Recently, my flying
instructor, Andy Foster, and I were scheduled to make a cross-country flight from
the Pearland Airport to the fly-in diner at the airport in Brenham, but our
plans were foiled by some nasty thunderstorms scheduled to move into the area
by late afternoon.
Not wanting to waste a perfectly
good morning for flying, however, Andy decided to make good use of the time for
practicing his landings with a few “touch and go’s” on the Pearland runway and
invited me to come along.
I’ve been anxious to get back
up in the sky after being grounded for several months, so I jumped at the
chance. But just because I wasn’t getting credit for the ground and air
training time didn’t mean I was relieved of my pre-flight duties. As I mentioned
in a previous blog post (Fill’er Up!), flying is not just about soaring through
the air, free as a bird. First you need to take care of the work on the ground
before you can coax that plane up into the air.
Part of this job includes
checking the oil level, which means hand cranking the propeller to get the oil pumped
up into the engine. Lucky me! Here I am at right flexing my muscles to turn that
prop—one painful crank at a time until I hear a gurgling sound that lets me
know I can stop. 
Next I get to pull the plane
out of the hangar (all by my lonesome) and onto the road leading out to the
runway, but I’m not done yet.
The hardest work comes when I
need to push the tail of the plane down hard enough to lift the nose wheel off
the ground, then spin the plane around to face the runway. As you might
imagine, Andy finds my efforts highly entertaining.
We finally boarded the plane,
taxied out to the runway and took off into the sky. Those ominous clouds in the
photo were the ones keeping us close to home. But Andy let me control the stick
for a while, and I did my best to keep our wings level and the shiny side up. I’m
pretty much a scardy cat when it comes to making steep turns and climbs.
After that, Andy flew round
and round the airstrip, landing and taking off over and over again, to practice
several types of take-offs and landings. Here we are in the photo at right coming in for landing number six.
We didn’t make it to the
fly-in diner yet—we've rescheduled that trip for another date, but it was still a great day for flying—underneath the clouds.
Thanks, Andy, for a wonderful
day in the sky!!
