First, I'm home and alive, so that's all good.
Second, it's been a hell of a couple of days. That was stressful. It's still stressful, but better than it was.
Steve has been working on taxes for days. He's got a huge stack of papers to go through, and he's trying to get everything caught up before we leave for Sun-n-Fun, because it's due. He's tired and stressed out too.
Kaylee seems all right. She went on a kind of first date the other day for lunch, but I don't know how it went because she keeps things pretty close in that regard. lol Molly the cat is quite cute and adorable still. You can't help but like pretty miss Molly.
This morning first thing I had to go in and get my medical renewed. I still had a valid 3rd class, but my 2nd class was expiring. I hadn't had time or ability to go in, but I wasn't too worried about it, until suddenly it was due, and here, and I'm going to Sun-n-Fun to give rides (and probably fly in the show), which you can't do without a 2nd Class Medical, and which the FAA verifies in person when you arrive. Except all the AMEs are 2-3 months out on appointments. I called four of them over the last several days. I had one day to do it--Monday. I next texted Mike, and said I know he only does Wednesday afternoons and he's 3 months out, but...and explained my problem. He came in and brought his staff in at 11 am this morning before he headed to his other office in Logansport just to do my medical. Meanwhile, Ethan and family needed picked up Monday in Florida. I asked if we could leave from down there at 7 am so I could get back in time to get my medical. (You know how early I'd have had to leave here to be down there by 6 something am to be back off the ground at 7?) They offered to let me come down the night before and spend the night and we'd just leave early the next morning. So I arranged a hotel and to do that. Then they said we could just come home last night instead of this morning. That'll be the next post. The weather was terrible, and I do mean terrible. But we made it, so I was able to make it to my medical.
Back to this morning. The weather was too bad for us to fly down to Florida in BOB after my medical like we were going to do, so we called that off until tomorrow. So I called the hotel down there to let them know we were coming a day later and not to give our rooms away. Except they didn't have us down for anything. So I spent 30 minutes stressed out and trying to fix that, right before I left for the medical. I also have another problem. My glasses prescription is a couple years old now, and I can't really see 20/20 up close in particular on my right eye, and not great far away on my right eye. I barely passed it last year and it's the same pair of glasses. I can't use my contacts because I have an astigmatism and I don't get 20/20 on the contacts anyway, and it's the same old script, so, worse than my glasses. I haven't had time or ability to go get my eyes/glasses redone. So I was worried about not passing the vision part of my medical.
I get there, and first you pee in a cup, and second they hand me a thing and say "cover your left eye and read that", and we start with my bad eye right out of the gate. Except she wasn't watching me, so I didn't fully cover my left eye, and I can see pretty well with that one. I was able to cheat through the right eye on the near and far, and passed with flying colors, so to speak. Getting that piece of paper in hand took about 50 pounds off, because without it my options coming up were not good. We didn't have another rides pilot available, we'd committed to it, and if I tried to fake it, it's a Federal offense if I'm caught, which I very well could have been considering they use iPads and the internet to plug your info and probably verify your info. I could have had Morgan pretend to be the rides pilot and have her give them her info, but then if they saw me climbing in and doing the rides and checked me, we're back to "hosed". Cancelling the whole thing would also be very bad. So...that was all averted thanks to Mike going out of his way to save my bacon.
When she went to take my blood pressure, I wondered about it, because I was and have been stressed out, and I wondered if it would break 120 up there. She put a new wrist unit on, and it said "147/78". I was like "Whoa, hey, I've been stressed today, but that is really well and truly abnormal for me. I usually am like 115 these days!" So she took it herself with the normal cuff on the arm, and it was 112/70. THAT'S more like it. If my blood pressure really was 147, I was going to be upset, the only time I've ever seen it that high was when I was in labor and a lot of pain hours into it.
I also have a little jelly-like glob on my left eyeball. I'd googled it and it said it's super common and no big deal, but I was in an eye doctor's office, so I asked him about that too. He said it's super common and no big deal. lol A little extra fluid trapped for whatever reason, and if it doesn't hurt (it doesn't), it doesn't affect my vision (it doesn't), and doesn't bother me (it doesn't), to just leave it alone and it'll probably disappear on its own. Good enough, that's what Dr. Google said but it's nice to have a real doctor say it too.
Left there and met up with Steve, Ty and Chuck for lunch, and finally I was hungry again now that that hurdle was over with.
Finished lunch and went out to Kokomo, where Morgan and I took up BOB the Beech. It needed some test run-ups for maintenance, which all went well, and then she flew for a checkride to become a C-45 pilot in the CAF. She was so nervous she was shaking, you could see her poor legs in particular vibrating over there, but after a few minutes she settled in, and did just fine, naturally. We did steep turns, stalls, slow flight, takeoffs and landings, go-around, engine out, all the stuff. And it was windy, too, so that was good practice, though it was close to down the runway, it was still gusty and windy. She did manage to Bounce BOB, which so far I haven't done or had anyone else do, but she fixed it and landed great out of it, so that was actually kind of nice to see. In the beginning I'd been worried about that, how it handled after a big bounce, because I hadn't bounced the thing and I wasn't sure what it would do. Now we know. lol It's fine. It's a lot more stable to deal with than the T-6 in about every way. Crosswinds, bounces, taxiing, all of it.
We get back in, and we shut down on the ramp. We're going to leave the airplane out because we're going to leave first thing in the morning for Florida. Me, Steve, Jim B, and Morgan. Jon comes up and says "I got an oil leak over here on the right engine". I'm like, okay, and he says "No. I mean I've got a LEAK, a bad one. I'm going to need to take off the cowls and find it." We're on the ramp, it's cold and grey and windy, and he takes the cowls off and there's oil everywhere. I do a run-up on just that engine so he can find it. He says "We're gonna need to put it back in the hangar and work on it there." It's too big of a leak to ignore, and we can't go to Florida with it like that. So he pulls out all the planes he just put away, puts BOB in, puts the planes all back in the hangar, and as of right now he is still working on it. He came in once and said "There are two hoses with oil. A soft and a hard hose. If the soft hose is the problem, I can maybe fix it with a late night. If it's the hard one, we're done for awhile." I still haven't even heard if he knows which hose it is, and it's 8:30 pm. We're supposed to leave in 12 hours. I have a whole herd of people lined up and expecting us to be leaving in the morning, so there will be a lot of folks to contact if we can't. So...for tonight, we wait. I haven't even packed yet. I just got home myself less than an hour ago. I have a lot of catching up and packing to do.
(Also, my flight suit is tight and it's required attire. So that's fun.)
Update: Jon couldn't find the oil leak. So we have to go out tomorrow and run it again, maybe fly it again. They think it's a cylinder base or a sump. If it's an easy fix, we'll be on our way tomorrow. If it's not, we may be done done. But I have to pack tonight and wait and see what tomorrow brings. But frankly, I'm just glad it didn't blow out a leak halfway to Florida with a plane load full of people. Could've had a destroyed engine which would put us out of commission all year, Assuming we landed safely out of it. Or we could've been grounded with maintenance problems somewhere down south and away from home. Which means I'm glad it was IFR today, or we'd have departed, and had that leak somewhere other than here. Again...fortunate. Lucky. Thankful.
Below, next up, I'll talk about yesterday, because that was a hell of a day too. ;)
Us in BOB not wearing our flight suits illegally
And a couple of funnies I enjoyed, pardon the French:
(Mom, FAFO or "F Around and Find Out" is a common phrase now days, in case you hadn't heard that, so getting that phrase combined with an appropriate grammar lesson cracked me up)
No comments:
Post a Comment