Two Pilots & an LSW: Helter Swelter

So when Summer decides to hit, it does so with...vigor. These last few days, holy cow. I know I hate winter the most, but my second least-favorite thing is this. 90-100 degree temps/heat indexes, sweltering and sweating. Spring and Fall, when it's not raining or blowing winds to kingdom come, that's where it's at. Summer when it's a normal 80 degree day. No gray dull winter, no hot ovens. Please and thank you. So you're going to have to listen to me complain about that a little.

Yesterday I had an evening flight, but he decided not to go. The person before him had the plane on a checkride, and they ran about 30 minutes into his time frame. He decided he didn't want to be rushed or short on time, so even though it was a 90 minute drive up here, he just headed home. Kind of a bummer, but I was wondering if he wanted an excuse, because we are just doing the pattern, and you can only do so much of that on a hot day anyway. Then I had a night flight, a night cross country required for the Commercial certificate. The sun doesn't go down until 9:15 pm, and you have to go an hour after sunset. The plane we were going to take, the RG, went down for maintenance, so we were in the regular 172. Now we're much slower going over 200 miles. We had about 30 gallons of gas which should have been plenty for what he planned. As we sat in the oven-like hangar, with no wind to help, I decided if we were going to sit there and cook, we might as well cook with a better view. So I pulled out the Aerostar and we went flying for about 45 minutes, watched the sun going down, killed some time, and I practiced some engine out stuff while we were at it. I did a Vmc demo, to see how the plane did on one engine with various amounts of drag out. Flaps, gear, more flaps, etc. A windmilling propeller, or over 20 degrees of flaps, and it's not staying in the air. Otherwise it does pretty well. I'd done it before when we first got it, but it's been awhile. With 40 degrees of flaps down, it comes down over 1500 feet per minute. Lose one on final with full flaps and you'd better get those flaps reduced in a hurry. Anyway, that's what I did for a few minutes, and it was good.

The cross country though, that did not go as planned. Instead of taking 53 minutes to get there, he climbed up to 5500', and it took us 1.3 hours to get there. They said they had self-serve fuel, but when we got there, it was locked up tight, and it's only available when they're already open. Which is kind of dumb and defeats the purpose of self-serve. So I stuck the tanks myself, and we had 18 gallons remaining. There wasn't a self-serve or full-serve fuel place open at midnight much closer than home anyway. Marion maybe and Huntington maybe, or Ft. Wayne, all close to home. So we took off, leaned out, didn't climb high, and monitored our time. When we landed, the fuel gauge was bouncing around the "E", but my calculations said we'd still have an hour's reserve, 8 gallons left. But I can't stand watching a fuel gauge close to E. At night is even worse. I hated it. We landed, I stuck the tanks, and we had a full legal safe hour left of fuel just like we were supposed to. I still hated it. If it wouldn't have been after hours I'd have topped off at Kokomo before we left in the first place, but I didn't want to mess with self-serve when we had more than enough for what was planned. Well, it didn't end up being more than enough, it ended up being legally and safely enough, but not keep-laura-happy enough. He planned on fuel there if needed, we planned on having 30 gallons be plenty for a 2 hour flight, flying after the rest of the world is closed doesn't help. Things just didn't go as planned. It was fine, it just was a...warning shot. We didn't land until after 1 am. By the time I got everything put away and headed home, it was 1:30 a.m. I was exhausted, and hot, and sweaty, and worn Down.

Steve had a flight at 7 am in that airplane, before the airport opens, so I warned him that he and his guy were going to need gas first thing. He was possibly mildly annoyed I didn't go to the self serve pump at 1:30 am to top it off for them the next day, or teasing me about being annoyed, but I didn't have it in me. lol

Unfortunately he was up early for his student, and I woke up early for the Flying Squirrels. I needed to go to Kokomo, pick up the Champ, fly it to Glenndale, go down to the Cub, taxi it down to the end, then do flights. I was really, Really tired. When I forgot to turn the mags on to start the Champ, and it was already really hot outside, I knew I'd need to be extra diligent with tailwheel students today. As always, once you get rolling with someone in the plane, it all clicks in.

I had two students before lunch, and they did a great job. We had an hour each. Then a lunch break, and I had another kid after lunch. This one had a little trouble. He was on his fourth hour, same as the other two, but he couldn't taxi on his own, or do the takeoff at all, or climb out, or fly just straight, or anything. He'd stare inside, or stare to the right, and we just wandered all over. I gave up after awhile and we just flew around. It was obvious he wasn't picking up anything that people were teaching him (I was his 4th instructor), and he was just there to have fun and mess around. So that's what we did. He's not ready to do this flying thing, he just wants to play a game. Which is fine.

When I landed with him, it was 2 pm or so, and we were all wrung out. We'd talked about doing all 5 of their hours today, another flight while the weather was good, but we just didn't want to. None of us. So we called it for the day. I took the Cub back down and put it away, took the Champ back to Kokomo and put it away, drove to Dairy Queen and picked up a mini blizzard, ate it on the way home, walked in the door at home, and walked straight into bed and laid down and fell asleep for an hour. I had another student at 5. When I woke up at 4:30 to go fly, I could feel the ice cream I'd eaten and it was just almost cooked in my stomach. Felt so gross. My core body temp was too high, I could feel it from the inside out, and I was drinking cold water all day.

I got up, got ready, and drove back out to Kokomo, ready to cook in the 172 for another hour or more in the pattern. Except he didn't show. He had the wrong day on his personal calendar. So I closed up the hangar that had been left open from earlier, and I turned around and came home. I was okay with it, I was fine being done. I felt bad for him, because it was the same guy who left early yesterday and didn't fly. He goofed up and now he doesn't get to fly this week. But I didn't mind not flying again this afternoon.

Kaylee updated her blog. She is dealing with a few things, but honestly it's probably mostly good for her to handle. Growing up and dealing with growing up stuff...

Here are a few photos from the last few days.