Busy Sunday.
Blogged a wee bit in the early AM, as has become the custom. Worked on some output screens for the software development team I’m managing – aviation safety stuff, pretty cool if we can get the kids to actually use it. SQL databases and customizable cockpit charts, who/what/when/why, etc. Has some real potential.
Then! Down to Montgomery for to wrestle 1200 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal into the air and bring her floating featheringly down to earth again. With some two-circle BFM in between. An absolute cougar in the trunk, lady of a certain age and that, remarkably well preserved. With a mebbe 30 year old boy toy in t’other aircraft, whom she wanted nothing more than to dominate.
I don’t like to psychoanalyze, so I will not. Tempting though the exercise might be.
Occasional wingman Jim did the brief while I studied for yet another Biennial Flight Review that would follow shortly after in the club Cardinal, somewhat resentfully. For hadn’t I just done one in the Citabria not two weeks past?
I had.
And yet there are two aero clubs between which I divide my time and hard earned, when not grinding it out for the Barnstormers. Each of whom insists upon its own BFR, because Certificated Flight Instructors have to eat too.
Annually.
The Flight Review, not the dining. It “keeps the insurance down,” says they, coloring it a “club annual.” Still, it’s $40 out of yer pocket. Monies that could rightfully be otherwise be spent on Guinness. For strength.
The lady was far and away a force of nature, a “one person party,” as she confessed, needing nothing but her own self for to have fun. “Win,” she cried. “We must win!”
Stay right here with me, sister, said I. For I am your man.
Since I hadn’t briefed the flight, I was not surprised when she asked of me as I was pre-flighting, “What’s a good tip?”
Well, said I, scratching my head. A good two and half g nose low turn preserving energy is always a good way to start…
“No,” she said impatiently, cutting me off and all but stamping her stiletto-heeled boots. The “dufus” unsaid but hanging in the air betwixt us. Rubbing two fingers together in the universal sign language of filthy lucre she explained as to a child, “What’s a good tip?”
Oh, you know: Whatever you think is fair, although of course nothing is required. It being a privilege and all. Twenty dollars.
Aggressive as the day is long, she was, and was all in Boy Toy’s knickers quicker than you can say “Bob’s your uncle.” Landed all triumphant like, and was as good as her word in the article of gratuities. Sending Boy Toy off for to make the payments. Said she’d be back, wanted the name of a good flight instructor. Had the bug, and what’s more, had the resources.
Somewhere in Del Mar, a man with 25 years of now-broken marriage behind him is living in an apartment eating microwave dinners and paying for all of this.
A man not me.
I thanked her kindly for her generosity, before rushing over to the FBO for yet another annual biennial flight review.
Which is when I got a ring from the Kat, who had somehow found herself stranded at the horse barn, where honest hay and oats are turned into something loathsome, courtesy of an enormous animal with wee, sma’ hooves y-clept “Willow.” Who has won my daughter’s heart, the great, rough beast. On account of leaping over fences and such at alarming speeds and vertiginous heights, with my own dear daughter tenuously connected atop, everything shivering in the balance.
“Where’s mom?” cried she, severely vexed. For it had been the better part of 45 minutes, and no ride home had materialized, and no one had taken her calls. I had to confess a certain innocence of mom’s whereabouts, being not merely physically displaced, but also temporally disengaged.
“I’ll come and get you,” I replied. For elsewise I’d never hear the end of it, and in any case it was the right thing to do. BFRs being eminently re-schedulable.
“Never to fret,” replied my congenial CFI. His fees already counted upon, and perhaps already spent. “We’ll just do the thing as the sun goes down.”
In actual nighttime.
But, malgre the fact that I already have 606 hours of night time in the logbook, loth was I to add even a jot. The flesh being so very fragile, and the mountains so unyielding, not to mention invisible once the jocund sun takes his leave of the western sky. Persisting in their existence despite the fact that they cannot readily be seen, until one is right up on them, and then only maybe. Godlike, in that respect. And the Cardinal lacking any class of radar altimeter, GPS-aided terrain awareness warning system, nor even a good pair of afterburners should things go south.
“Oh,” said I. Unwilling to be a non-hack even yet. “OK.”
So having rescued the Kat and dropped her off it was back to the aerodrome, and in the event the checkride was a nothing of a thing. Slow flight and stalls as the sun faded in the west. Pump the gear down, hizzoner having pulled the landing gear circuit breaker in my plain view. A pair of landings at Gillespie, one of them a soft-field full stop. Then IFR back to Montgomery for the ILS full stop, under the hood, masterfully flown if I must say so myself.
It’s my story.
And then back home again, a mere groundling in a mass of indistinguishable groundlings.
So, yeah: Busy day, for a Sunday.
Sorry, Sir, but which is the Kat and which is the Biscuit? Is the Kat the older, or the younger one? I always forget.
Ah, the Kat is the younker, 15 going on 30 and 16 on the 10th of May. Already has her own BMW picked out.
“Whatever you can afford,” I tell her.
She just smiles, knowingly.
Well, if it were a 2-wheeled BMW, that would be OK, I reckon. (Being neither her Mom nor Dad)
Here in Idaho a youth can get their drivers license at about age 14 1/2 after taking driving school and driving for 6 months on their permit. But we have another interesting rule: 2 moving violations before age 16 and your privleges are removed for 30 days. Ask me how I know that. And the youngest is driving a piece of junk 95 Kia that was supposed to keep him flying low and slow.
Speaking of moving violations, the 20 year old daughter, who lives in Monterey, CA, informed me last night that she got a ticket for running a red light. “It was really just deep yellow Dad, and I didn’t see a cop anywhere.” Cost? $445. I can’t believe California is out of money. My response? Good thing it’s your money.
Lex: you have a helluva talent for telling stories…..
it’s just too bad you wasted all those years flying. %-)
/white smoke
Ah, yes…
So, when do you get that official CFI, for to instruct said cougar?
No plans for that, either of it!
A man’s got to know his limitations.
“A pair of landings at Gillespie”
The B-17, Lex, did you see her?! Liberty Belle has been out there since Tues, I went by yesterday with the Nikon but they weren’t flying, probably because of the rain.
The sun was going down, and I had my hands full. I guess I missed it.
…malgre the fact that I already have 606 hours of night time in the logbook
Okay, with only 606 hours of night, I can see why you still keep a logbook…
Yes, Bill, we know that hellaflopper pilots are not as other men. Just keep yer hands where we can see them.
bwahahaha.
“Somewhere in Del Mar, a man with 25 years of now-broken marriage behind him is living in an apartment eating microwave dinners and paying for all of this.”
I am coming to the belief that the reason men do not live as long as women is out of self-preservation.
During my stint with a deaf-owned company I also discovered that the normal hearing loss as we age affects mainly those frequencies that correspond to the frequencies of the female voice. In this I find a sort of Divine Intervention, proof that The Creator not only never gives us more than we can handle but that He also Eases Our Burdens in His own Divine Way.
At the risk of making a pun, let’s hear it for marriage, tinnitus and heart attacks!
– Max
Funny you should say that. Yesterday the son-in-law was by the house to shoot the stuff and watch a little racin’. Wife said something that I couldn’t hear since there was a TV full of snarling 850 hp. engines tearing around the track in Lost Wages. I asked her to repeat herself and got a blast about I need to get a hearing aid. Now, after nearly 40 years of shipyards, I really do have hearing loss. I’ve had titanitus for the last 20 years. But did I repeat that? Oh, no, I had to tell her that since I could hear the son-in-law and couldn’t hear her that I must have self-installed a hearing filter for HER voice.
Man, it sucked having to wash all those dishes and vacuum the house just to get a bit of peace
My wife insists that I get a hearing aid.
At least that’s what she keeps telling me she’s been telling me every time I notice her lips are moving…
You do paint a colorful picture Lex, as always. Today’s is even more, um – vivid – with regard to the cougar. Rapacious is the word that comes to mind.
Lex,
Snday, I took the 911 SC out for a drive with my dad. He is 87. We went to the Everglades boat dock where all the motorcycles come for a break then east about seven miles over to North Perry Airport. I pulled over on the perimeter road and said, “dad, this is a good place” and he promptly got in the driver’s seat, adjusted the position of the seat and mirrors, tested the clutch and rowed throught the gears while stationary. I explianed, “Dad, first gear in this car requires more gas and a slow massage of the clutch pedal through the friction point seeing how the torque on the breathed on 3.0 liter flat six is not quite like the Detroit V-8′s or the Jeep he drove for 70,000 miles in France and Germany in 1944-45 during WWII.” He stalled the highly unfamiliar and tightly wound 911 once then after a restart, got her off the dead stop with a few lurches. “Too timid I say, you need more RPM’s with these high strung european motors, have to build the revs and let out the clutch at the same time, one fast and getting faster (revs) and the other slow (clutch). After we got up to about 10 MPH, he wanted to shift into second gear and when we got there the engine was bogging and we chuncked along while he figured it out…another stall. The third time was a charm but he never got it going more than about 25 which is just about the time this car starts to show it’s track roots….ah well, I was glad to give him the wheel and even gladder that he is still around to take it (-:
Good friend -just departed-{at 91} (Three war AF retired, Mustangs in the Deuce, 86′s in Korea, and A1E’s in ‘Nam) last two favorite cars were a Miata and one of the last big block Vettes. Wow, just remembering his eyes as he talked about all of them! (with and without wings.)
Lex,
Don’t you have a camera in your cell phone? Cougar in a flight suit. That would be a nice shot!
I wouldn’t want to be that flight instructor. You can’t stamp your feet to get your way when the requested ATC routing is denied or have five planes ahead of you for departure on a Saturday morning. Care to wager your tip money that the cougar doesn’t even solo a plane?
Rumor has it that women foot stomping was a close second to women jumping on trampolines to close out “The Man Show.”