Speaking of Alaska. I had a MBros flight yesterday to Alabama. D was originally planning on going with me, as he wants to build his flight time up to 1000 hours in the plane so he'll have the same liability insurance that Nathan and I do in it. But he ended up backing out. So it was supposed to be me and three of the other guys. With full fuel, that's a full plane. They show up, and unload a truck, and they are bringing along with them an entire stack of stuff, including a trolling motor, a large capacity battery, ten 1-gallon jugs of hydraulic fluid, three 5-gallon buckets (empty at least), tubing, boots, and two or three bags of heavy tools. I just stared for a minute. There was no way I was under gross weight with that load. If I don't take the stuff, they can't do the project. So rather than call off the whole flight, or make them leave a guy behind, I went ahead and took off. I didn't even want to know how much all that stuff weighed, I didn't even try to figure it out, because at that point it no longer mattered. I told them it's not a truck, you can't just load it up like that, weight counts, and this has just removed our safety for the flight. If we lose an engine I will not be able to keep us in the air on the other one. I'm sending D an email to remind him to remind the folks who go what our operational limits are so that position doesn't come up again. Other than that, it was a great flight. Smooth, super cold, over 6 hours round trip, just me up front taking photos and reading a book, no scary weather, no howling headwinds, no fuel management issues. Just the perfect kind of flight to get paid for.
While I was in Eufala, I have a friend who lives nearby in Dothan, so I fired up the 340 and flew over to meet him for lunch. We had a nice BLT, and hung out for an hour and a half or so, had a good time. I came back to Eufala, topped off the plane, which I had to do myself, all 5 tanks, because they don't have a 100LL fuel truck (wah), and got the text that they were 45 minutes out. Success!
I took a lot of photos trying to get the settings right on my camera. I got some that turned out pretty well and some that I just can't quite master. I have to do a bit more reading and practice.
When I landed back at Kokomo at 8 pm, I turned my phone on, and had texts from a friend who said "If you taxi slow, I may have all the snow cleared off in front of your hangar." He'd gone home, gotten the shovel on his pickup truck, run to dinner with his kids, saw when I was coming in to land and beat me to the airport, and finished scraping off the snow right as I was taxiing up. And then another guy opened the hangar door for me and tugged us into the hangar sitting in the plane. Now THAT, ladies and gents, is SERVICE! I told the guys to not get used to that. lol It was super nice though, I appreciated it.
Other than that it's been too cold to do flight instructing. Kaylee's school has been on a two-hour delay every day this week so far, and tomorrow they may cancel for cold. There were power outages around from cold breaking power lines, frozen pipes, and all manner of trouble up here. I'm thankful for a warm house and a lot of food and beverages in it. :)
Tonight Kaylee has auditions for her school's Spring Musical, "7 Brides for 7 Grooms". Kaylee is oh so hard hoping for her first major role in a musical this time. She's singing and dancing for an audition tonight at 8:15 pm or so. Fingers crossed for her!
I know I'm forgetting stuff but I'll just have to remember later. In the meantime, here are some photos from Alabama's trip. Sunrise/Sunset, I just can't tell which ones I like best so I'll put representatives of all of them up.
These are all backwards, starting with a cellphone photo I took and going from sunset to sunrise with my Nikon.
City lights under a thin cloud layer at night.
Ice crystals on the side window
Greys of winter...sunrise.
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