There I Was

Kaylee is busy but seems to be in good spirits.  Unfortunately I have no good Kaylee stories for you.  She's working, doing school, doing choir practices for the upcoming concert, partially cleaning  her room, keeping her grades up pretty well, and being an all-around great kid, what can I say.

Steve is a tad overwhelmed.  He's working on the CAF's "Warbird Expo" stuff, the Kokomo Air Show stuff, Poker Run stuff, the Indy 500 Fly-over stuff, of which he's Air Boss, and oh yeah, trying to get out billing and run a business and take care of everything else too, while he flies most of the day when the weather is nice because we're swamped.  He can multi-task and take on more than anybody I know.  He's going from early in the morning until he falls asleep at night, and there is no playing, relaxing, zoning out, or doing nothing.  He's either flying, on the phone or on the computer working on SOMETHING, every waking hour.  Even at lunch and dinner he's usually answering somebody or writing a note or sending an email or taking a phone call.  Right now I see him shuffling paperwork and on his computer over there, at 8 pm, and he's just settling in to do some work over there, as usual.  Seriously.  I've never seen anybody who works harder than he does.  He'll be back up at 6 something a.m. to take Kaylee to school then run over and take a flight first thing in the morning.  He has one night a week he takes a few hours off...that's about it.

The weather was supposed to stink today, but instead it held off until afternoon.  So I flew twice this morning with students, had a quick lunch, then took the PT-26 up for a quick post-annual, back to service, maintenance flight.

Ooh, here, I'll tell you a death-defying story to make it more interesting.  Like all good stories, it must start out with "There I was."  So, there I was, flying the PT around.  I did some badly-named "Dutch Rolls", I did some steep turns and a stall just because, I flew over Kaylee's school, waiting out a guy in the pattern at Kokomo, and then I came on in to land.  I kept it tight in, like normal, swung around for a tight base/final, descending, rolled out, and the winds were 10 gusting to 20, so a bit of a gust factor, but only 20 degrees off the runway.  As I pulled the stick back to level off and begin the flare, there was no "back".  The stick was hung up on something, and I couldn't level off properly for some reason.  I was pulling as hard as I could, but the nose was still coming down.  I grabbed the trim crank and cranked in a bunch of nose up trim, which brought my nose to at least level.  At that point I drove it onto the runway with a right main wheel first wheel landing, and got off the runway by the first taxiway as there was a guy behind me too.  When I got back to the hangar, Nathan came over and I asked him to look in the back and see if something was hanging up my stick.  Sure enough, while I had buckled the seatbelts and secured the canopy, the cushion for the back seat had slid down and gotten in between the seat and the stick, causing me to run out of back stick pressure barely at level.  It could have been a bad deal, an overly-exciting day, but...it wasn't.  Sorry.  ;)

The rest of the day I just did what I could for the Poker Run.  Send out emails to other airports where we'll be taking boxes of cards, going to Staples for supplies, out to the airport to drop of supplies for a guy, just...stuff.

Another busy day tomorrow, starting with a flight at 8 a.m. in the PT.  Speaking of PT, Kaylee's school is off in front of the wing tip while I flew around for a few minutes today.