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!

Stafford Airport in Weatherford Oklahoma KOJA - The Shuttle Bus Edition

This one will be long but worth it. However, it won't be the standard crew car review since we really didn't get to use the crew car at Stafford. We had to outrun a storm coming in from the west so we decided to go somewhere else to eat. More on that later and by "we", I mean Scott Kirkland and myself. It is Scott's airplane and we come up with places that we have never been.

We've always wanted to go to Stafford since my ill fated attempt with Charles Galles a couple of years ago. We had to divert to Ada Oklahoma because of weather but found a path right back to McKinney with no adverse weather.

The thing that made us want to go to Stafford was the Stafford Museum can be found on their website. Be sure and check it out. It will certainly tell you more than my meager fingers can type about it.

The first thing about our journey was that we tried to get going fairly early. We were airborne before 9:00 AM and had some beautiful skies, and it wasn't too hot.

After our climbout and heading towards Stafford, I noticed that we were getting really close to a target on ForeFlight. It wasn't lying. We were less than 2 miles away and he was 500 feet above us. Just before approach turned us, I got this shot. It is hard to see in this small version of the image but if you click on it, you will get a larger image.

Just remember that if you can see an airplane in a picture, it's close. The rest of the trip was kind of boring but in aviation, boring is good. Here is one of the highlights.

Look at the outside air temp. It's August 4th and 70º. Slightly better than the 104º we had in Shreveport or the 109º we had at home 2 weeks ago. We were also at 6,500 feet.

As we pushed toward our destination, we realized that Oklahoma is pretty flat and uneventful. We flew into an area of turbulence but it started at 20,000 feet. We were safe. We also flew through a couple of MOAs that were cold. 

The flight was so uneventful that when we were handed off to Ft Sill approach, we made our call in and then heard nothing for over 20 minutes. Everything seemed to functioning so we called in for a radio check. Ft Sill approach came back and said we were good. Also, we were the only aircraft in his airspace, which explained the silence. 

As we got closer, we were handed off to Fort Worth Center again and then as soon as we had the field in sight, we were dropped. We entered the pattern and for the first time, I recorded our landing on my iPhone. Scott made a great landing.

When we entered the pattern and made our position reports, someone on the unicom was giving us wind speeds, direction and barometer readings. For an untowered airport, they were very on top of flight operations in their airspace. As we taxied up, we were further surprised by having a marshaller putting us right in a spot next to the FBO. Friendly can't even begin to describe the service.

Now the fun begins. Because we bought fuel, we got to tour the museum for free. Normally, it's $7. The first part is about the life of Lt. General Thomas P. Stafford. It shows his life in Weatherford and later in the military and then the space program. He was quite an impressive man. 

Next you start getting into some of the hardware. There's a replica of the Wright Brothers airplane, the Bell X-1 and on and on. I'm just going to put up several of the pictures that I took and let them do the talking. 

One last picture. What do you think a someone from the south and someone from Russia could find in common aboard a spacecraft? Looks like some scotch and some vodka to me.

That was a lot of pictures. This museum was named an affiliate to the Smithsonian in 2011. They have plans to expand it even more in the future. Do yourself a favor an put this on your list of places to see. 

Unfortunately, we didn't get to have a crew car experience as there was a storm approaching from the west. By the time we finished, it was about 12 miles away and moving slowly right at us. We thanked everyone for a great time. The gentleman at the FBO told us that they had 5 crew cars and they were not retired police cars but retired detective cars. Unfortunately, they were all Crown Vics so I told him that is an automatic 10 point deduction. He then told me that they did have a Town Car so on our next trip there (there will be another trip), we'll see if we can get the Town Car for a better score.

So where did we go for lunch? What better place than a local casino that has an airport close by. Durant! We put in a course for KDUA in the GPS and took off. Still not much of anything interesting on the trip to Durant. We did have a bogey pop up that was close to us and heading our direction but 1,000 below us. It was a helicopter doing 125 knots.

We finally got to Durant and lost our cool morning weather. It is August after all. I haven't been in the terminal since I passed my check ride there back in 2011. At least we got to land on the actual runway today. when I was here for my check ride, the runway was closed and I had to takeoff and land on the taxiway.

Here's where we deviate from the old review of a crew car to a review of the shuttle from the casino. I didn't get to get any great pictures of the shuttle because I didn't want to be that guy that everyone was pointing at, uttering the phrase "What the hell is he taking a picture of a shuttle bus for?". But, I was that guy. The shuttle bus was built on a Ford F-350 chassis. 

Once in, it was quite roomy with seating for 12 plus space for a wheelchair. On the way over we had Darlene Jesse as our driver.

On the way back, we had Don Dillard as our driver.

One thing I always bust the crew cars on is a non functioning ac. No problem in this category.

As I said before, this thing is roomy with seating for 12. The best thing is that someone else is driving and they are familiar with the area. No having to use your GPS on you phone to find a place to eat.

We got to the Choctaw Casino, we headed to Smash Burger. I didn't realize that our presence would cause everyone to rush the counter at Smash Burger. The only other explanation would be that the person working the counter needed some additional training in taking care of high volumes of customers.

Finally time to get back to McKinney and after taking on some fuel and complaining about the heat, we taxied out to runway 17 where the air temp was 102º. Since it was so short of a flight, altitude only helped bring down the temp to 93º.

All in all a great day of flying, 3.6 hours on the tach, saw a great museum, had some good food at a casino and sweated it out on the trip back. Sorry about the length but then again, not really. It was a lot to cover in a blog post. Until next time.....................