Two Pilots & an LSW: Trips

Kaylee sent us more photos—she went to a rock concert with her friend. Steve pipes up with “As in the middle of the ROCKS?” because in the photo they’re surrounded by mountains. She says “Nope Rock band on a mountain” She totally missed the dad joke. I’m disappointed in her. ;)

She spent today recuperating with Advil as her muscles were all rebelling from the hike. She’s bored as she is texting me non-stop while her friend is at work. lol I am at work too, sort of. Trying to be productive anyway.

Yesterday I took the Cirrus out of Frankfort, went to Delphi and picked up Tell, Stephen and Clay, and flew them down to Kentucky. Dropped Clay off and took the other two 15 minutes away to another field, where we stayed and waited until they were done. Weather wasn’t great, and I had to go around some things on the way down, but then it got really dicey for the trip home. I texted them and said if we didn’t get out of here in the next 5 minutes we weren’t getting out for awhile nor were we going to be able to pick Clay back up. I took off with cells all around the airport, bombed out of there, went in between them, then raced them to the other airport, didn’t shut down, threw Clay in the airplane, and went for home. Had to divert around a huge wad of weather, and was racing to get back to Delphi. I could have made it before the storms, but then getting back into Frankfort was a question, so we stopped at Frankfort and they got a ride from there back to their cars at Delphi. It was an adventure. Always an adventure.

One embarrassing thing is that this Cirrus will not stay running if you start it with the power at a normal lower setting. So I’m sitting inside talking to the old guys that hang out at airports and they ask me questions about how long we’ve had the plane, etc., and I’m like “Well, this is its first trip, actually”. And then I get out there and it dies the first time, so I leave the power up and it ROARS and I pull it back and it almost dies so I bring it up and it ROARS and this happens like 3 times. Plus I’m rushing out of there to beat storms. I figured those guys thought I was a complete idiot. I sure looked like one. I’m still embarrassed and I’ll hopefully never be back there. :P

I was so focused on the weather for that day that I completely forgot to have anyone check the fuel in the 340 for me. I was leaving at 7 am the next morning (today) and the airport would be closed, and now that I was home for the day it was 5:30 pm and they were also already closed, so I had to drive from Frankfort to Kokomo Airports, get out there, and sure enough, no gas in the plane. So I had to pull it out, taxi it over, self-serve the four tanks, taxi back, put it away, close up, and THEN go home. I was so sweaty, it’s super muggy here now. Cold cold windy windy HOT. *sigh* But at least I was ready.

Get home and go to bed early last night because I had to get up at 5:30. Then Dustin and I were looking at the weather for Milwaukee, and it’s not great. There are storms, and low IFR. I look at all the approaches, and low and behold, the approaches are shut down where he wants to go. The only approach into the field has minimums of 600’ and we need 200-300’. So I pick the other airport that has one approach that goes down to 300’. He wants to leave 15 min earlier, so 5:15 am it is, and I go to bed. Wake up to storms here and low IFR there. We end up delaying by an hour, which helps us with the storms but not the low IFR. Dustin hasn’t flown in six months, and here we are shooting an approach to the minimums. He struggled a bit on this one, so I quietly helped here and there as he had a professor from Purdue in the back of the plane on headset with us and you want to make him look good, ya know? We land in the rain and the clouds, at minimums, and he heads off with her to a seminar of some sort until 6 pm.

Meanwhile, I work from the pilot lounge, wait for lunch, and then take the crew car to go drive around and eat. First, the crew car required a checkout. It’s a full electric Chevy something or other, and there is no “start” button. You just put your foot on the brake with your door closed and it will start automatically. The knobs on the dash are dark and you don’t know what they are until you move them, and then they’ll light up and show you radio volume, for example. And they required a diagram on how to shift gears, because like everything else they didn’t want to be “normal”, but “new” and “fresh”. They say that a good way to keep your brain young is to task it with different or unusual or new places. If that’s the case, my brain may never die, because I go these weird places and drive on busy roads in big cities with construction and traffic where I have NO idea where I’m going, in cars that require extra thought to find simple things such as how to shift into Park or which side the turn signal vs the windshield wiper is or how the navigation system works or…how to open the door if it’s a Tesla. Just all the things are weird. It's interesting at least, and maybe even good for you.

I ended up at a place called “The Twisted Fisherman”, which had an “island” vibe in the middle of Milwaukee. It was on the river, and they had brought sand in there, and beach chairs, and played island music inside and out. I had a fabulous seafood pasta that seriously tasted like Florida with clams, calamari, shrimp, mussels, spinach, linguini in a garlic wine sauce. A few capers and I’d have been in heaven. SO good. Sat there and watched the water, in the sunshine, and for a little while I was pretending to be somewhere kind of cool for once. ;)

The rest of the afternoon, I drove around a bit, then came back to the airport and hung out in the pilot's lounge and did some work. The FBO closed at 5 pm and my people weren't coming back until 6, so they left me in the main area and said once I left I couldn't get back in, unless I put something in the door to stop it. So at 5:45 I went to the bathroom, which is outside the FBO door. I put a magazine in the door to block it, but before I left I felt weird about leaving my stuff in there, in case it got locked in, so I took it with me. Which was good because the magazine didn't stop the door from locking, and I was now locked out of the FBO. At least I had my purse and iPad! So I sat outside on a bench until Dustin and the two folks we were bringing home got there

Now we had round two of weather. The ceilings were higher but we had two lines of thunderstorms to navigate and one big cell headed right for Kokomo. We got there at about the same time. Lightning, heavy rain, broke off the ILS because of it, but we were otherwise VMC, so we circled around to the south, and when the cell moved off the runway, we came in and landed. Our passengers were impressed. lol. Fortunately it was mostly smooth until the end there.

I got home around 9-something pm, and then realized at 9:45 pm that someone scheduled me for a morning flight tomorrow. I was looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. OH well. So it goes some days, eh? Then I looked at the weather and realized that tomorrow afternoon may be the only/best day of the next 3 in order to do a guy's T-6 checkout. He's cocky, says he doesn't think it's a hard airplane, says he hasn't bent an airplane in 1700 hours tailwheel and doesn't plan on starting now. We'll put his money where his mouth is and see how it goes. When it's hotter than hades, too. Should be great. ;)