Flynlow: Cooper's

Saturday was a long, but fun day. Travis and I had planned to fly out and get some BBQ. I arrived at the airport before he did and when I opened the hanger door, the first thing I noticed was the oil access door was missing from the plane. It had been coming open during flight and my first thought was maybe Phil had taken it off to work on it. I looked around the hanger, then called Phil to see if he took it home… nope. He was disappointed and figured it had fallen off on his last flight.

I started walking the runways looking for it. Phil told me which runways he had used and I checked them from end-to-end. Travis showed up and we walked them again, even going across the highway to see if it had fallen off when Phil was on final. We didn’t find it.

Phil and I figured it would be okay to fly with it off, so I checked all of the cowling screws to make sure they were tight and we took off for a test flight. We flew for about 20 minutes, then returned to the field to get fuel and check the cowling again. Everything was fine.

After fueling, we headed out West. I took off and handed the controls over to Travis. We were flying West when I decided we should go back to the original plan of flying for BBQ! I checked Foreflight on my iPad and we were pretty close to being on course.

As we neared Llano, two Blackhawk helicopters called that they were flying over Llano and asked if there was any other traffic. I told them where I was and they said they had me in sight. I used the very nice turf runway and Travis commented on how nice it would be for powered parachutes. It was so wide we could have taken off across it in a PPC!

After tying the Chief down, we went into the terminal to get the courtesy car for the drive into town. I was impressed with their terminal. The last time I’d been there it was a dump, but this time it was very nice. They gave me the keys to an old church van that had seen better days, and we were off. After a very good $50 lunch at Coopers, we had to sit around at the airport for awhile before jumping back in the plane!

On the way back I showed Travis where the bald eagles nest. We stayed high so we wouldn’t disturb them as required by law.

When we arrived back at Kittie Hill, Charlie was out rolling the runway I normally use, so we used one I’d never been on before. Then we taxied back to put her away and reflect on the day. It was just a perfect day for flying. As I’m typing this, I hear the thunder rolling and know that the field will be too wet to fly off of for awhile, so I’m glad we got over 2 hours in!

Nice house.