OK

Steve had just stepped in the shower this morning when I got the first text that said "Who crashed???" Next came in "You guys okay?" Then came a couple of phone calls and texts wanting to know what plane went down at Kokomo. It doesn't happen a lot, but it has happened a few times over the years, and it is never a very good feeling when you don't know how bad it is and who it is. First you reassure those who contacted you that it wasn't you. A couple of those over the years have seemed like it was either me or Steve, because of circumstances, such as the female twin pilot who crashed over by Purdue with a plane full of passengers in bad weather. A female Seneca pilot near here made a lot of people fairly concerned it was me, so I spent a fair amount of time letting people know it wasn't. In the meantime, I'm pulling up our schedule to see who has what of our airplanes scheduled out for the morning. Today we had only one, and it seemed as though it wouldn't have been that one, but you can't be sure. So you start hunting people down and finding out what's happening. My call got through to the guy out at the airport, and he let me know what they knew: a Mooney took off in not-great-weather-conditions on Runway 5, and ended up taking a sharp right in the air off the end of the runway and landing rather hard into the corn. The pilot sustained a minor head injury, no word on the condition of the kid with him, but purportedly they'll both be fine. Thankfully. The plane is still out there in the corn, very little path into it, probably waiting for the FAA/NTSB. I'm sending out what I know to folks, and Steve comes out of the shower, and I say "A lot happened while you were in the shower". I do hate those, the feeling in the pit of your stomach as you try to find out who, in a very small community of people, just crashed an airplane with an unknown end result. Like I said, was really glad to hear everyone walked away.

We left to go to a birthday party that started at 11. We didn't get real far. The "check gauges" light came on in the Suburban, along with the oil pressure dropping real low off and on. Steve got out and checked the oil, and it wasn't even showing up on the dip stick pretty much. We turned around and came home, where he put the quart and some he had here into it, after which it was registering on the dipstick, so we went ahead and went to Leia's birthday party until about 2 pm.

After the party we went out to Kokomo, where Steve added as much oil as we needed, the kids ran around on the golf cart, Nathan worked on Gumby, and I had a 3-5 pm instrument flight lesson; we hung out for a bit afterwards and then went out to dinner as a group. Ruby Tuesday's has some nice new stuff on the menu. I had a shellfish trio, with crab cake, lobster and shrimp, cheddar mashed potatoes, snap peas and salad bar, and it was really good, for under $20.

And thus passes another Saturday around OKK...