This morning was a bit of a race as I canceled my morning flight on the assumption that someone was going with me to drop the 340 off in Aurora. He then decided he couldn't do it, so I called my backup person, but he was already busy this morning, for the first time in ages. My second backup person was off on a flight for us, and our other guy is gone now. Yet another was asked and just isn't comfortable going into tower controlled fields by himself, and another was trapped at a real life actual day job. The last one was heading to vacation for weeks and was fixing up an airplane part for us to get our 172 back online. So Steve called up his Bonanza student, who was willing to go on another last-minute flight, and I took Steve's cousin Dave with me in the 340, and we all came back together in the Bonanza. It was good practice for the student, with the tower and the extra weight in the airplane, and it helped us out too. Win/win.
We made it back in time to run to Wendy's and grab a sandwich, and when we pulled back into the airport, my 1 pm was there 30 minutes early and ready to go. We were up for an hour, and then I had a Discovery Flight with a father/son combo. I asked who was up front and who was in the back, and the Dad was the one who got the gift of a flight, so he was up front. I asked if he wanted to make this a basic first lesson or if he just wanted me to get us going and him do the flying. He wanted to make it a lesson, so I did. We had a good flight. As we were flying along, he said something like "You are very confidence-inspiring. I'm really relaxed right now, not concerned about anything." and his son piped up from the back seat and said "Same back here-I'm not worried at all. You seem so relaxed and confident in everything it makes me relax and be confident." I thought that was a nice compliment. There's really not much somebody can do in a 172 that you can't fix or get out of, though. :)
When we landed, it was time to GO. I had to race out of there and run to pick up Kaylee at after-school band practice and get her to her voice lesson. While she was there, I went to Subway and got her (and my) dinner, brought it back to her in time to pick her up from voice, she ate her sandwich in the car and I drove her back to band practice, dropped her off there and went back to Kokomo and put the airplane away that I'd flown on the Discovery flight, secured the hangar, and was chatting with Steve and Ty when I realized it was 6:05 pm. I was supposed to get her at 6. Whoops. I drove out of there like my tail was on fire, and got there about 6:15, which is pretty good, frankly. I had no conflicting traffic. ;) Took the kid home, and then went back out to Kokomo.
I had a plan. I was going to take the Cub back up for the first time in a month or so. But I got to the hangar and the Cub wasn't there. Must still be in maintenance. It was a perfect evening and Steve was busy with someone out there and I had until sunset, so...I took the T-6 out. Lately I'd been doing a lot of wheel landings and faster landings, which was feeling sloppy, so I decided to do some short field 3-point landings tonight. Started with a decent one, had a couple of those, ended up with a dropped-in one just a bit high, an accidental wheel landing, and ended on a greaser, nothing too bad, so I wouldn't say it was consistent, but it was good practice, and I did get my roll-out distance cut almost in half by the end.
The sun was almost gone when I taxiied in. And it felt like I'd had a little successful therapy completion for the day. Not sure which of these to post, so I'll add a few duplicates.
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