Chapter Eleven

Weeds.

Well, were you listening when I spoke of landing in the weeds being a good thing and ending up out in the weeds as a bad thing?

I'm not embarrassed.

I came to Billings because they have multiple runways. One of them has to be into the wind. They're all closed except 'two-eight right'. Yes, the cross wind runway.

The airport in Billings is on top of a mesa, butte, large flat hill. One end of two-eight right sticks out like a finger and has a drop off of about three hundred feet on three sides. The wind blows up the sides and makes a very unstable, goofy wind pattern across the runway. When it blows up the sides and meets with the stuff blowing across the runway it is blustery and accelerates. Sometimes it happens right on take off roll.

It was direct cross wind but I felt fine with it. Full throttle. Left stick, right rudder. Just when the tail wheel came up a gust grabbed the left wings and lifted them up real quick. I had in all the left stick there was. There wasn't any more. I was going too slow. The right bottom wing tip drug on the ground. I pulled the power off and the left wings came back down but with no power on the plane weathervaned into the wind. It was an excursion to the left I hadn't planned on.

Damn, here come the weeds.

Damn, here come the fire trucks.

Pretty soon they had me surrounded. I surrendered.

It was my turn to close an airport.

Jerry, director of maintenance at Edwards Jet Center, called Dale.

Dale came to repair my wing. He's Seventy-three. Let me introduce you to Dale. He's one of those kinda guys I love. Dale knelt down and looked at the wing tip and said, "Is that all?" I took him to lunch.

Dale is a worker. Look at his fingers. I like workers. Dale rebuilds bent airplanes and flies crop dusters in the summers. He has three airplanes at his house that he's working on. He doesn't need my headache. He has three headaches of his own. I appreciate his taking the time to help me.

I wish the rest of the world worked like General Aviation. The people in General Aviation are like a bunch of Boy scouts. Kind, helpful, friendly, courteous. Actually General Aviation is better than The Boy Scouts as you can be gay or an atheist and still get in.

The wing tips on the bottom wings of my Bird are angled up. When you get tipped up one way the opposite wing tip lies flat on the ground. They anticipated this at the factory. I just scraped some of the fabric off the wood. It's an easy patch and Dale has just become my favorite seamstress. He's going to sew new fabric to the ribs. Dale has the biggest darning needle I've ever seen.

When I described what the inside of my airplane wing looked like I never thought I'd send pictures of it. Actually the wood and structure looks like fine crafted furniture. While it was open I did look for termites though.

Darning Needle

Tying the knot

The good news was that my airplane was hangared last night. In the late afternoon there was a warning with sirens on all TV channels of a severe thunderstorm. The recorded voice said, "High winds in excess of sixty miles an hour with potential of damaging hail and sky to ground lighting. If you are outside proceed to shelter and stay away from windows." It was nearly a hundred degrees and raining ice cubes. More proof of aliens living here.

I wonder how I'm going to feel about my next take off?