Bashing Friday

The Bash weekend, and thus the last big aviation event of the year, is over. No more air shows to plan, no more waivers to apply for or sponsors to seek out or things to line up. It's always enjoyable, but it's a whole lot of work for a whole lot of people, so it will be nice to have a month or two of hopefully nice weather left for flying without having anything bigger than an ice cream Saturday social or EAA Chapter Meeting to work on. :)

Our weather held out for us with nice and cool temperatures, light-ish winds (even if they wouldn't make up their mind which way to blow while making sure it was never actually down the runway), and none of the show-stopping rain showers we were looking at having at times today came through either.

Friday was the Major Airplane Shuffle day. I've sort of slept since then, so I don't even remember what all I flew or to where, but I pretty much was hopping from one airplane to another from late morning until sunset. The Citabria, the T-6, the Cherokee 180, etc. We had to pick up planes and pilots and bring them into Glenndale for the weekend. Friday morning I had a large photographer who wanted to go up and take photos of the Veterans flag-raising ceremony from the air. He was a little concerned about not having a parachute. I told him he wouldn't be needing one. The bottom line is that even if we wore parachutes in the Citabria to go do a photo flight, he'd never in a million years make it out of that airplane if something went wrong enough for us to bail out, particularly since our flight was at 1800' or below the whole time. He could barely get in. When I told him to put on his seat belt, he said "What good will a seat belt do me if I don't have a parachute?" I sighed and told him the seat belt was for if I ran into something on the ground or botched up a landing, that it would save his life while the parachute was just something to make you feel better but wouldn't actually do you any good. Next I did a "controls free and correct" check, and I couldn't get the stick back very far because of his belly. I told him to suck it in and pulled the stick back, and said "When we come in to land, I'm going to be putting the stick here." Sure enough, as we come down final, I say "Stick's going to be coming back here", and I brought it back against whatever resistance I had. Once I was down solidly I relaxed the stick and said "You can breathe now", and he whooshed out a bunch of air. After we got out, he insisted on taking my picture by the plane, then I guess went inside and told Steve not to get rid of "that one". Oh, he'd also said that he was suspicious of girl pilots. I said "You probably should be!" He said "Yeah, you know how aggressive those ladies are in airplanes". He was being sarcastic about it. I wasn't. ;)

Close to sunset, I took up a family of three in the Cherokee 180. Two teenagers and their mom, and the teens had never been in any kind of airplane before and were a little nervous. The girl pushed her arms against her chest and had a very frightened look on her face once I got off the runway. I turned around in my seat to see how she was doing, saw her face, and asked her if she was okay and if she would like to go back and land right now. She said no. I just flew straight and level on this perfectly smooth sunset evening, and they started relaxing. Then we flew over their house, and over a friend's house. One teen called his friend on the cell phone and had him come outside and wave at us, and from then on the teens were having a blast. Mom loved it too, and when we landed all three of them gave me a big hug and said thank you and how much they loved it. You know something's special when a teenage boy will even hug you and be excited about it. ;) Oh, and when I landed back at Glenndale, the mom said "I didn't even feel the wheels touch down!" I said "Oh, please go tell that to Steve, would you??" Heh.

Friday night it got late and dark on me, and we needed to get the T-6 back to its hangar for the night because of a potential for rain. So I took off out of Glenndale with full fuel over the wires in the dark, with Duane and Trey chasing me over to Kokomo in 32L. I was flying along when something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye--a flickering. I glance at my closed canopy, and see flame. I turn my head back to the front before the sight registered with my brain, at which point I snapped my head back around in a hurry to see the reflection of flames in my window again. I am not used to seeing things I fly shooting flames. It took another half of a second before my brain processed that it was an okay fire coming out of the exhaust of the T-6. At least my heartrate slowed down pretty quickly. ;) When I got into 32L with Duane and Trey, I was looking for Glenndale, which is not super easy to spot at night even if you know where it should be. I found a fire and flickering lights, and Duane and I decided that must be our guys around the campfire. I brought up the lights, and the runway was off to our right, not our left. Trey took a photo with his cell phone of the runway in the dark and said "Young and dumb, landing at Glenndale at night in a 172". What can we say? ;)

We hung out around the fire for awhile, but some of us had to get up early the next morning...