Back At It

It was a nice, still morning to start with to do some PT-26 flying.  I drove down to Indianapolis and met with a student there, and we flew for about an hour and a half doing pattern work.  There ended up being a direct crosswind of a whopping 4-5 knots.  The thing is, in a tailwheel, even that means something, so it was a good object lesson for the day on why you pay attention to the winds and your controls even when the winds are light.  There was one landing that was a little too adventurous.  I ended up throwing in the power and yanking up, initiating a needed go-around, and then we had to climb up over the buildings and such again from a ways down the runway.  Tailwheel instruction never gets very relaxed, frankly.

Speaking of tailwheel, since the photos got posted to Facebook and the club members who needed to know do, we lost our last tailwheel airplane yesterday.  The Cub was flown into the ground by a foreign exchange student (not one of our students, but a ward of the owner) at a high rate of speed, flipped and destroyed.  Nobody hurt.  The Glenndale Champ was stalled out too high on a landing (by the owner's grandson with the owner on board) and broke something which was then repaired inappropriately and has been offline since (but will be hopefully back online soon).  Our third and final taildragger was very busy down at Westfield.  Yesterday a student left the throttle wide open, didn't tie down the tail, put anyone in on the brakes, or put a chock down in front of the wheels, hand propped it, and it went careening into a ditch and hit a stand of trees.  It's gotta be totaled.  Prop hit trees, which means engine tear-down, gear wiped out, right wing smashed up.  It's in very sad shape.  It's painful to look at.  And that leaves us with a lot of tailwheel students and pilots and zero tailwheel airplanes at the moment, right at the push before the end of the season/winter.   We'll work to try to get the Glenndale Champ back up and running as quickly as possible, but it's going to take a few weeks.  Ugh.  The person who did it was upset, obviously.  The owner is upset too.  So am I.  Things happen sometimes, but that shouldn't have.  Double Ugh.  Didn't need that.  At all.

I have a trip to Savannah, Georgia tomorrow, and needed to pick up the 340 today.  The guy from Aurora was going to come pick me up in a Baron.  I saved my email to him-I was really clear on when I needed to be back by, when I needed to leave.  Which was noon, my time.  At 12:30 he calls me, from still in Illinois, and says he's on his way.  I say that's going to make me late, he says I should be fine.  Um, I've made this trip a lot.  I'm not fine.  I needed to be down by 3 pm to get Kaylee.  He hasn't left Illinois yet at 12:30.  It'll take him an hour to get to me.  An hour to get back to Aurora, and an hour for me to get home.  That puts me on the ground at 3:30, which gets me to the school by 3:50 pm.  School gets out at 3:10.   So I text Kaylee who has to sit in the library for an hour after school.   I did get a ride to Aurora in an ancient B-55 with a Loran, ADF, RNAV unit, and ancient radar in it, with no working VORs, no GPS, no actual working nav aid at all.  He was having me pull up my iPad and find out where we were because we were above a cloud deck and couldn't see the ground references.  Kinda funny.  Especially since the last time I got a ride home from them, it was night IFR in a beater C-310 where all the navigation failed and we were going to have to fake an approach into Kokomo.  Ended up getting a localizer needle to work about 5 minutes before we were given vectors to intercept it.  Fortunately.

Anyway, got the 340 home, left it on the main ramp, ran to my car and picked up Kaylee, took her home, then took her back out to drama practice, ran back to the airport and put the 340 away for tomorrow's trip, and hung out until it was time to go get her at 8 pm.  Dinner at Subway, a little flight planning (very little), and an early bed time for me with a 5:30 a.m. wake-up call.  I'll say hi to Savannah for you.

In the meantime, read-em and weep.