Driving with Co-pilot Egg, Flying without Co-pilot Rick

I stated on Twitter Friday afternoon that the weekend forecast made it look as if the best flying day for the weekend was going to be…. Monday. And it was.

Sunday dawned with low-ish clouds and 12 knot winds. Flyable if I had somewhere to go, but I’ve found that Co-pilot Rick’s extended vacation in Maui has caused a rather sizable hole to form in the flying schedule. Sure, I can fly without him, but I’ve grown accustomed to the additional ballast he provides to settle Papa down in choppy air. And without Rick, well, just who would fly the bumpy legs? Me?? No, I’d sooner leave Papa in the hangar and fulfill my fatherly duty to pass down my driving skills to Co-pilot Egg in order to ensure that she will follow in my hereditary footsteps. Which is to say, to make sure she’s as obnoxious and aggressive on the road as her dear old dad. But, you gotta crawl before you can walk, and you gotta walk before you can run into other people, so we’re still working on the basics.

I’ve mentioned before that it helps to have a destination in mind (and programmed into the GPS) before departing, so we decided on a road trip to Yellow Springs. And by ‘we decided,’ I mean ‘I dictated’. She wanted to go to the mall. Again. I couldn’t take the chance of an honest debate not going my way. Daddy’s prerogative.

You may never have heard of Yellow Springs, OH, so I will help you visualize it. Have you ever heard of Berkeley, California? Ok, start with that, but remove the incredibly lush scenery and shrink it down to a postage stamp size. But don’t shrink the prevalent political viewpoints. There ya go: Yellow Springs. It’s where Ohio hippies that can’t afford to move to Berkeley live. Me, I’m all about exposing Egg to diverse viewpoints and encouraging her to keep an open mind. Well, an open mind to my explanations about why they’re completely wrong about literally everything, of course, but yeah, an open mind.

We took rural country roads on the way there and it was, for the most part, a relatively uneventful drive. By ‘relatively’ I mean that I only slapped my foot on the illusory passenger-side brake pedal a half dozen times. As opposed to doing that a handful of times while trying to avoid a wreck just getting out of the neighborhood, as I have in recent memory. She’s definitely showing progress. Daddy is proud!

As much as learning to drive has been a learning experience for her, it has been for me as well. Seriously, there’s not much to do while driving through Central Ohio other than talk. And as we’ve been going to places, I learn more and more about what she knows that I didn’t think she knew. You’re probably thinking that I’m talking about the swear words I use when she scares me, and she has surely learned a few of those as we drive, but that’s not really what I’m getting at. She already knew all of them (and more!) from school. Here, I’ll provide an example of what I mean:

The Import House. Sounds benign, right? Well, I forgot where we were. In we went.

“Hey, Dad, this place is full of bongs!”

You know how a series of thoughts can pass through your mind in the blink of an eye? Well, here’s how mine went:

Uh-oh.

Act cool.

Hey, wait a minute! She knows what a bong is???

How did that happen??

Omagawd, I’m getting soooo old.

She then said, “How is this even legal?”

“Ah, there you go: Daddy’s little Republican!”

So, yeah, we didn’t spend much time or any money in The Import House.

But you know what she had never actually seen before?

This:

Go figure.

So, off to the Comic Book store, filled with visions of Archie & Jughead, Richie Rich the Poor Little Rich Boy, and maybe a super hero or two.

Sigh:

As I was thinking that it might be time to beat another hasty and ignominious retreat, I heard her talking to The Comic Book Guy:

“Do you have any DeathNote,” she asked.

“Whhaaaaatttttt??? I thought. What the heck is Death Note???

Japanese “comic” books. Manga, in the vernacular.

Geez, now she not only knew more than I thought she did, she knew stuff that I didn’t!

Time.To.Go.

On the way back to our car, (she will undoubtedly note the use of ‘our’ instead of ‘the’ or ‘my’) I had to stop and read the political tenets on public display on a Toyota:

I really don’t think this guy fully understood the intent of this one:

I don’t think it is meant to be in favor of robbing Peter, but I can sure see how Paul might think it’s a pretty good deal.

We stopped to pick up a couple of racks of BBQ ribs to take home for dinner:

They were phenomenal, and the Meat Is Murder pamphlet that they included made for excellent dinner time reading.

Just kidding.

The low lying clouds were long gone by Monday afternoon so I took the opportunity to pop over to MadCo for some 100LL for Papa. It was a nice flight over, albeit a little bumpy (and me without a co-pilot!!), but the air was that kind of see-forever clear that makes the Ohio farmscape look like an extremely detailed HO train setup. A sign of the season was the number of combines out in the fields harvesting crops of soybeans and corn. Scenic, but such a sad foreboding of the winter to come.

Despite the choppy air, the ground winds were nearly dead calm and I made a very nice landing at MadCo. Papa took 21 gallons, but the bite in the wallet was somewhat mitigated by the $3.91 price.

Flying back, the air had calmed down and was providing a smooth and comfortable ride. Just as I was thinking how easy it would be to become complacent in this kind of weather, a Citabria (or Decathlon) went winging past at my altitude and about a half mile away. Surprise! I hadn’t heard Bolton clear anyone for takeoff, and the GPS showed that we were both well inside Bolton’s class D airspace. After the tower had cleared me to land, I asked if anyone had departed recently.

“No, why?”

I told him about the other airplane.

“Never heard of him, never saw him, and he didn’t come from here.”

Nice.

Thank goodness for the clear air! And, if nothing else, a great reminder of why we keep looking, no matter where we are.

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Weather Patterns

Our local cable TV provider offers an invaluable service that they make available even to their lowest cost customers on basic cable: they have a channel that does nothing but show Nexrad weather radar. The audio channel is used to transmit recorded weather forecast data. Lately it has sounded something like this:

“And now for the weather patterns affecting the Central Ohio Region: crappy, unflyable weekend weather followed by five glorious days that will taunt and frustrate you during the work week.”

This week, though, was a little different. We had a torrential downpour during the Friday homeward bound rush hour that slowed the commute significantly, but at least I wasn’t in the Miata with the top down this time. Saturday was forecast to be nice, and Sunday was promised to be even better. This weekend was planned to be another attempt at the trip to Niagara Falls with Wingman Ted, but unfortunately the bad weather we had on Friday reached the Niagara Falls region just in time to prompt yet another cancellation of the trip.

With fairly decent weather Saturday but the promise of better on Sunday, I decided to fly on Sunday and fill Saturday with a few hours of driving practice for Co-pilot Egg. Unlike when I was a teenager learning how to drive, the State of Ohio now has a requirement that a new driver log fifty hours of driving before being allowed to take the test and receive a license. We’ve been knocking out an hour here and there, most notably during our week at Oshkosh.

For her first ten to fifteen hours I’ve been very selective about the conditions she would be driving in. On our morning commute from West Bend to Oshkosh, I’d have her exit the highway for a driver change just before we reached a road construction area just south of Fond du Lac, for example. Yesterday I decided to up the stakes a little bit and let her try her hand at a more hostile environment: dealing with Saturday afternoon shoppers. But first, I let her try a few laps around the neighborhood in the Miata. I’m a firm believer in the idea that everyone should know how to drive a manual transmission. I’ve heard from others that weren’t taught how to drive a stick that it is very hard (bordering on impossible) to find someone to teach you later in life, so I thought I’d start broaching the subject with Egg.

That went about as well as you’d imagine, assuming you remember your first try at it. Once you learn it and get to the point that it’s as automatic (heh!) as using the turn signals, you tend to forget how difficult and confusing it was when you were first learning it. And to be perfectly honest, you probably shouldn’t try to teach someone else how to do it in a car that you care about. Having a sentimental attachment to the vehicle might lead to exchanges like this:

“Erika, you have to use the clutch if you’re going to stop with it in gear!!”

“I DID use the clutch!”

“Then, pray tell, why is the engine no longer running???”

So, yeah. That might have happened. Twice.

Still… after about the fifth lap of the neighborhood she was starting to get it. I think she’ll get a lot better at it with practice, but I don’t think we’ll try it on the roads quite yet.

Once done with that, we transferred to her preferred car. She seems more comfortable in the Forester than either of the other cars and with the challenges lying ahead I though there’d be great benefit in having her use the car she likes the most. The target of the driving challenge was a busy road full of strip malls and restaurants. And although this confession will likely spark a conflagration of “Why would you do that!” statements from the Co-owner, I told Egg that we could stop at CarMax and look at used cars in her price range. Hey, why should I be the only one harboring secret, unattainable dreams? With me, it’s the goal of building a plane; with Egg it’s the idea of owning her own car.

Speaking of building a plane, I really did some damage to that dream last week. It was a stupid thing to do, but it had to happen eventually: I measured the cellar door from the basement up to the back yard to see if an assembled wing would fit through. Well, it would fit through the door, but it wouldn’t fit the steep climb up the stairs. That pretty much kills the dream of building a plane. The only other way to do it would be to use two of the three bays in the garage. Those bays, inconveniently enough, are currently used to garage automobiles, and the idea of leaving one of the cars outside (the other would just be moved out as needed) for the three to five years it would take to build an airplane is unlikely to sit well. I’ve heard anecdotally that an arrangement like that causes significant friction. So, that’s that.

Although… I’m still tempted to build an RV-12 tail kit. That’s small enough to be built in the basement. Even if I never went on to build a full airplane, it would be easy enough to sell at cost. According to the guy for whom the garage situation is anything but anecdotal, all you lose when selling an in-work project is the cost of your time. That seems a good trade to me. I want to spend the time on it.

So, back to the driving with Egg. Having a firm destination in mind helps with the driving in that it provides an opportunity to not only practice driving, but to learn some of the local roads and routes as well. We started out on the highway where Egg capably dealt with a bit more traffic that she’s used to. I also pointed out areas along that route that she will want to remember in order to be in the correct lane. Little tidbits of advice like “stay in this lane because that one is going to be ‘exit only’ in a mile” should help avoid the dangerous situations you see when someone unfamiliar with the roads gets in a panic and tries to make a last second lane change, often with tragic (yet predictable) results.

Picking a destination that’s very hard to get to also afforded the opportunity to show her how to find alternate routes when the shortest way is not truly feasible. In the case of CarMax, getting there the shortest way involves coming off of the highway to a continuous lane, then having to get across three lanes of heavy traffic to make the left turn. Because you don’t have to stop as you come off the highway, people behind you get a little pissy if you stop to wait for a gap to make the lane changes. It’s better to just go down to the next intersection, make a left there, and work your away around the block back to the dealership. And other than some knucklehead pedestrian with a death wish (seriously, this guy just strolled across four lanes of traffic without a glance in either direction, his attitude essentially being “dare you to run me over”), the alternative route worked out very well.

Being a Saturday afternoon, CarMax had all of their sales people prowling around the lot. You don’t get very far without being intercepted. “So, what are you looking for?” is a more common pick-up line than “do you come here often?”

“We’re just window shopping today, but we have three requirements:

– $10,000 or under tag
– no sports cars
– no large horizontal spaces.”

Sales guy: “[LOL] I understand that last one – I have three daughters myself. I suspect at least one grandchild probably came from that.”

Oh, and I told him that Egg was just training and we came all the way up there just to practice difficult traffic conditions, and how we’d gone around the block rather than try to make those lane changes right off the highway.

“I do that too!”

He also told Egg that he had taught all three of his daughters how to drive a manual transmission and that although it may seem impossible now, it would get much easier with practice. And, because he’s a salesman and therefore required to agree with everything I say, he agreed that a Mazda 3 would be a good choice for her.

We weren’t there long, but it was long enough to get caught. I responded to a text message from home requesting that we bring food back with a terse “We’re all the way up on Sawmill Rd.”

To which I received a very predictable reply: “What are you doing all the way up there?”

And here’s where I unintentionally taught Egg a very bad lesson: “Going to Trader Joe’s.”

Which was the truth since I needed to go buy more coffee beans, but not quite all of the truth. Some day I’ll get hoist on that petard. If I’m lucky, at least it won’t involve the inappropriate usage of horizontal vehicle space.

We stopped for lunch on the way back which unintentionally put us in place for another valuable lesson: how to get out of the way of a speeding fire engine. Closely followed by the “what do I do to get around this car wreck instead of sitting here all afternoon” lesson. So, good experience for her. Bad experience for the poor folks that inadvertently constructed the learning opportunity.

Three hours of frantically pushing at a non-existent brake pedal on my side of the car was enough; we called it a day.

Sunday dawned with a very nice Weather-out-the-Window&trade forecast:

The remainder of the day was forecast to have a scattered layer of clouds at 3,500′. Being as flat as Ohio is, we’d be OK just staying under them if we didn’t want to spend the time climbing over them. The winds were expected to be out of the northwest at 8 knots, which is just fine. Departing on runway 22 put the crosswind on our right side, and eight knots of it was pretty much just enough to completely moot the need for the normally required boot full of right rudder. We had a pleasant, smooth, and scenic flight down/over:

We stopped by Rick Gray‘s RV shop, although I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be there:

He wasn’t, but that didn’t stop us from peaking through the windows. What a great workshop! Color me jealous. From there it’s just a short walk over to the airport terminal where the restaurant is. Now here’s something you don’t want to arrive to:

Closed!! How could that be??? Fortunately, I walked a little further down the hall and found the ‘Coffee Shop’ entrance. They apparently open that on the weekends when they think the whole dining room is too much bother to open. That’s fine, really, but they ought to put a sign on the other door. I wouldn’t have walked down the hall if I hadn’t been going to see this:

I asked Co-pilot Rick if he knew why the bear was waving. He didn’t. Seems obvious to me: “Because he’s gotta split!”

Seriously, I don’t know why he flies with me.

We departed out of Parkersburg and headed west along the river:

As we started heading northwest towards Bolton, we found ourselves just under the promised puffy clouds at 3,500′. Puffy clouds mean bumpy air, and bumpy air means it’s Rick’s turn to fly. I busied myself with diddling around with the Garmin 396 checking weather observations. Bolton was reporting sky clear while Rickenbacker, just a few miles away, was reporting a ceiling at 1,900′. Both were wrong. I guess I have to learn to take the XM METARS with a healthy grain of salt. Here’s what it looked like the whole way:

It’s neat to fly below the clouds. We have to stay at least 500′ below them to comply with the federal regs, but that’s still close enough that they lend a real sense of speed that you normally don’t get. The RV was cooking along at 140 knots, so that visual indication of just how fast that really is was pretty cool. But yes, it was a little bumpy.

I took over the controls from Rick after I accidentally put a wingtip two feet into the Columbus Class C (a fact that the Garmin dutifully informed me about post haste) and managed a pretty good landing at Bolton, considering the conditions. Sometimes entering on the base leg as we did today will result in me being a little high on final, and today was one of those days. It happened at Parkersburg too, but with the hostile terrain down there and the very-long runway, that’s no big deal. It’s actually a good thing.

But back at Bolton, the effort to rid myself of inconvenient altitude ended up making me fast on final too. The flaps were able to absorb that excess potential energy, but I allowed them a little too much latitude. By short final I was at 70 mph and dropping like Paris Hilton’s pants (ooh, sorry about that one!). Landing a short-winged plane like the RV-6 in an energy state like that is similar to an auto-rotation landing in a helicopter: you have enough energy for one, and only one, attempt at the flare. You’d better get it right the first time!

I did.

Of course, it’s not like the engine wasn’t running – I could have added a blip of throttle if I didn’t get it right. Still, good practice.

As I pulled into my driveway at a little before noon, I couldn’t help thinking that I probably would have stayed home if the Weather-out-the-Window&trade had looked like this:

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In the pursuit of scientific knowledge

The Weather-out-the-Window(tm) forecast this morning could have been written by The Autumn Chamber of Seasonal Commerce. The promotional materials would write themselves: Crisp! Clear! Seasonally Temperate Temperatures! And, last but not least, Deep! Blue! Sky!

And I awoke with a cold. Stuffy head, watery chest & cough, and a deep feeling of malaise. Rats. Not that would have mattered, though, what with college football on the TV and, as I found out mid-morning, my assistance desperately needed for one of Egg’s school projects. Accelerated biology. And me? I never even had regular biology back in the day. So, with an appropriate level of trepidation, I requested a review of the assignment. It turned out to be less accelerated than I had feared: create a 3D model of an animal cell, and a rudimentary drawing was provided for guidance.

I have a sordid history of assisting Egg in her projects. The first (and most memorable) was the Pine Box Derby car that we built together when she was 7 or 8 years old. We started with the basic kit; I’m not sure they even had the fancy pre-cut kits that they have today. The basic kit is pretty much just a block of wood, some nails, and four plastic wheels:

She wasn’t really into cars or racing very much back then (but more than she is today), so I came up with the design plans. Unfortunately, just about any modification to the shape of the block was going to require the use of a power saw and I wasn’t overly keen on the idea if turning her loose with a band saw. In the interest of good parenting, I did the sawing. Putting on the wheels also seemed a bit risky, both in the construction phase (let her use a hammer??) and in the ultimate performance of the racer. Straight wheels are fast wheels, I figured. The body needed to be sanded before painting and, well, she just wasn’t strong enough. So what exactly did Egg do as part of the construction of the car? She painted it. I then sanded it, painted it, sanded it, and painted it again, of course, but she put on the first coat.

Came the day of the big race, and there we were at the registration desk. I was filling out paperwork (covenant not to sue, liability release, etc.) and Egg was rolling the car back and forth on the desk.

SO the lady behind the registration desk says, “Be careful Honey, you’re going to break your Daddy’s car.”

Hurumph. At least the child wasn’t standing there with a stump where her right hand used to be. I mean, I had to do some of it, didn’t I? Really, what was she trying to say? That an eight year old couldn’t have built this?

The weigh-in was next. I believe the weight limit was something like five ounces. Of course, Egg’s car was much lighter – something less than three ounces if I remember correctly. “Yeah,” I remember thinking, “lighter is better in flying and racing.”

Then, The Race! We were up against the complete antithesis of our entry. This kid, whose father apparently wasn’t quite as loving and devoted as Egg’s, had taken the block of wood from the kit, spray painted it bright yellow, and written “School Bus” on it with a Sharpie marker. Sad, it was. Made me feel bad for his impending humiliation. I even thought about slipping him one of those Big Brother brochures, thinking that he must be some kind of orphan or something.

His yellow bus beat us by a country mile. Not. even. close. It turns out that you need to have your car’s weight right up to the limit. Who knew? Well, besides the bus kid, who knew?

So, here we are a few years later, trying to figure out how to make a model of an animal cell. These days I act more in an R&D role whereby I provide a working prototype and let her do the rest. The first step is supply procurement, and for that we go to Egg’s version of Harbor Freight: Hobby Lobby. We wandered the aisles for half an hour on a scavenger hunt for the most fiscally viable means of making the model. We looked at paints, fabrics, felts, wood chips, and Styrofoam, adopting and rejecting ideas as different and less costly alternatives were discovered. By the time we got home with the supplies, we had spent over $28. You can buy a model for $18.95. I guess you wouldn’t get the full educational experience out of that, though. Here’s the pile ‘o stuff:

Even at her age, I still do the cutting. The smaller spheres that would be used for the nucleus were cut on Co-pilot Rick’s band saw, and I cut the large sphere with a saw left over from the kayak build after first testing it on one of the left over smaller spheres:

It didn’t take long to finish up the proof of concept:

Egg did the rest, and this time I have proof:

I think it turned out very well. But I still know nothing about biology!

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Really, I just crack me up

It was bound to happen, what with all of the hours practicing with the band and the long bus rides to competitions. Co-pilot Egg has got herself a boyfriend. He’s a percussionist in the band. Quiet lad, though; it’s hard work to get a word out of him. You could count the number of words that he has uttered in my presence on your thumbs. So, it was dinner with the family tonight, and with the boyfriend along as a guest. There wasn’t much by way of dinner conversation, so the Co-owner seized upon the opportunity to convey some marching orders, primarily with regards to the dress code for the lunch that they have scheduled with Egg’s grandparents on Friday. Jeans are OK, but they have to be ‘nice’ jeans. Egg seemed unclear on the topic of what exactly constitutes ‘nice’ jeans, so I volunteered that jeans with holes in the knees would not meet the standard. A poignant look from Egg prompted the BF to reply:

“I don’t have any jeans with holes in them.”

Loath as I was to respond in anything but a friendly, respectful manner to what was by far the longest series of words that I had ever heard him string together, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m weak, damn it! Weak!!

I said, “Well how do you get your legs in?”

Dead silence from him, and barely stifled guffaws from the ladies, both of whom had fervently hoped that I wouldn’t embarrass the lad. Sorely disappointed, they were, but not at all surprised that I had.

Trying to settle things down, the Co-owner shared with him that “he had really stepped into that one!”

Ok, I simply lost it over her unintended continuance of the joke. I admit it. And I only made things worse when I suggested that to avoid further damage, she “should just zip it.”

I’m not sure, but I think he broke a smile at that one.

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Co-pilot Egg promoted to Capt. Egg?

Well, yes, but only temporarily and only in the nautical sense:

We were visiting family in Vermilion, OH, and said family are of a nautical bent. They seem to feel about boats the same way that I’ve often stated that I feel about airplanes: you need at least two, but no more than five to meet all of your boating/flying needs/desires. They have two: a big Hatteras cruiser, and a slightly smaller Jupiter “fun” boat. They were gracious enough to take us out onto Lake Erie in the fun boat for some tubing (powered by twin Mercurys producing 550 horsepower at 30 gallons per hour!!). Well, to be precise Egg did the tubing, I did the photography/videography and piloted the boat for a little while. And, as you can see above, Co-pilot Egg also wore the Captain’s hat for awhile. I’m not sure which she enjoyed more, but you can see that she had a pretty good time:

Note that the ‘Thumbs Down’ is not a rating of the ride, it is actually her way of communicating to the boat owner that she felt somewhat ignored when she gestured for the boat to be slowed down a wee bit, a request typically made by raising a downward pointed thumb. The smile belies the stridency of her complaint, though. I think she was bluffing.

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Enjoying the gaps (between the storms)

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Sleepovers and Buzzards

The weather patterns affecting the central Ohio region are well known: dry, sunny weekdays, followed by gray, wet weekends. Friday was a perfect example: just a smidgen over 80F, light winds, clear blue sky, and just a bit of haze to salve the wound of missing an absolutely perfect day for flying due to being ensconced in the old salt mine. Truth be told, a nearly perfect day is every bit as hard to miss out on as a perfect day, so the light haze didn’t really help all that much.

Still, the conditions were ripe to at least get out to the hangar to clean up the wheel pants (they get kind of grimy from bearing grease and other detritus collected from various ground surfaces) and get them back on the plane. If it wasn’t for the extra 12 mph they provide, I wouldn’t even bother with them. But at $4.59 per gallon, it would be unconscionable to accept the performance penalty associated with flying without them.

The job went quickly, and as I was putting away the tools I realized that all I had to look forward to was a night trapped in the house with Co-pilot Egg and a couple of her A-girl (their names all start with ‘A’ these days – what’s up with that??) friends who were over for a sleepover. Balancing that against my pledge of not burning avgas simply for the sake of burning avgas, I decided that I could quit flying-for-the-sake-of-flying in the same way a lot of people quit smoking: repeatedly. “How hard can it be to quit? I’ve done it dozens of times!” It was still early in the evening, so there was plenty of time to take a short ride around the local area.

Papa was more than willing, and it wasn’t very long at all before we were preflighted and taxing down towards the runway. As we were just starting towards the runway, the tower keyed up and offered the following:

“I’ll just warn you now that there is a group of ten to twelve buzzards in a group at the intersection of the runway and taxiway A5. They’ve been there for awhile now.”

I replied with a couple of questions:

“Do they appear to be content with what they’re doing, or are they looking flighty? And which side of the runway are they on?”

He replied:

“They appear to be eating something brown and furry, and they haven’t reacted to any other planes flying by. They’re on the right side of the runway, so if you want to move over to the left after takeoff, I’m ok with that.”

Taxiway A5 is pretty far down the runway when departing on 22 – I’m guessing it’s at least 4000′. The runway is also 100′ wide, so I quickly developed a plan. I would use the left half of the runway and once off the ground I would make a gentle turn to the left. By the time I passed A5, I would be about 500′ up and a good distance offset to the left. In other words, I wouldn’t be disturbing the Buzzard Critter Buffet, and they wouldn’t be bothering me. It’s kind of like when you sit on the opposite side of the dining room from the group of rowdy gang-looking teens at the Golden Corral.

The plan worked fine, but I didn’t anticipate the call I got from the tower as I overflew the area of the buzzard repast: “Can you see what they’re eating?”

“Nope, afraid not, my wing is in the way.”

Had I been thinking about it, I could have positioned myself so that I’d be able to see what they were doing. As it was really just idle curiosity and not at all pertinent to the situation, though, it was no big loss that I didn’t think of it.

I flew around long enough to work some of the kinks out of my attitude, and also to fiddle around with the new EGT gauge. It appears that leaning with the EGT is going to require a little more research than I can do while flying alone. It’s not hard to find peak EGT on one cylinder, but it is going to require more attention to the gauge than I can devote to it in order to determine which cylinder is peaking first. That’s a critical piece of knowledge in that the first cylinder to peak is the one that will be used to determine the correct mixture. Still, the gauge is working wonderfully:

My fiscal conscience got the better of me after 15 minutes so I headed back in. I contacted the tower right about the time the airport maintenance truck arrived from Port Columbus to deal with the buzzard situation. Thus transpired one of the more memorable tower communications I’ve ever heard:

Larry the Cable Airport Maintenance Guy: “They told me there was a bird strike or something for me to clean up.”

Tower: “No, there’s a group of buzzards down by Alpha 5 – they seem to be eating something.”

Larry the Cable Airport Maintenance Guy: “Yeah, it looks like they got ’em a big ole ground hog. I’ll go ‘head and scoop ‘er up.”

Tower: “Watch out for the buzzards. They may not appreciate you taking their dinner.”

Larry the Cable Airport Maintenance Guy: “Most of ’em don’t seem to mind, but one of them seems a little pissed about it.”

[pause]

Larry the Cable Airport Maintenance Guy: “Ok, I got ‘er done.”

Tower: “Ok, thanks. Don’t forget to call your wife and let her know you’re bringing home dinner!”

Despite the amusing distraction from all of that going on, I actually scored a really nice landing right on the numbers. I usually land a little long on 22 in order to expedite the trip down to the first turn-off at Alpha 3, but I thought I’d land shorter than usual and get slowed down well before entering Pissed-off Buzzard Territory. I taxied back to the hangar, and just as I was turning into my row, I heard my cell phone ringing. Picked it up and was informed by the spouse that she and the three girls were at JP’s BBQ (located in the Bolton terminal building) and had hoped to watch me land. I offered to go around and do it again (Please brer Fox, don’t toss me in that there briar patch!), and the offer was readily accepted. This presented the issue of how to explain to the tower that I wanted to turn around and go back out. None of his business, of course, but at your home airport you tend to develop a bit of a rapport with the tower guys and it’s not uncommon to share your plans with them if you’re going to do something that breaks with your normal patterns.

“Bolton Tower, 466 Papa Golf, I’ve just been informed that I have a house full of giggling teen girls waiting for me at home for a sleepover – I think I need to go fly a little more before I’m confronted with that. At the T-hangars, ready to taxi.”

He cleared me down to the runway, and updated me on the buzzard situation: five of them were still hanging around. I replied that they were either cleaning up scraps or waiting for the postprandial football games to come on. Either way, I didn’t figure they’d be any more of a problem than they were the first time around.

I gave the girls a nice takeoff and departure back out to the west. After five miles or so, I figured there was no point in going any further and called the tower to let him know that I was returning:

“Tower, Six Papa Golf, I figure I’ve gotten away with as much delaying as I can get away with, six miles west for landing, full stop.”

As expected, he cleared me to report a midfield right downwind to runway 22. The pattern was empty, so I asked if I could cross the runway for a left downwind instead, figuring that would afford me the opportunity to cross over the girls at full-tilt-boogie with a tight turn to get slowed down, and let them watch the full landing approach. Cleared as requested, but he pointed out that there were three buzzards still down there.

“You mean the three standing there at JP’s? Those are mine.”

“Oh, are those your daughters down there?”

“Well, one is mine, the other are the guests.”

“Ah, I’ve got three of my own. I can understand why you needed a little more time in the air!”

Like I said: rapport.

On short final, I got to thinking that I had set myself up perfectly for big time embarrassment: what if that wonderful landing I just had before was my full quota of the day? Poor Egg, having to go to school and be mercilessly taunted because her daddy can’t land worth a darn! Oh, the humanity!! Concern mooted by a greaser, in case you’re wondering. Well, that and the fact that I was later informed that they weren’t even paying attention. They were too busy playing with their cell phones.

Typical.

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Travels with Egg

Co-pilot Egg is out of school for the week for the so-called Spring Break. Being 14 and all, she hasn’t the Caribbean option for recreational activity, so is stuck here in sunny Columbus for the duration. I try to take at least one day off during her sojourn in order to make our annual-when-we-think-of-it trip to the US Air Force Museum in Dayton.

I like to take my camera, but it usually turns into an exercise in futility. There is very little light in the museum, and what little there is is usually yellow. Because it’s so dark, the flash on the camera can’t do an adequate job of lighting the entire airplane, and because of the color, everything ends up with a wicked tint. Here’s an example:

(Reminder: click on picture for larger view!)

There wasn’t much that I could do to get a useful picture out of that in color, so I made it black & white and added some grain to it:

That turned out fairly well, but only because of the nature of the subject. I wouldn’t want to do them all that way. What I decided to try instead was to bring the tripod with us, and use it to hold the camera steady enough to allow the use of a much longer shutter speed. With a long enough shutter speed, the ambient light should be enough to light the entire airplane. That worked for the most part, but I found a new problem right away: the pictures all had an overall deep tint of orange or blue to them, depending on the type of lighting the museum had selected for any particular exhibit. My camera has a selectable/customizable white balance, though, so I experimented with different settings until I got what appeared to be acceptable results in the LCD screen:

I really like this one:

Egg liked this one because it’s purple/pink:

I’m considering getting a parachute for Brave Sir Hogarth after seeing this:

A challenge to photography equally difficult to the lighting issue was the schedule Egg was enforcing to ensure that we weren’t late to the Imax movie (one of our annual events), so I didn’t stop to read the placard to learn exactly why a dog needed a parachute. Later Google research explains it:

BERLIN AIRLIFT DOG PARACHUTE

This parachute was specially made for “Vittles,” a dog that flew 131 missions with his owner, 1Lt. Russ Steber, during the Berlin Airlift. Gen. Curtis LeMay named the dog and ordered the parachute made for him. Vittles, a boxer, accumulated around 2,000 flying hours, but never had to use the parachute. His owner, Lt. Steber, did have to bail out of a C-47 over the Soviet zone on one occasion, but Vittles was not with him on that trip. Steber was captured and returned to the West a few days later.

So there ya go. Of course, without the use of opposing digits (i.e. thumbs), I’m not sure how old Vittles was expected to pull a rip cord.

We also visited one of the airplanes that I worked on when I was in the Air Force:

We also found time to visit some of the more interactive displays:

I used my new flash for these since it did a much better job of filling the light. Here’s the same picture from two years ago using a lesser flash:

Egg is trying to perform a spacewalk using a rocket backpack- you’d look intense too:

There are more pictures, of course. You can see them here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/HogarthKramer/AFMuseum3_2008

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