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.
