Fun Flying

What an excellent day. We all slept in just a little bit, got ready, stopped at Meijer to pick up food and drinks for the airport among other things, stopped to pick up a late breakfast, and went on out to Kokomo. It was a beautiful weather day. Blue skies, light winds, cool temperatures; just one of those lovely fall-ish days that I so enjoy!

Nathan's friend Jim Zazas came up from N. Carolina for the weekend; he's an airline pilot who is also a T-6 (and other birds) instructor. He went up with me for about an hour and a half, for my first time in the front of Nathan's T-6. We started from scratch, from preflight through start-up (don't forget the wobble pump to prime the primer, btw) and taxi practice, on through some turns in the air, power off stalls clean and dirty, yadda yadda. For a nice change of scenery, he demonstrated two barrel rolls and a cloverleaf. Man that plane does such smooth aerobatics. I really enjoy it, actually better than I enjoy the yank and bank zippiness aerobatics of the Pitts. We came in for a landing, realized we were starving and called it for the lunch break.

Chuck was there fixing his Citabria, Nathan and the kids, Charlie & Dawn, Steve & Kaylee, Jim T. and Jim Z., and we fixed up burgers, chips, potato salad, cookies, you know, a normal fun airport group lunch. ;) After we ate, Chuck flew his plane for awhile, and Jim and I did some ground time over things from performance charts to, oh, all sorts of stuff. That ended with a "blind" cockpit check, where he calls out something in the cockpit and you have to put your hand on it right away without looking. We had time for another flight, so went up for round two. Steep turns, minimum controllable airspeed, more stalls and recovery in various configurations and power settings, and landing. It was a lot of fun, and felt pretty good. We stopped when fuel told us we needed to; Max had stayed at the FBO past his closing time just to fuel us and the Mustang up after we all landed, which was so nice of him. We went over a few more things on the ground, and then the group of us put everything away, locked up the hangars and headed to Outback Steakhouse for dinner.

Can't beat that, now can we? :)

While I was flying, Steve and several of the others were working on wiring some things up in between Nathan's hangars, and Nathan took Jonathan for a ride in the Mustang. It was a beautiful evening for it, so calm and smooth, and in the relative quiet of the airport, nothing beats the sound of that thing going overhead...

A marvelous experience, for sure. I am a fortunate lady. Gal? Woman? ... Person. :)