Sky Mom

I received e-mail last week from Danielle Gibeault, a Wisconsin-based flight instructor looking for some blog love. I get a lot of requests to be listed on this blog, and although I read many interesting blogs, I only blogroll the ones that are much like mine or what I aspire to be. So I put on my mean face and looked over My Sky Mom.

Hard to keep a mean face while reading it. She's a nurturing and enthusiastic flight instructor, but does she meet the criteria I want?

• ... commercial pilot? check (even though under the bizarre-to-me US rules she is not necessarily exercising the privileges of a commercial pilot licence while she is conducting flight instruction)
• ... girl type person? check
• ... primarily aviation blog? check
• ... frequently updated? check
• ... interesting to me? hey the current posts cover weather, chemtrail nutjobs and air law: check
• ... Canadian? nah, but she's won enough points from the above to make the cut.

He blog is written in a question and answer style, but the questions she chooses to answer and her style of answering allows her to throw in any random thing she wants to blog about, too. I mostly see questions from non-pilots curious about the world of aviation, from new students looking for help keeping the airplane right side up but her credentials (the US system gives flight instructors a set of letters for every separate thing they are allowed to teach) suggest that she knows off the top of her head how a DME knows how far away you are and how many aircraft it can handle at once.

I'll answer random questions about aviation on my blog, too, but as I blog a couple of weeks ahead of posting the entries, but as much as two months behind the events chronicled, it may take a while to work in a question. If you're a non-American with a flight training question, be aware that the rules are quite different around the world. As a rough guess, if your country had closer ties to the UK or Europe than the US in the 1930s, your regulations are probably more like the Canadian and British ones than like the ones Danielle is talking about. But it's still good stuff, and I know there are a lot of people in the US who read this blog.

Lest you think Danielle's nom-de-blog indicates that she a matronly type, she's posted a photo so you can see she's got those sexy French looks, too. Go rock her website traffic counter.