Cluster

The tale of the flight that wouldn't go right. But hey, at least the airplane itself ran perfectly well!

I woke up at 6:20 a.m. to check the weather for a trip to St. Louis, and it wasn't very pretty. Big blob of precip, calling for 80% chance of thunderstorms, IFR, etc. But really, it wasn't actually as bad as it was forecasting it to be. So I kept an eye on it for an hour, and saw that everywhere the precip was, it was just rain, not storms, and ceilings and visibilities just weren't that bad. So I texted my guy and told him I'd be departing in about an hour, and that I'd send him a message and let him know when I should arrive. He said okay.

Friday I'd dropped him off in Piedmont, MO. Saturday I'd picked up another guy in St. Louis. Today I was supposed to go back down to St. Louis to (I thought) pick the first guy back up.

It was raining all morning here, so even though one of my four fuel tanks wasn't completely full, I still had enough to get there and back, so I just left it rather than stand out in the rain to get an extra few gallons. No problem. I got in the plane, took off, leveled off, looked at my ETA, and sent a text to my guy that said "I'll be there in 1 hr and 35 minutes." He sends me a text back that basically says "You know I'm going with you to St. Louis?" He had driven back to Kokomo earlier in the week. :O He then checked FlightAware, saw I'd already left the ground, and the flurry began of texts and phone calls. He called Steve, he called me and told me to wait, come back, I'm going with you! Steve tried calling me a dozen times, I got 18 calls and 9 texts...but couldn't answer any of them because my phone quit working. Heh. I could read the texts, just couldn't answer. (Never got the calls, just saw I'd missed them all when I got on the ground.) Meanwhile Steve calls Steve C and asks him to call Grissom tower to call me and stop me, so he's trying to work on that. I told Grissom I did not have an emergency, but I needed to turn around and go home. They set me up for the ILS back into Kokomo, I came down, and Steve C. was waiting by the hangar, asked if I'd forgotten anything. Like my passenger.

So now I do need gas--Steve fills it up while I go refile a new flight plan, recheck the weather, and get ready for the same trip, round two, with a passenger this time. He shows up, we laugh about the communication error, and take off on our leg of the trip. This was a technology win while also a communication fail. Without FlightAware and cell phones, he wouldn't have known I'd taken off already, I'd have ended up in St. Louis for absolutely no good reason, he wouldn't have made it out there properly, and it would have been a lot of wasted time, gas and money.

Our trip out was all IFR, a little rain, but mostly smooth. The problem came when it was time to land in St. Louis. They have all GPS approaches out there, and one ILS. The Viking doesn't have GPS approach capabilities, so we had to shoot the ILS in. That wouldn't be a problem normally, but due to winds, traffic was all using the GPS approach for the opposite runway, 12L, of our ILS 30R. Sooooo, when they said "80V, expect GPS 12L", I had to say "Unable GPS approaches" then wait for several pauses while they looked at our strip and saw that indeed we were not GPS equipped. She then tried to approve me for an ILS that does not exist over there, so I insisted on one that did exist, silly me. Because we were opposite the flow of traffic, they routed us way out of the way. Finally they dropped me down a little lower, and that put me out of the clouds, so I called up and told them if it would help with traffic flow, I was now VMC and could take the visual. That made them happy. Me too, as I could stop going the wrong way...

After I dropped him off in St. Louis, I had the plane to myself for the trip home. It was IFR all the way again, so for the first half hour I had the wing leveler on while I drank a diet coke and ate a Twix for lunch. Ipod buds in under my headphones, of course. Then I decided to hand fly to get some practice in. I noticed Kokomo was down to 3 miles and 600 overcast, which it wasn't supposed to be, and figured that was good ILS weather, and while I think the visibility was more than that when I landed, it was still good practice. It was also odd because Grissom had me shoot the entire approach, starting at the VOR, instead of giving me vectors to final. I can't think of the last time that happened, but hey, I guess they wanted to make sure I got a full approach in. Thanks. ;)

You can see my track here on FlightAware, the first takeoff and circle back to home base, the routing out of the way of my destination, etc. Kind of funny...

I finally landed, starved, had just enough time to fuel back up, push it away, and stop at the pet store and pick up more cat-pee-removal stuff (it seems to be working pretty well on odor in particular), before picking up Kaylee from the bus stop, stopping for dinner and getting home. We've been doing homework ever since. She has quite a bit to make up from being sick last Friday, which doesn't make her happy, and what makes her unhappy makes everyone unhappy, right? ;)

*yawn*