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(Part 2) I hate camels and always carry a loaded .303 carbine clipped inside the door. We were too high to hit them, but as a matter of principle, I decided to have a go through the open window. The effect on Ron was electric. As I fired the first shot his neck lengthened by about six inches and his eyes bulged like a rabbit with myxo. In fact, Ron's reaction was so distracting that I lost concentration and the next shot went through the port tire. Ron was a bit upset about the shooting, probably one of those animal lovers - I thought, so I decided not to tell him about our little problem. Shortly afterwards I located the main herd and decided to do my fighter pilot trick. Ron had gone back to praying when, in one smooth sequence, I pulled on full flap, cut the power and started a sideslip down to 500 feet. About halfway through the descent I looked back to see the calves gracefully suspended in mid air. I was going to comment on this unusual sight, but Ron had rolled himself into the fetal position and was emitting high pitched squeals. At about 500 feet I leveled out, but for some reason we continued sinking. When we reached 50 feet I applied power and that helped quite a lot. As luck would have it, at that height we flew into a dust cloud caused by the cattle and went IFR. I made a mental note to consider an instrument rating as soon as the gyros are repaired. Suddenly Ron's elongated neck and bulging eyes reappeared. His mouth opened wide, very wide, but no sound emerged. "Take it easy", I told him. "we'll be out of this in a minute." Sure enough, about a minute later we emerged, still straight and level and still at 50 feet. Admittedly I was surprised to notice that we were upside down. This minor tribulation forced me to fly to a nearby valley in which I did a half roll to get upright again. By now the main herd had divided into two groups leaving a narrow strip between them. "Ah!", I thought, "there's an omen. We'll land there." Knowing that the tire problem demanded a slow approach, I flew a couple of steep turns with full flap. Soon the stall warning horn came on and so I knew we were slow enough. I turned steeply onto a 75 foot final and put her down. Strangely enough, I had always thought you could only ground loop in a tail dragger. Halfway through our third loop Ron at last recovered his sense of humor. Talk about laugh.... I've never seen the likes of it; he couldn't stop. We finally rolled to a halt and I released the calves. I then began picking up clumps of dry grass. Between gut wrenching fits of laughter Ron asked what I was doing. I explained that we had to stuff the port tire with grass so we could fly home. It was then that Ron started running. The last time I saw him he was off into the distance, arms flailing in the air and still shrieking with laughter. I heard later that he had been confined to a psychiatric institution. Anyhow that's enough about Ron. I just got a letter from CASA withdrawing, as they put it, the privilege of holding a license to fly. Now I admit that I made a mistake in taxiing over the wheel chock, but I can't see what else I did that was so terrible. Can you? ========================================================================== ==== To leave this forum go to: http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm Search the archives on http://escribe.com/aviation/coupers/
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