating the snacks until close to the halfway point, has kept us from having to land early to handle what NASA would call waste management problems, which are not easily taken care of in the Mooney.
The night before a recent solo flight from Duluth, Minnesota, back to Houston, I went to the local supermarket and loaded up on bananas, apples, and peaches. I noticed that there was a sale on pop- top containers of pudding and, remembering the pleasure of snacking on such delights in orbit, I bought a six-pack. I forgot to pick up a spoon. About an hour out of Duluth on the way to Kansas City, I broke into my bag of goodies. Realizing that I had forgotten a spoon, I did something that would have given our NASA dietitians absolute fits. I folded the top of the can to form a crude spoon and used it to scoop out the delicacy. As I did so, I smiled at the memory of a glitch that had occurred on my first shuttle flight in November 1982, which provided a lesson for all pilots who eat while flying.
No, I didn't cut my tongue, but I had another problem. To allow the crew freedom of movement around the cockpit and mid-deck of Columbia, we were provided little radios to wear on our leg or in a holster across our chest. These radios broadcast on an FM frequency to the spaceship's radio, which then relayed our calls to the ground. The reverse also was true — we could hear Houston call wherever we were in the cabin, even in the "john." These radios had one failing: We went through batteries very rapidly. Without a low-batt warning, the first time we knew that we were having problems was when Houston could not read our reply or when we stopped hearing Houston call.
On one orbit I was propped against the mid-deck wall in a position from which I could eat my pop-top vanilla pudding and watch the world go by. Houston called and I tried to answer. They kept calling until one of my crewmates, who was monitoring the radio, finally answered for me. I immediately dived (literally) into the battery locker and replaced my battery. A quick call to Houston produced no answer, so again I replaced the battery. Houston said that they were receiving a carrier wave but they could not read me. At that, I took off my headset to examine it. To my surprise, I found the mike completely plugged with vanilla pudding.
As I droned on in the Mooney toward Kansas, I couldn't help smiling at the memory — and was extra careful to keep my makeshift scooper well away from the microphone. I was also secure in the knowledge that I had the right-seat headset handy. After years of NASA's preachings on redundancy, some has rubbed off on me. I carry an extra handheld radio and handheld GPS for that fateful day when the alternator fails, as it surely will. I have also equipped N6201N with a backup vacuum system. I dislike flying partial-panel instruments. Redundancy spells cheap insurance.
In the meantime, remember: If you carry gooey snacks with you, keep them away from the mikes. If they get clogged, even fresh batteries won't help.
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