Two Pilots & an LSW: Nothing but Flying--Almost

Roadie didn't eat for 1.5 days, so last night I gave her a dose of steroids. She didn't fight as hard as before, so I did it, and today she was eating like a horse. That stuff--I need some anti-steroids. :p

Ann, when I came home tonight, was on her deck, knocking on the glass, waved at me excitedly and with a smile, and blew kisses at me, saying "I love you". She hasn't done that in a very long time--I don't know the last time she was with it enough to do that. So I go over in less than an hour to put her to bed, and she's lost. She's afraid, and confused, and her heart is pounding, you can tell her Afib was bothering her, she was just freaked out. And it seemed like she wasn't sure who I was for awhile. So I just held her hand and prayed out loud with her, and talked to her for a few minutes. In less than an hour she went from happy and alert to lost and scared. It was weird and sad...

Now the rest is flying, so you can skip it Mom. ;)

Yesterday was a full one. I left the house around 8 am, drove an hour to Frankfort, and took the 340 with Ethan, Nick, me and Tell down to Evansville. Dropped off Nick, got gas. Took off with Ethan and Tell and flew down to McMinnville, TN and dropped them off. They were looking at a truck, and if they liked it they were going to drive it back 7 hours home from there. They liked it, so I left them there to drive home, and I went back into Evansville, and got more gas. Took the courtesy car into town and had breakfast at 1 pm, because who doesn't like breakfast for lunch?? Waited for Nick to be done, and then flew him back to Frankfort by ourselves, tugged the plane away, then drove an hour home. What made this day more interesting was the weather. The skies were clear, but not clear. The sun is shining on the airplane, but you can't see a thing. Canadian wildfire smoke has blanketed our area so thickly that it was IFR down here, down in Evansville, and even down in Kentucky. I had to shoot four approaches yesterday, 3 of the 4 almost to minimums, to be able to see the runway. The one rookie mistake I made, was going back into Frankfort. Winds were calm, so I did the RNAV 27 because that's the one I could land on and wouldn't have to back-taxi to get to the hangar, could just go right to it. Except that was facing into the sun. In the evening when it's low. Into the smoke. I barely got the runway in sight. Winds were calm all day, so there was nothing to move the smoke on, either. Evansville had us do the ILS 4 when we were coming from the north, which meant we had to overfly the airport and go way out to intercept it. When I came back into Evansville, winds were still calm, and they switched to ILS 22, when I was coming from the south now, so I had to overfly the airport and go way out to intercept it. I mean, winds are calm. Why don't they let you come straight in on the approach closest to you? Then when I left, they made me taxi all the way from one end of the airport to the other, to take off on Runway 22, so that I could then turn around and head north anyway. Why not let me take off from the runway I was right by heading in the direction I'm going, when the winds are calm? I had to wonder about the controllers. Like...really? I could have requested something else and see what they said, but I left it alone. I wasn't in a hurry.

Today Morgan and I flew Kevin, Jackie and Sean out to Caldwell, NJ. There was a Presidential TFR all out there in the NYC area airspace. JFK, Newark, Teterboro, La Guardia, all of them, and it included Caldwell. I spent a lot of time reading the pages of info on the TFR. You violate that they will pull your pilot certificate, and it is confusing to read. They don't just say "here you can't do this, here you can do this" They lump it all together from "Go here and they'll shoot you down" to "You can go in and out of here as long as you're on an IFR flight plan, have permission, a discreet code, and don't loiter". They actually use the word loiter. Like you loiter when you're IFR anyway. "Uh, yes, center, request vectors to loiter". What?

Halfway to NJ, the weather west of Kokomo blew up, and there was a big line of storms heading for Kokomo that was going to make it interesting getting back in. I kept an eye on that and figured we may have to wait on the ground in NJ for a bit. Tops of the cells were up over 45,000', so it wasn't a joke, and I couldn't clear it. Heading into NJ, I did the radios and the flying with the passengers in the back. It was all pretty normal until we hit the second New York controller, in the middle of the Presidential TFR. This guy was swamped. I sent my flight plan through the night before so they'd know I was coming and leave some room for me, as they can turn away General Aviation flights if they get saturated, and they were pretty well saturated. This controller was firing off the words like machine gun bullets, and every person on the radio was firing them right back at him. It was a pretty little ballet. Nobody grumpy, nobody stuttering or pausing or slow or "ummm"ing or anything. Everyone out there was a pro and it was a good thing. I told Morgan, when I got a minute, that it was a great exercise in why you didn't go into that airspace until you're good on the radios, because if you're the one who messes up the rhythm of that space, it boffs it up for everybody out there and turns it into a cluster. Morgan said she thought we were talking fast, but then we get to that guy and now we're talking FAST. "So. Many. Words." lol I said you mirror them. They talk slow, you can talk slow. They talk fast, you talk fast. They talk rapid fire, you all talk rapid fire. He switches me over to tower after flying me through the RNAV course, and I shoot the RNAV 4 in for a landing. When I switch over to tower, the tower guy is talking reallly slowly. It's like he was compensating for the ATC guys. He was letting us know they weren't that busy and it was okay to chill and slow down. Like I said--mirror the ATC.

Inside I was staring at the weather, watching the radar loop through, on various formats. On some it looked bad, and on others it looked terrible, including hail and tornadic activity. It took me about 20 minutes of looking and deciphering before I decided that if we left in another 20 minutes or so, we should be able to get in. It looked like it was going to dissipate, and it was the wad behind it I was wondering about. It ended up being fine, it dissipated before we got there, and we just got good old fashioned rain and clouds. We came home at 30,000', and I had Morgan fly once we got out of the initial busy space. Coming back into Kokomo we had to do an approach, so I did the ILS 23. Grissom vectored us too tight in onto the FAF, 700' above glideslope intercept, so we went full scale deflection on the glideslope before the localizer even came in. If she wouldn't have been with me, I'd have just intercepted the localizer and then dive bombed down until I got the localizer back. The Cheyenne can drop like a manhole cover without picking up a bunch of speed. But she's a new instrument pilot, and I don't want to exhibit bad habits. So I told Grissom we were full scale on the glideslope without having the localizer, and he vectored us back around for attempt #2, which went fine. Morgan hand flew the approach and made a nice landing out of it. She was supposed to go to an Air Race dinner that night, they pushed it back an hour for her since we ran late, and tomorrow she's going to a Taylor Swift concert, so combine all that with flying her first turboprop in IMC, flying it into NYC area, and up at 28,000' (since at 30,000 you have to have the autopilot on), along with coming in 8th place overall on the nation wide air race out of like 60 people, and she's had a stellar week. :)

The tower/ground controller at Caldwell was flirting with me on the radio, or super friendly, and it was funny. They were obviously slower than normal because of the TFR. Just a few of us came in or out. He was like "We haven't seen you around here as often as we used to!" and "We miss having you around", and the last one, I said I'd be back in a couple weeks and he said "we'll hold you to it!" I kept an audio file of it from LiveATC.net because it was cute. They were obviously bored up there without all their normal traffic. lol

It was a good day, I enjoyed it, had fun flying with Morgan, had fun going into the Presidential TFR successfully, had fun talking to the Caldwell guys, had fun outsmarting the weather, all of it. Enjoyable run.

Tomorrow will be more work than fun. Flying 7 people on two round trips all self serve fuel late into night in the 340. Wish I could use the Cheyenne and just do one trip, but that wouldn't be cool. Too charter-ish because of who they are, etc. Ah well. Some days are easy, some days are less easy, but getting paid is always good.