I hopped in the Aerostar to go to Ft. Wayne. Coming in to land is where things started to go wrong for the day. I just love it when a tower extends your downwind for miles and then tells you to follow the C-152 down a 7 mile final. And you're in an Aerostar which is the fastest piston twin in production. And then they tell you the 152's groundspeed is like 80. And you're like...no shit sherlock, why did you put me here? And you're doing slow flight all down final in an Aerostar with gear and flaps down and doing s-turns on final, not great ideas in that airplane, with the jet wing and the bad stall characteristics, where they/we lose at least one a year in the pattern or on approach, so that the 152 can clear the runway right as you're about to flare. It wasn't THAT busy out there. They coulda had a better plan...like let me in in front of the freakin' 152.
I get there 15 minutes late thanks to that, and he's sitting in the back of the T-6 ready to go. I preflight, hop in, fire up, and he can't hear me on the headset. We mess around for awhile, and finally I shut back down. I have him give me his headset, and I plug it in up front and check it out, and I can hear fine. So it's not the headset, it's the jack. Nothing we can do about that, but he wants to go anyway, so the plan is, I can hear him but he can't hear me. I'll talk on the radio and he can talk to me if he needs anything, and he'll do the flying from the back seat and go wherever he wants to go. Should be fine. It wasn't. We're wandering around, and he wants to fly low, too low, over the city, around the towers, over his family and friends. Ft. Wayne is asking me questions like "how much farther south are you going to go" or north. Or can I go west, or.... and I don't know, because I'm not flying and I can't talk to him to ask him where he's going next. So I'm just guessing, and keep telling him to climb back up a bit so I don't get into trouble. It was 1.5 hours of that. I also ended up having a miscommunication with tower, and ended up having to call them on the phone when I got back on the ground, so I had that hanging over my head while I was flying too, which was lovely.
I get on the ground, go to get in the Aerostar to go home, and my left seat will NOT move. It's frozen in place and I can't reach the rudders from there. I can't fly home like that. So after about 10 minutes of wrestling with it, I just climb into the right seat and fly home from the right seat. Fortunately I'm used to flying from the right seat, but it still felt weird with nobody else over there. I'm hot, tired, sweaty, and absolutely nothing is going right so far.
When I got back to Kokomo, Steve had brought me a cheeseburger, so I ate that and had a Diet Mt. Dew and two Tylenol and sat in a comfy chair with my eyes closed for a bit to regroup, because I still had two flight lessons to go.
The next flight was an instrument lesson going over holds, making up holds and having her do the entries and the hold. Nothing broke, nothing went wrong. I'm still a little aggravated, I ran home, got Ann's dinner and meds, got gas, turned around to head to the airport for the last flight of the day. In the Champ with Cameron, and we went over to Glenndale and did takeoffs and landings, and then back to Kokomo, and it was warm, sunny, calm winds, and pretty relaxing. It started helping me unwind, actually.
All in all, I've had better days, but I've had worse days too, so hey.
Me in the right seat of the Aerostar which is weird when nobody's in the left, and Champ Shadows.
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