NetHeads, Today was the first decent flying day for two weeks in the Southeast, with dark blue skies and light winds, and I had planned to make an afternoon of it. The only thing I'd actually planned at takeoff was flying over the Hytop Nexrad radar site so I could watch my GPS lose it's signal (it doesn't take much to entertain me). Before it was over, I'd flown 3.2 hours, burned 12.5 gallons of 93 octane fuel, and done twelve touch-and-goes at ten different airports. One tiny bit of entertainment was a guy in a Cessna that was headed south down the Tennessee River behind me as I landed at Stevenson, Scottsboro, and then Guntersville. Each time I changed frequencies I'd hear the guy a few miles behind me, and when I turned west after departing Guntersville, he was even further behind me that when I'd first heard him at Stevenson, and I'd done the pattern and a touch-and-go at each aiport in between! Nine of the ten landings were real greasers, and the 10th was only slightly embarrassing. That was an awful lot of fun, for less than $10 an hour.
It must have been National Red Tailed Hawk day, because I saw at least a dozen of them, several at way too close range for comfort. At one point two of them appeared in front of me, one above and one below. That lead to a real problem, dive or climb to dodge! I missed them both, but I saw one later that couldn't have been more than fifty feet in front of me. He turned sharp to his right and I got a really nice view of his bottom side. On my way home I'd stopped by the gas station to refill four six gallon gas cans, when a guy pulled in next to me and started to fill a dusty little two-gallon can. I thought "I'll bet he feels a little inadequate with that little can", and a few seconds later he looked over at me and said "Gee, I feel a little inadquate with my little can compared to yours!" I told him he must be a mind reader, because I'd been tempted to crack a joke, but assumed he'd think I was a crackpot of some kind, and he asked if I had a boat or something. I told him it was an airplane, and we stood there for ten minutes talking about it, and I had to tell him about my afternoon. He's a former navy pilot, was thinking about getting back into flying, and I think I gave him several reasons to follow through with it! It turns out his neighbor has a new weight-shift trike, and it so happened his neighbor is in the hangar next to mine, and he was out flying when I got back. Small world...and a very nice day... Mark Langford N56ML "at" hiwaay.net website at http://www.N56ML.com --------------------------------------------------------
