Thanksgiving Rides

With family in town and our neighbor calling about airplane rides, I headed to the airport Friday morning and gave 7 rides. Started at 9:30 and didn't stop until 1:00. First ride was for Preston (13) who is our neighbors nephew. He's in the CAP and very into flying. The next ride was for his dad Chris who had never ridden in a small plane. (I kept the wings level for him.) Following Chris, was our neighbor Tom, who has said he'd go for a ride but anytime I'd ask he always had someting to do. (yea righ...) So he finally go in with me. :-)

The next set of rides were all family members.. Josh, Tenisha, Erica, and father-in-law Charlie. Since Charlie was the last rider, we went flying a little more including a touch-n-go at the downtown Kansas City airport which is in Class B airspace which was fun. Haven't done that in awhile.

Bombing around...

Last Sunday, Ray called and asked if I wanted to go be his safety pilot while he shot some approaches in the RV-10. Kinda hard to so no to that. He picked me up at Ottawa and let me do the take-off while he setup for the approaches into New Century (IXD). He shot two ILS 36 approaches and did a good job. Just for fun, he let me shoot an approach as well. This was my first approach in a REAL airplane and too make it tougher, it was from the right seat. (I've shot lots of simulator approaches). I actually did a decent job. We did the full procedure and I kept it in the donut down final until the very end when I got just oustide of it. Ray took it back at the 200ft MDA and I took off the foggles to find us just left of the runway 20 feet or so. He was also kind enough to let me fly back to Ottawa... so I logged .9 hours of RV-10 time!

Last night I make the short 25 min. flight up to KLXT for the EAA Chapter 91 meeting where Ed Holicky from NOAA came and talked about weather services and their future. I logged 2 night landings. I also found a somewhat major issue with my electronics. Whenever I turn up the instrument lights, it causes my CDI to deflect and act weird. If I turn them off, everything works OK. Going to need to get to the bottom of that soon!

55th Annual Fairview Free Flyin and Airshow

It wasn't a planned event but Ray had mentioned a flyin going on in Oklahoma so I did some seraching and found out where it was. It was the 55th Annual Fairview Free Flyin and Airshow in Fairview, OK. A short 1.5 hour flight from home. So the plan was to go north to visit Sandi's family if the weather was good or go south to Oklahoma if it wasn't.

Saturday morning dawned and the winds up north were forecasted to be stiff so we headed southwest. We departed Otttawa and arrived in Fairview just after 10:00am. We missed the free pilot breakfast so we had to wait until 11 for lunch. While waiting we wandered around getting a look at all the planes.

The airshow started at 1:00 with a series of flybys by 9 Yaks. That was followed by a bunch of RC model flying, including a flying LAWNMOWER and even a Snoopy doghouse. That was followed but a couple of Pitts aerobatic routines.

The flying lawnmower

Departure was interesting because as soon as the airport reopened there was a MASS depature of airplanes. The taxiway didn't run the entire lenght of the runway, so we had to taxi through the grass/dirt along the side of the runway. It was eerily quiet as we started our taxi and I had even made a comment about nobody making any departure announcements at all. Of course planes were taking off one right after the other. Then someone did a radio check and that started a whole series of humuorous calls. Mostly a string of 15 or 20 "Yeps" "Yessir" followed by the last guy who always said "Oddball". There was a few comments about needing 4-wheel drive. Sandi even had to put a quip in about "Are ya'll related?". The trip home was uneventful. The total hobbs time was 3.5 hours which included a substantial warm up period before we left.

Photo Gallery

Hobbs: 152.5

Fall/Winter slow down

It's that time of year when it has gotten cold, the fly-ins are scarce and there just aren't a whole lot of places to go. We don't have any big trips planned for the next several months at least. Will probably do some local flying just to keep the engine in good shape, as we did this morning. We got up and made a short 25 mile trip over to Topeka, KS (KTOP) where we met up with my mom for some breakfast.

The plane now has 149.0 hours on it!