First Passenger!

After several unsuccessful attempts to book a time that worked with both the weather and our schedules, today I finally succeeded in taking my lovely Wife Mel for our first flight!

The wind has been awful for several days in a row now, and I was quite frankly getting sick of it.  Gusty, unpredictable, even gale force!  Ugh!  Today was a different story.  I noticed that it was much more stable, and at 13 knots without much gustiness (if that's even a word?) earlier today - sent a message to Mel to meet me at the hangar.  She agreed, poor dear!  :-)

I headed straight from work to the hangar and jumped straight into the daily preflight checks.  I made sure I didn't dilly-dally, but also I made sure I didn't miss anything either - the stakes are now higher than just solo.  My passenger is relying on me to be on the ball from the get-go.  As if perfectly timed, Mel arrived at the hangar and we walked out to the ready-and-waiting Jabiru.

I gave her a quick safety brief regarding moving in the area of aircraft, and also safety inside the cockpit.  Manny had asked me to put some Avgas into the Jabiru, so we taxied over to the bowser and filled it up.  I talked Mel through what we'd do and did the run-up.  She was cool, calm and collected.

Because it was the last session of the day, I wanted to keep the flight brief - more of a ceremonial flight than a huge scenic one.  The cloud was overcast at 3300 feet AMSL, and that reached right to the horizon, so I knew it would start getting hard to see fairly soon.  I elected to do one circuit, but make it my best ever.

We taxied over to runway 23.  On our way there, as we were taxiing down runway 36 Mel asked "Should be going faster?"  I smiled.  She got me there - we were in fact on a runway, but I explained that we were just taxiing at this stage.

Lining up on 23, one last check: "You all good?  Ready to go?"

"Yep!"


Full power.  Let's go!

We took off and completed one circuit.  It was quite smooth the whole way around.  I told Mel about reducing the throttle during the Base and Final legs.  I've heard horror stories of new passengers freaking out thinking that the pilot has switched off the engine.  I didn't think that Mel would worry, but it was in the back of my mind.  Turns out that she didn't worry much at all.

The only thing that she didn't like too much was when I rocked the wings slightly to check for traffic under them.  Because the Jabiru is a high wing, it's something we have to do to be sure the coast is clear.  The first time I did it Mel shot me a What was that? look.  I explained what it was for.  She was fine with it for the next few turns.  Manny and I had done it so many times, I didn't even think about it.  Now that I do, I guess it would be unusual for the uninitiated!

We landed, rolled to the end of the runway and taxied back to the hangar.  Plenty of time before last light and just enough time for a quick arm-length self portrait.

All smiles!

Next time, we'll go out and check out the town and our friend's horse stud.  I'm looking forward to that!