The Beagle 2 should have landed on Mars yesterday, but so far no signal has been received from it.

I'm going to keep the Site of the Week as it is for the rest of the month.

I heard a rumor that Santa may be bringing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight, so I'll be able to add a better review of it to the site eventually.

I've started converting some pages to PHP. Did you notice? It will make things a lot easier to maintain around here.

If you're getting married and would like to honeymoon in space, now you can. Russia's space agency is offering the package for only $40 million.

The ESA's Beagle 2 Mars lander successfully separated from the mothership today.

I guess there were no more Wright Bros reenactment attempts after Wed- the Flyer is headed for the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI (near Detroit). It's not an aviation museum, but is well worth a visit. I was just there a few months ago.

Did you hear that the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport (BUR) was renamed after Bob Hope the other day?

Did you know that the European Space Agency is landing a spacecraft on Mars next week? The Mars Express launched from Kazakhstan in June. The lander, Beagle 2, is scheduled to separate from the rest of the craft Friday and touch down on Dec 25. Here's an official factsheet on the mission.

NASA has two probes landing on Mars in January.

I haven't heard a word about this in the mainstream media- have you?

Did anyone see the attempted reenactment of the Wright Brothers' flight today?

It happened at about 12:30 pm and was quite a disappointment, since low winds kept the flyer from getting off the ground. Here's the press release in PDF format.

If you attended the festivities in NC, please send me a note. I'd like to read a first-hand account.

The ezine launched today. Did you get your copy?

The new site of the week is Be a Pilot, which is designed to encourage people to take flying lessons. The site has a lot of good info on flight training, especially for beginners.

I haven't been blogging much, have I? But then I never said there would be entries every day.

I've been doing a lot behind the scenes- writing the ezine, putting up more flight instructor listings (which don't get mentioned in the blog when they come in, BTW), and doing some maintenance and cleaning up of the code for the site.

I'll preface comments about web design or programming with "tech note" so those of you who aren't into that can skip over them.

Tech note: I just discovered server side includes... OK, I should say I finally got around to *using* them... and will be making heavy use of them to make this site easier to maintain and give it a more consistent look from page to page. You might have noticed some pages have different background colors, or other slight differences from the look of other pages. That's because there's lots of similar code in many of the files- code that in a real programming language, you'd never repeat in dozens of files if you knew what you were doing.

I sent another message to the CFIs whose addresses rejected my first one... a high percentage of those also bounced. So I'll try a third time, individually mailing them, and any of those who bounce, I just may remove the listings, especially if I find out that the address is really no longer valid. What is the point of having a listing if the address posted is bad?

The new site of the week is The Museum of Flight in Seattle, which is considered one of the world's major air and space museums.

Last night I posted another great flying adventure story that was sent in. Feel free to submit your own stories- details are on the Flying Adventures page.

Did you know there are 115 pages on this site? (Only about 10 of those are the blog and archives.) Have you read them all yet? I'll wait...

I rearranged the home page a bit today. Did you notice?

I sent a note yesterday to all the flight instructors who have a free listing on the site, just a reminder to help me keep the listings current. About 20% of those messages bounced back.

If you're one of those people, but didn't get email from me this week, have you changed your address since you sent in your listing? Or let your inbox fill up? There are many reasons why email could bounce back, but the only info I have is which addresses bounced, not why.

If my email isn't reaching you, then email from potential students might get rejected, too.

Wondering what pages are the most popular on this site? Here are the 5 most-visited pages for November:

1. The Bahamas II (Bimini, Andros Island)
2. The Bahamas (Freeport, Treasure Cay)
3. home page
4. the blog (you are here already; clicking is futile)
5. Airplane Ownership Issues

The new site of the week is about the National Air and Space Museum expansion in Virginia. The cleverly named Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center opens December 15 near Dulles Airport. If you're in the Washington, DC area, definitely check it out.