Episode #55: A bike ride turns into a quick airplane ride

-

 Earlier this week I finalized plans to do a bike ride on Saturday morning with my buddy Larry. We were going to meet at the college parking lot at 6:45am and ride toward Valley View then back to Lindsay. After that we would head over to the Gainesville Municipal Airport. By now we have completed just over 18 miles on the bike ride.

The airport was having a breakfast for those that have an airplane at one of the hangers. We had a nice breakfast and I met more people than I can remember names. After we finished breakfast and visiting with a few more folks, Larry says, hey I haven't had my plane out in a few months, would you like to take a ride? I said sure.


He does his pre flight check list and we pull it out of the hanger and head to the runway. We taxi to the north end of the runway (since we had a south wind this morning) and take off. It is surprisingly warm inside and as we build speed down the runway to take off the plane kind of bumps and bounces until the tires get off the ground.

When we get off the ground and start gaining altitude it continues to get warmer and warmer in the cabin. As we get further off the ground nearing 1000' it feels like if we were in a car, we would be fish tailing and along with the bumps from the wind as we build speed, I am beginning to think maybe I should have skipped the bacon and egg breakfast. 

I am not sick but wondering how long it will be before I am. After a few more minutes we are at the altitude he wanted to cruise and are now on a northeast heading. We are heading to my house so I can get some pictures. Though I have many pictures from about 400' from my drone this gives me the opportunity to see my place from about 2000'.

As we get close to my house I am a bit disoriented as to our location. We fly by it and we miss it. As we turn north to come back around we cross the Red River and are now in Oklahoma for a short few moments. Now I have opened my maps app on my phone as we start getting close. I identify the high school and the football field and look east and then I see it. 

We are still a bit north of my house and Larry makes a long sweeping semi-circle around so I can see it from my position in the right seat. From this vantage point I can see we are coming up on it quick so I open the camera app on my phone and snag a couple of quick pictures before we pass by.



We then head back to Gainesville and to the airport. As he positions himself in the pattern to land there is a surprisingly lot of people conducting training and performing a procedure called a 'touch and go' where the plane will land on the runway then immediately powers back up and takes off without stopping or exiting the runway. 

We get behind one of these pilot trainees and he is flying so slow, Larry is gaining on him too fast to make a safe landing so he has to abort and do a fly around. When we complete the fly around and the approach to make a very smooth landing. 

After we put the plane back in the hanger, we get back on the bikes and put on another 7.25 miles by the time we reach the starting point at the college we manage to get a 25.25 mile ride. It was a good morning and a memory to document.

Later that afternoon, the kids brought the grandkids over for a birthday meal to celebrate my birthday a few days ago. We had a good meal and a nice visit. After we ate, I took Brad out to help me bleed the fuel injector lines on my tractor. I inadvertently ran it out of diesel a few days ago while mowing. Unlike a gas powered tractor, when a diesel runs out of fuel, air gets in the fuel system and the injector lines have to be purged of the air in the lines.

I bled each of the four fuel lines multiple times at the injector pump as I had done when I ran out one other time about 20 years ago and still could not keep the engine running. I called a buddy of mine to see what I may be missing and he advised I bleed the lines at the injectors rather than at the pump. I did this and bled each line 4-5 times each and it finally started. I was really getting frustrated but glad I got it running.

Today started out good and ended up great. A nice bike ride, a cool plane ride, a great meal with family and my tractor is running again.

One thing you can count on from now on. I will NEVER run this tractor out of fuel again.

   



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Episode #23: A Good Wife Is A Gracious Gift From God ... Proverbs 19:14

-
Image
This post won't mean as much to those who do not know Carol Ann, but those that do know her, I know you love her and this is my story about a young teenaged girl that captured my heart so many decades ago. I know my family will enjoy this episode and the look back. Carol Ann defines the term love at first sight for me. She was 16 years old in this picture and we met a year later when we were both seniors attending different high schools. We met one cool January afternoon in 1975 while making "the drag" you know, the practice of driving through town to the Safeway parking lot then back through town to the Sonic drive-in then repeat, repeat to ad nauseam. I had a couple of buddies riding with me and we would honk and wave at the town girls, (remember, I was a 17 year old boy who lived in a small very and rural community about 15 miles away).  She was riding around with one of her friends and when they waved back that was all I needed to turn around and follow. We caught up ...
Read more

Episode#49: Watch The Babies As They Grow Up

-
Image
  The main objective for creating this blog in the first place was to document stories of my life that my children may have forgotten or maybe never knew and for their children and their children's children. I never knew my great-grandparents and have only met met one of them, my great grandmother who died when I was 13 years old and I knew little to nothing about her. I did not want this to be the case for my downline. Among the travels and adventures I have shared here in the previous 48 stories of this blog, I have not included very many stories of my childhood yet, however I did dedicate a couple of posts about when we moved to the country when I was a kid and when I met Carol Ann in high school. For some time I thought it would be fun for me and entertaining for them to see a pictorial account of me and Carol Ann as we grew up. So for that purpose, I have found as many school pictures that I can find and have matched them up to show what each of us looked like as the years pas...
Read more

Episode #46: Ruth Evelyn Wilson Black My Grandma

-
Image
This story is more for historical purposes for those of my family, particularly for my sons and grandkids but is a story of my childhood and family. For story context, Grandma Black was born almost 113 years ago, on June 26,1912. She was born a couple of months after the Titanic left England then two days later strike an iceberg and sank just two and a half hours later. In birth order of her grandchildren, I was the sixth. Her oldest son had two daughters older than me, Sherri and Brenda. Her younger son had a son named Kenny, and my mother had two children before me, Mike and Patty. Grandma was 45 years old when I was born in August 1957. Her father, Fred Walter Wilson was born in 1881 and died in 1949 at the age of 68. Her mother, Nancy Jane Monroe Wilson was born in 1880 and died in 1970 when she was 90 years old. I do have a few memories of my great grandmother but I was only 13 years old when she died and we did not see her very often when we went to OKC. The photo below is the ea...
Read more