Fogged

Kaylee had a two hour school delay this morning thanks to the fog, which was just fine with me.  I'd gone to bed at 11 pm the night before and slept better than a baby, until I had to get up to drive Kaylee to school then head over to the airport.

The fog lifted up to 200 overcast and 3/4 of a mile when Nathan and I took off in the RG and headed over to Pennsylvania, where it was nice, and warm, and hazy but clear.   He fixed the audio for the 496 in the RG, a simple fix of the audio being unplugged back there that apparently we'd not thought to check when the audio wasn't working.  Audio is important, you know, for that "Five Hundred" warning when coming in to land.  I say that tongue in cheek, because mostly I just like the tunes, but actually, it WAS nice to have the 500' warning today when I was shooting the ILS back into Kokomo at 300' and 1.25 miles.  It's not as cool as the 340 yelling "MINIMUMS" when it's time to get out of there or land, but it's still a nice feature.

The trip home I was by myself, and I had the music playing, and the autopilot doesn't work in the RG right now, which isn't any big deal other than you always have to mess with the plane, just like the good old days.  I remember the first airplane I flew with an autopilot, I distrusted it so much I wouldn't really let go of the yoke in IMC.  :)  Anyway, I was VFR for awhile on the way home, and then for the last hour I was in the clouds.  I got kind of bored after awhile of nothing to look at but grey clouds, and I was low enough that my cell phone worked, so I committed the public-would-be-horrified-act of texting and reading my email while flying.  Read a book on the iPad for a little while, but there was no good way to hold it in that plane, and my hand got tired after awhile holding it awkwardly with one hand and flying with the other.  When I got close, Grissom gave me a pilot report from "A Cheyenne that landed here 45 minutes ago said that the bases were 300'."  I took off first, and he beat me home by 45 minutes...*sigh*  My fifth logged instrument approach in the last 24 hours, even though it was the only one I did myself, and it was home sweet home.

That train accident that killed four people is now being attributed to the engineer/driver being fatigued.  He claims he was rested but fell prey to "highway hypnosis".  But they're talking fatigue, and brought up all the car accidents that come from fatigue, and the Colgon airline crash that they attributed in part to fatigue too.  Not great timing with the FAA wanting to test pilots for Sleep Apnea without going through the usual rule making process.  Just what they need--public sheep opinion's momentum.  Fatigue is definitely a problem in the transportation industry, but sleep apnea is a pretty small segment of that problem...

We've got some weather moving in tomorrow night into Friday, the winter weather that is hitting Colorado and such right now, but most of it will be south of us, and we shouldn't get more than a dusting up here in Kokomo.   Nothing too exciting, just cold.  Cold and gray.  Whee.  ;)