Ready to fly for another year

I finally completed a new club check yesterday, so I'm legal to fly club planes for another 12 months. I took everything out of my flight bag and put it all in the expandable bag on the back of the motorcycle. It fit great, even the headset, so I may have to do that more often when going out to fly.
I love flying and I love riding my motorcycle, so any time that I can combine the two it's a good day!

I ordered a new jacket to suppliment/replace my original Tourmaster Transition. I know it is brand new, but I've already decided that it was just too hot for the summer. I'm keeping it for now because it's an awesome jacket, but by tomorrow I should have a new Cortech GX Air mesh jacket with leather panels. I ordered it this weekend and UPS says it's on schedule for a July 12 delivery. Yes, it's yellow and black to match the bike. Tourmaster and Courtech are the same company, but the Cortech branded products are tailored with a more sporty style than the Tourmaster products. Assuming that the weather stays ok, I should have bike, bag, and jacket at the flying club meeting this weekend. After the meeting, me and another club member are going to have lunch and discuss any final plans for Airventure 2006!

Back from Colorado - Part 3 (of 3)

Salida was fun. My wife had a friend up there and she gave us some good ideas of stuff to do. She took us rafting on the Arkansas river and told us how to get to an old ghost town up in the mountains where we saw a lot of neat stuff and fed chipmunks out of our hands! We also rode the Royal Gorge train and visited the park.

It was finally time to go home. We had been watching the weather and while it was clear in Pueblo, there was a line of rain reaching across Texas from a stalled cold front. It was showing on radar east of Abilene which was where we planned to stop for lunch. We got to the airport around 9:30, paid for parking and fuel, loaded the plane, and turned in the rent car. We took off and headed toward our first stop of Abilene as we climbed to 9000 feet which kept us above a scattered layer of clouds. We had a pretty smooth flight and shortly after 3 hours, we had the field in sight and started to line up for landing. After an uneventful landing we taxed over to Abilene Aero and parked. A lineman was there at my door with a red carpet that he placed on the ground for me to step out onto! Very cool. The facilities were great and the people were very nice. We went over to the terminal where we had a very good lunch and then returned to pay for gas and get a new preflight briefing.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the trip home was pretty uneventful and our luck held. The long line of thunderstorms across the state had broken up completely and there was just some stuff north and south of our course on radar. We departed to the east and started our climb to 9000 again. I had planned our course to go sort of north of Waco to miss some rather large MOAs (Military Operator Areas) between us and Houston. Well, about 10 minutes into the flight, the center controller called us up and said that he had an ammended clearance when I was ready to copy. I grabbed my pen and said, "Go ahead." He then said that the MOAs were "cold" (inactive) and we were cleared across them direct to College Station. He then added, "That route will keep you out of all the weather all the way to Houston." He was right. While we watched stuff build to the left and right of our course, we cruised along in the clear above all but one or 2 small ones that we punched right through without any bumps. All this time the frequency was saturated with the controller and airplanes continuously getting vectors around the building weather near both Dallas and San Antonio. Meanwhile we cruised along in smooth comfort and watched towns and airports drift by below.

As we got to College Station we received a few small course changes and a descent to get us on the STAR (Standard Terminal Arrival Route) in to Hooks. Finally, about 20 miles out Approached asked if we wanted an approach or wanted to continue for the visual approach. We were below scattered clouds to we elected for the visual and via the GPS, pointed the nose straight at the airport. A short time later we were back on the ground at home, glad to be breathing the "thick" Texas air, but still missing the LOW humidity back in Colorado!

After all we went through and the unconfortable condidtions around Amarillo, I was amazed to hear my wife say on the drive home, "Next time we're giving the kids Dramamine on every leg!" Yes, you heard me correctly...She said "next time"! After the stressful flight up there, I thought we had taken our last trip as a family. Apparently not!

Next up...Oshkosh!!!!

Back from Colorado - Part 2

Where was I? Oh yes, stuck in Amarillo watching the radar. Anyway, I forgot exactly how long we were there, but after watching the radar and talking to FSS it looked like we had a window of opportunity to get to Pueblo. The briefer pointed out a gust front where the doppler was showing an extreme shirt in wind speed/direction. He said to be careful with that.

We got back in the plane and started it up. The wind was still blowing pretty hard but the bad weather looked to be east of our course. While we were doing the runup, ground control called us to to say that a Cirrus SR22 reported severe turbulence at 11,000 over Dalhart. Well, that was the gust front, and that's the route we were taking so we sat and thought about that for a couple of minutes. The boys were already falling asleep, so I said, "Let's go see what it's like and we can turn around if it's getting too rough." We took off and the up/down drafts were still pretty strong and I was thinking, "This might be interesting." We kept going and while it was not worse than moderate turbulence, we were still getting tossed around quite a bit. Even with the manifold pressure and propeller RPM at the bottom of the green arcs in the guages, we were still bumping into the yellow arc on the airspeed indicator. I was worried about stresses on the airplane at a couple of points so to slow down and stabilize it a little I dumped the landing gear. That helped so as it smoothed out I put the gear back up. I wasn't having any trouble keeping the airplane under control, but it was gettin worse. I actually told my wife, "Listen, if we get tossed totally sideway or even if you go upside down, don't freak out, we'll be fine. I don't expect it to get that bad, but wanted to say it just in case." Finally as we neared Dalhart it got a little rougher. I was keeping the airplane at maneuvering speed at this point, which is the speed you use to minimize the chances of overstressing the airframe. Suddenly, BOOM!! We must have hit the center of the gust front because we had a huge bounce that actually unseated my headset from my ears! Fortunately that was the worst of it. It actually started smoothing out after that and it got smoother and smoother as we neared Pueblo. We kept watching the rain in the distance but were able to stay away from it without any effort. We finally started talking to Pueblo approach and started our descent. We had trouble picking out the airport since we were unfamiliar with the area, so even though we were in visual conditions we elected to track the localizer inbound until we saw the airport.

One funny note about the landing... On short approach I noticed a big jackrabbit run across the runway. After we landed and got the plane tied down, I mentioned the rabbit to my wife. She said, "You think that was funny? I looked almost straight down as we approached the runway and there just have been 20 of them scatter in all directions just before we crossed the numbers!"

So, after a long day and some interesting moments, we had finally made it to Colorado where we tied down the plane, picked up the rent car, and headed out to Salida where we spent the next week. More on the return trip next. It'll be pretty boring compared to parts 1 and 2!