Paris Texas KPRX

 Hello fellow aviators! It has been a while. Didn't something happen to the world in the last couple of years? Be that as it may, we are finally coming out of our self induced cocoons and re-assimilating. Today brings us to an adventure in Paris Texas and Cox Field (KPRX). This is a 63 nautical mile trip to the northeast of McKinney (KTKI). 

Today consisted of John Schweers and Chris Jurgens in John's Bonanza, Scott Kirkland and myself in his Cirrus, Chris Dennis and his girlfriend, Michelle, in his Mooney and finally Ben Jones in his beautiful 182 P. 

First off, it was chilly this morning. I woke up to 41º and slightly overcast skies but very high clouds. When we got to the airport, we had some high winds. McKinney has a 18/36 runway favoring 36 today with winds 340@19 G25. No matter what, it was a beautiful day.

Here we are lined up waiting for our turn for takeoff. Once we were in the air if you looked to the south, you got a view like this.

And if you looked forward, you got this view.

It is just over a 30 minute flight and we had 3 aircraft in trail while Chris wanted to do some VOR work and flew to the Bonham VOR and then to the Paris VOR before flying straight in to Paris.

I always hand it to Scott. The man is a phenomenal pilot and 99 out of 100 times, you get a landing like this, even as strong as the winds were.

  Welcome to Paris Texas!

And now to the crew cars. They have 2. Since they know my aversion to Crown Vics, we got the Crown Vic. The other car was a Honda Accord. Since it wasn't Crown Vic, it already was a notch above the rest.

Before getting in the back of the Crown Vic, Chris needed to relive some old memories of the last time he was in the back of a Crown Vic. 

Before we went to the agreed upon eatery, we had to make a stop at what makes Paris famous. The awful tower, I mean the Eiffel Tower of Texas, complete with a cowboy hat.

Among all of the other tourists we found one who agreed to take a picture without stealing my phone. 

After all of this high quality tourism of world class architecture, our hunger got the best of us. So it was off to Jaxx Gourmet Burgers on the square in downtown Paris. 

 

With a menu like this, the decisions were tough. Everyone had something different. The 2 most unique were the German Burger and the Korean Burger. No one left this place the slightest bit hungry. Even as I am writing this 5 hours later, I'm still full. 

We made it back to PRX safely, but full. This was such a great day of fun between a fine group of aviators.

Thanks for the fun guys!

Westheimer Airport, Norman Oklahoma - KOUN

It's been a long time since I've had a chance to post anything. The whole world has changed a lot in the last year with the COVID19 pandemic. I'm finally seeing a light at the end of this tunnel. 

That being said, today was a beautiful day for flying. Took off from McKinney (KTKI) at about 12:54 for a 1 hour flight to Norman Oklahoma (KOUN)

It was a little windy but nothing like the crazy strong winds we had earlier in the week. We had 45 mph gusts for a couple of days. 

 Once we finally got airborne, it was a picture perfect day. Lots of blue skies and a slight tail wind.

It was terribly uneventful, which is always nice. Our flight path took us just west of Ardmore, OK (KADM) and slightly west of Paul's Valley (KPVJ).

We were vectored near the football stadium as we joined the downwind for runaway 18 in Norman.

So we finally get on the ground and find a crew car. First of all, I always award extra points if the car is not a Crown Victoria. Extra points are definitely awarded today. Our winner today is a Ford Fiesta!

If you can get past the dings in the passenger door and the bird poop all over, it isn't a bad car, to the naked eye. There is more to a car than appearances. Once we started moving, it became painfully obvious that this car has a transmission that is just about ready to fall out. The clutches were slipping so bad, I was afraid that we might have to get out and push it. Luckily our adventure kept us close to the airport so we wouldn't have to have a tow truck come and get us. 

Once we finished our real reason for flying in, it was time for lunch. We chose The Garage Burgers & Beer.

Nice little burgers and beer place. You can tell that this is a college town. We each had a burger, Scott got the fries and I got the onion rings. Both were really good. Handmade patties that were loosely packed and practically fell apart once you bit into them. 

We finished up and headed back to the airport and returned our chariot to it's rightful owners, paid for the fuel we took on and did our pre-flight. After a couple of pictures of the base of the tower and our parking mate, we taxied out to take off. 

One thing we noticed was that OU has an aviation program and fly Cherokees. everyone of them has a call sign. They are all Crimson. We taxied out behind Crimson 13 while Crimson 5 landed and we were waiting on Crimson 8 to land. Once we were airborne, I tried to get some pictures of some very bad smoke from fires to the west of us. 

 Unfortunately, I missed the worst of the smoke but you can see one of the small fires to the right side of the picture. This isn't the big fires to the west but if you look just above the small one and you can see where the layer of smoke was getting sheared off at about 5,500 feet. That's why we ended up going up to 7,500 coming back.

All in all, perfect day for flying. 

I'm giving the crew car grade is a 75. I would have given it more if I weren't so worried about the transmission falling out of it and having to wait for a tow. 

Stay tuned. We have a couple of big trips planned this year. One may not include a crew car and one will involve a true krewe.

Granbury KDGJ

I know it's been a while since I made a post. A lot has happened in the last year. I don't need to re-hash everything that has been in the news. What I need to do is take you on a trip to Granbury. The date was Sunday, June 14th. We celebrate Flag day on this date but I also celebrate my parent's anniversary on the date, which is one day after my younger brother's birthday. June is a busy month.

We departed McKinney at 11:56 AM on an IFR flight plan to Granbury KDGJ. If you have never had the opportunity to go to Granbury, put it on your list. It's right on Lake Granbury, southwest of the DFW area. It's 76 NM from McKinney as the crow flies. Our flight plan had us going out at 4000 feet using the Maverick transition, which would take us over DFW. We stayed on the runway heading (180º) for a lot longer than expected. By the time they turned us we would be crossing Addison on the south side of the airport.

On our way toward DFW, we got a nice view of Love Field, off of our left wing.

As many times as I've flown over DFW, it is still so much fun to do it. Sorry for the crappy shot, We crossed on the north end and I was not in position for a good shot.

As we were heading toward Ft Worth, we got vectored a bit so we were heading right over the Ft Worth NAS, formerly known as Carswell Air Force Base.

This was our last fun inside of the DFW Bravo airspace. The rest of the trip was getting to Granbury. It's a nice little airport with the runway being 3603' x 60' 14/32.

Once we were on the ground, we headed out for some lunch. Our ride for the adventure was the usual Ford Crown Vic. We had 4 to choose from but 3 were already gone. It was your typical municipal airport crew car. An old retired police car.

Interesting interior.

Along with an interesting warning. I've never seen this in a crew car.

It was a typical car that we usually get. Every now and then someone surprises us with a different car. Not here. The good thing was that it had a great A/C in it. It was hot and the A/C was nice and cold. I have to give this car a B-. 

So we took off for lunch to Stumpy's, as it was recommended by the really nice guy at the FBO. Unfortunately, Stumpy's had a line and we didn't want to spend the day waiting for a meal so we opted for the Historic Downtown Granbury where we opted for lunch at the Filling Station. Scott opted for a salad and I had the chicken fried chicken special. We were both pleased they didn't have huge portions. All in all a good choice.

It's a gas station themed restaurant that had a nice menu at reasonable prices.

So we paid our tab and headed back to the airport to see that 2 of the other crew cars had made it back.

Our way back didn't go exactly like planned. Scott filed an IFR flight plan and we were going to pick up our clearance in the air. Unfortunately, the controller working that sector was a bit busy and never got back to us. We finally were able to get flight following and he asked us if we wanted to go over the top on the way back. Who would refuse that? He brought us in just north of the Ft Worth NAS.

And between Meecham and Alliance. I couldn't get a good shot of Alliance.

As I said before, I can't get enough of flying over the top of DFW.

As soon as we were on the east side of DFW, they turned us direct to McKinney. That took us just north of Addison.

We made it back to McKinney a few minutes later with the temp at 93º. Summer is definitely here but not officially until June 21. So concludes our adventure to Granbury. Sorry for being out of my normal writing style. I'm trying to get my legs back underneath me again.

KBMT Revisited

I'm going to depart a bit from my normal reviews of crew cars and focus on the love of friends and love of BBQ in this post. Please forgive me as I will try and make sure that I give a complete review of the crew car but a thorough examination of the BBQ and the trip. It's not about the destination but the journey.

Saturday June 1, 2019 was, obviously, the first day of June but also a day that 2 guys who have been under a lot of pressure from their jobs needed a day to do "guy" things. That will always include flying to exotic locations for some unknown reason. This flight was no different. The exotic location was Beaumont Texas and the objective (you always have to have an objective) was BBQ.

I was born and raised in Beaumont Texas and thought it was awesome until I started college at Lamar University. Without going into all of the depressive facts of why my childhood was a disaster, let's focus on why this was a good trip. Even in the worst environments, the cream rises to the top. Same thing here. I freely admit that I am a BBQ snob and most of that is because of my relationship with the Patillo family. I've known Robert for more years than I would like to admit. This kind soul was an attendee at my mother's funeral last August and was the one person who surprised me at his presence. I will also let him keep guessing why all of these people keep asking for interviews with him.

We started our day with a text message, early Saturday morning asking if I would like to make a flight for an adventure. I classify all of my flights with Scott as an adventure. I suggested that we fly to KBMT and go for some BBQ. He was good and I even called the FBO and talked to the guy on staff for the day and he was enthusiastic about the crew car (cue: sarcastic response!).

We met at Scott's hangar and were ready to go by 11 AM. We had some challenges along the way. Since we are heading out on a VFR flight plan, that means that we are required to follow all of the rules for VMC. We knew that there were going to be clouds between us and KBMT. We knew that we could climb above the clouds and still remain VFR as long as we could see the ground. There were a lot of clouds between our starting point and ending point and they progressively got thicker.

This is from our way out approximately over Terrell. As you can see, we started with quite a few clouds but it thinned out quickly.

The closer we got to the coast, the more we started to see buildup. Look at the thin line in the distance. The closer we got we realized that we needed to climb to get over. We informed ATC that we wanted to go up 1000 feet and all we got was maintain VFR. 

It was starting to get thicker and we knew we would need to find a hole to get down through.

One nice this we had going for us is that we had my Stratux and Scott's TIS-B traffic so we could see traffic and Scott has XM Weather and my Stratux has ADSB-In weather so we weren't totally in the dark.

About the time we were 50 miles out, we had to look for a home and we found one. Scott had to fly a 360 around a big cloud and then there was a way out. I decided that it might be fun to shoot some video of this.

So we finally get to Beaumont Municipal (KBMT) and Scott put it down very nicely. I just didn't do a good job as a camera man.


Finally! We get to the heart of the blog post, the crew car. I you go back and look at a previous post from here, they had a pretty crappy crew car. I even had to leave a credit card as a deposit because it had a chip key that was worth more than the car. Too many people had forgot to return the key or my theory was that they were trying to save lives by never letting anyone drive it.

Now we have a well equipped ...........................
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Crown Victoria!

This is probably the best Crown Vic that I have ever been it. The A/C worked great, it had power, it had a bumper guard (I was tempted to push something) and was full of gas and clean.  I can't know this car. Of all of the Crown Vics I've been fortunate to drive, this is the cream of the crop. By the way, the FBO is really growing. The young man there told me that they are selling over 3000 gallons of 100LL a week. Compared to what it used to do, that's amazing. Support your local FBO.

We took this creampuff to Patillo's BBQ. If you haven't been to Patillo's, you don't know what you are missing. You have always heard someone describe BBQ as the best thing they've ever eaten. I won't say that but I will say that it will be the most unique taste you'll ever find in a BBQ joint. It is also the oldest black owned BBQ restaurant in the state.

I had a couple of sliced beef sandwiches and Scott had a beef plate. We both had links. They are world famous for the links.

It was now time to head back and the clouds had been building but we still had scattered clouds all the way back to about Terrell. The Dallas area was starting to get cloud cover so we knew we needed to get under for the last part of the trip. We thought we might have to fly circles around the airport but we were able to find a way on top but had to climb to 8500 feet instead of the 6500 we had originally wanted to go. The nice thing about 8500 was that the outside air temp was 63 degrees and smooth.

We fought this for about 90 miles and then while we were checking weather along the route, we started seeing things like clear below 12000 at Athens and even Terrell was looking good. But past Terrell, it started deteriorating. We had to get down before Terrell. So we dropped down to 3500 at Terrell and started making our way to McKinney. As we were listening to ATC, there were several reports of hard rain and it was near Addison and a lot of the inbound traffic for Love Field was being diverted around it. I quit taking pictures as we both needed to be alert and ready for anything.



All in all, a great trip. I really hope you get a chance to go try some of this BBQ. It was worth the trip. I think you can get Scott to agree too!