Two Pilots & an LSW: Sunday

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Sunday

Kaylee bunkered down in her room most of the day, coming out around 4 pm for me to take her to a youth group serving the poor at the local outreach center thing, until 6 pm. Then back to her room. She's feeling a little better today, has slept a lot.

I slept in and it felt like I slept until 10 am or something, only to find out it was 8. And I felt like I'd been sleeping in too long. I got a lot done around here, including about 75 loads of laundry (or 7 or 8). It was nice to have a day mostly at home. I needed that, especially as we wind up here for Oshkosh.

Much of the day has actually also been spent staring online at Facebook. A warbird pilot went down today, Vlado Lenoch. I wouldn't call him a personal friend, although I interacted with him a few times, and he even hugged me the last time I saw him at the Columbus Air show and told me he enjoyed following my escapades on Facebook. When he flew for that show, he'd eaten all these jalapenos, and was patting his stomach before he went, and when he came back he said "I taxied out and thought 'I still can't believe people pay me to do this.'" He still had the real joy in what he did. He was always laughing or smiling when I'd see him around at events, and I've never heard anybody say a bad word about him, which is unusual and unlikely for someone in his position of, well, fame and some form of power, at least in that community.

He was at an airshow in Kansas Saturday, and this morning he took the local airport manager, also a pilot, up for a ride in his P-51 Mustang, "Baby Doll". They took off at 10 am and crashed around 15 minutes later, high rate of speed, big impact. Nobody knows why. I can't even imagine why. That's what I want to know. The guy was a legend. He'd been doing aerobatics about as long as I've been alive, is one of the top in the country in what he does. He grants aerobatic waivers to all the warbird people looking to do that low level for airshows. He has thousands of hours of Mustang time, does airshows in them about every weekend. So what on earth happened that on a pretty Sunday morning 15 minutes after takeoff on a pleasure flight, he went down in such a fashion that it was obviously not in control? I keep thinking "heart attack??" even though most people think that of pilots they respect because they can't believe they'd make a mistake and it's almost never that. But in this case, I'm just having trouble. Back seater do something he ran out of altitude to get out of? What?? Most aviation accidents don't shock me, especially in the airshow industry. They walk a line and they and we all know it. Training, practice, proficiency and judgement keep most of them safe. But the margin for error is small. But this one shocks me. I await answers.

As I'm writing this, my arm is stinging. See, yesterday I went to climb out of the 172, and my foot caught on my headset cord. Desperately not wanting to pull on my $1000 headset cord, I jumped and lifted that foot really high, hopping backwards on my other foot--right into the wheel pant of the 172, which threw me to the ground like a misbehaving delinquent. Of course I landed on my arm and hand and hip. Hand and hip are fine. Arm has a road rash scrape on it that hurts. It isn't deep, it won't scar, it's just a scrape, but it's right on the bony part above your elbow and it stings every time I move my arm. Dumb thing. Steve said if I'm not careful I won't make it to 50. Kaylee won't look at it. She's had First Aid training, she should look at it. ;)

Here are some photos. These first three are from Jon Tharp on my maiden flight in the PT-26 after maintenance was completed on the engine. I stayed above the pattern juuuust in case. I thought these turned out nicely.

Next up are photos from a cross country I took with a student, with rain showers and a few cells nearby, my trip to S. Indiana, then our flight home from picking Kaylee up at camp.