Labor Day

I need to paint this picture for you in words. Stay with me here. It's 11:20 am. The skies are dark and ugly, the weather is moving in. Steve is busy at the airport, and everyone else is off for the day. I need to move a T-6 off of the ramp and into the hangar, for the weather. A friend generously agrees to let me shove that big thing in the front of his hangar for awhile. I go to start our tug, and nothing happens. The battery is fine but the starter won't even click. That's not good. I interrupt Steve who helps us move on to the second big tug, that's been sitting for months in one of the t-hangars and hasn't been used in...I don't know how long. Maybe ever, actually. It has a battery tender on it, and hallelujah, it starts! Steve gets back to work. I take the tow bar off our T-6, drag it out to the ramp, and huh. The hook up on the front of this tug is way too high, I can't use my normal wooden stick to prop up the tow bar to hook up on the front as desired. But I CAN hook up to the back of the tug.

The first raindrops start falling. I hook up to the back of the tug, tug it over the hangar, open everything up, move an airplane back carefully to create a T-6 shaped hole, and then try to find something I can use to prop up the tow bar so I can hook it up to the front, which is where I need to hook it up in order to carefully and easily push it away into the spot. I can't find anything.

It starts raining pretty hard now. Big gloppy drops. Rumbles of thunder. I am running out of time. I shrug and decide to try to back the T-6 into its spot in the hangar. This does not go well. I keep pulling forward, straightening out, then backing up and trying to swing it into place. Everything is backwards, when you turn the wheel things don't go the way they are supposed to, but I can get the hang of backwards. But if the tailwheel breaks loose, the tug and the bar get at an awkward angle, jackknife like a bad semi basically, and can't straighten up in the space I have. If the tailwheel doesn't break loose, I can't turn it tightly enough to fit in the spot. Conundrum.

It's dumping rain now. I'm soaked from head to toe. Going forward, backward, not quite, try it again. And again. And again. And again. I'm gritting my teeth, and apologizing to the good Lord for my thoughts. I can generally put the T-6 right where I want it on a tug. Except if I'm being watched closely, or going backwards. If you haven't tried to push a T-6 into a hole, hooked up to the back of a tug, driving in reverse, in dumping rain and wind, and not a lot of room, I vote you should give it a try. If someone had been there to record that with a time lapse video, I'm sure it would have been hysterical, especially set to some kind of circus music.

And then it happened. I got it in there, without it jackknifing on me. Amazingly. Finally. I closed up the hangar, sat in a chair, soaked completely through, for an hour, waiting for Steve to finish his business and come get me, listening to it dump outside. I'm cold, I'm hungry, I'm not just damp, I'm *wet*, and I'm grateful. When Steve came in, his face was a little concerned, probably rightfully so. But now that I've had a warm lunch, a hot cup of coffee, and a change of clothes, I can find humor in it again. ;) I took a picture of myself all scraggly and wet, and I look like the Wicked Witch of the West who had a bucket of water dumped on her.  And this photo was an *hour later* after I'd been drying out already.  I'm not sharing that on FB.

You can't be in this industry if you can't deal with rapid changes and uncertain schedules, that's for sure. It even gets to me sometimes, and I'm a really laid back person!

I have a young man whose tailwheel endorsement I'm doing in his dad's airplane. His dad is a kind of friend. He has limited time to do it in before he goes off to learn how to fly helicopters in the military, which is cool. I scheduled him for 5 days. Three this week, two next week, with the plan to fly twice a day until we got it done.

Then I got the call about the T-6 training, and he wants to do it soon, and I'm pretty much booked up all month, so something has to give. I told him I'd do it Tues & Wed afternoon, meaning I could only fly with Kid #1 in the mornings, and would go to the other place in the afternoons.

Then I got a text. MBros has two flights they need me to take. One on Wednesday, one on the 14th, one of the other full days I'd set aside for Kid #1.

I had 'normal' students at 6-7 pm both days (Tues & Wed) after I got back from the other trainings, but now I won't be back in time for them either.

So pardon me while I scrape around and try to figure out how to be fair and get stuff done that needs gotten done, while hoping this stupid weather chills out and lets us actually accomplish what we need to on the days we DO have.

Aviation.

Oh, and "Happy" Labor Day?