Traveling Pants

(It's a chick/kid book series. Don't mind me.)

I am so bone tired while I write this that I just keep staring at the cursor as my mind wanders off to...well, I don't know. Nowhere, I think.

I got to sleep some time before 1 a.m. and was up at 5 a.m. Actually, I woke up the first time at 4:04 a.m. and the second time at 5:05 a.m. Kind of funny. Well, okay, not THAT funny.

It wasn't a bad flight over to St. Louis. Some rain, night IFR almost all the way there once we got past Kokomo here, but it was smooth, there was no ice, and nothing to complain about. The ceilings were supposed to be 1700 overcast, but when I looked at the nearby airports, they were all IFR. I told him not to expect to break out when they said, because no other place was anywhere close to that. Sure enough we were about 350' above the ground when we broke out on the ILS 30L. It was good practice for him. It later raised up some as some rain moved through.

While I waited, I set up my iPad with a little keyboard and used it to answer emails and do a little bit of work, too. While I was at it, all my charts expired today, so I used their wifi to download the new set of charts, too. It worked great, the keyboard made typing much easier than that touch screen, and all in all I was pleased with my trial run with it.

When we left St. Louis, for the first time ever for me anyway, they vectored me right over the top of the arch. We weren't very high off the ground-the runway is just on the other side of the river where the arch is. And this is where I remembered that all pilots are children at heart. I mentioned a desire to fly through the thing, and D immediately chimed in with his urge to do it too. Of course not an urge big enough to lose my license over, but man, it was Right There...too bad it was so scuddy out--most of my pictures didn't turn out very well, but at least you can see it here. :)

The guy I was with was scheduled for an Instrument Checkride today. Then a meeting came up in St. Louis that he HAD to be at. So we left Kokomo before dawn to get there, using the time as instrument practice, and headed home as fast as he could get done. His checkride was at 3, and after we got leveled off, a quick check of our ETA showed that we were going to arrive in Kokomo at 2:50. The problem was, the checkride was at Muncie, and we needed to get the books at Kokomo, but now we didn't have time. So we called up center and had them switch our destination to Muncie. We figured he could start the oral portion of the checkride while I stole the plane, flew back to Kokomo, picked up the books, filled up with gas, and flew back to Muncie. Muncie was supposed to be decent VFR. We get there and they set us up for the ILS 32. The winds are down 14, but hey, that's not bad practice either. Again, we were supposed to break out fairly high. Again, we broke out below circling mimimums, about 400' or so. He hops out, I file a flight plan to get out of Muncie and get to Kokomo, and as I'm waiting for it to kick in, he texts me "Don't go--no checkride." So he comes back out. You can't start a checkride without a reasonable expectation that you'll be able to fly. Now the TAF had said the ceilings and visibilities were supposed to be VFR later, so I was hoping that would be a reasonable enough expectation to start the oral, but the examiner said no. So, we got back in the plane and took off IFR back to Kokomo, where we again got to shoot a downwind ILS 23, and again we were supposed to break out at about 1000', and again that was off. Really good practice for him, three real-life ILS approaches down reasonably far, one into busy Class B & D airspace, one into normal Class D, and one into uncontrolled airspace with a Citation 7 miles in front of us.

It pretty much rained on us the whole time, so the RG is nice and clean. It was about 12 hours from me leaving the house to getting back to it.

Meanwhile, this morning, Cousin Uncle Jeffrey came to visit from N. Carolina. Steve picked him up and ran him around today, and bored him badly with work things, and they are now on the deck talking about guy things while Kaylee's up front reading and I'm sprawled out here in my chair trying to stay awake...and failing.