I’m getting a bit backlogged in posts so I’ll probably just have to post multiple posts at once. Without much further ado, day two.

Our second flight day was started off with us having much greater respect for the weather. We were now even more aware of how fickle it can be and how quickly it can change. We started off the flight in very hazy but VFR conditions and were soon making our way southeast. We got a few fields done before some clouds started building on the horizon. When they got to the point where we were getting concerned, we quickly landed and had a look at the weather. Our checking revealed that we were possibly just being paranoid as the storm was still about 30 miles away (which makes me wonder if that was even what we were seeing considering the level of haziness) and was not actually that severe. In the end it wound up dissipating before it actually reached us. There was some bad weather over in the south towards St. Louis but we weren’t expecting it to get this far north. Having confirmed that we were safe we took to the skies again.

Once airborne we started taking pictures again, ever so often having to dodge rain clouds with moderate precipitation. These things would just appear out of nowhere and start dumping rain … all within a very short period of time. And following my newly confirmed motto of “Rain = Thunderstorms” I would proceed to move as far away as practical. Pretty soon we were getting towards the end of our operational fuel. After kicking ourselves for not getting fuel at that airport we landed at to check on the weather (it was pretty cheap), we started looking for somewhere to fuel up. I use Garmin Pilot on my Nexus 7 so I pulled up the fuel price layer and lo and behold there was an airport right next to us with fairly inexpensive fuel. As I was turning final for this airport I noticed a few interesting things. It was the proud owner of what had to be the worst runway I had ever seen. It was paved … I guess … the edges were jagged and had grass growing through it. In all honesty it looked like a grass runway with a concrete centerline. But it was smooth and had no debris so we continued the approach and landed. This was where the fun began. So we taxi up to the pumps and get out to fuel … but there is nowhere to put a credit card. We go in the building to see if we can pay inside… although there was a vehicle out front, the place looked like no one had been there in at least a few days. After looking around for anyone, we got back in the plane and left that terrible place. We picked another airport and continued on south.

Now I mentioned earlier that the south was experiencing pretty terrible weather but we weren’t expecting it to get very far north. However about 20 miles away from our airport, we started seeing very heavy rain on the horizon. It was pretty much the most ominous thing I’d seen while flying in quite some time (Only being topped by a thunderstorm with cloud to cloud lightning … at night. Luckily that time I was in an airliner and didn’t have to worry about doing the flying). Unfortunately we needed fuel and we weren’t about to turn around. Worst case scenario was that we’d make it there, but we’d get stuck due to weather for hours. Not content to let that happen we kicked everything into over drive and raced over to the airport. Like true professionals, the time we spent on the ground from touchdown to wheels up couldn’t have been more than 20 minutes. A time that could have been even shorter if there wasn’t a guy filling containers with avgas at the pumps. With 6 hours fuel on board we got out of that airport and went north as fast as 160HP could take us. We spent the rest of the day battle cloud layers and fighting to maintain VFR minimums all while trying to stay high enough to take pictures. At the end of the day we’d been flying for just over 7 hours and working for about 11.

ACHIEVEMENT GET!!!

New Achievements Unlocked:

• Duty Day Noob (Longest time spent flying increased to 7.03 hours)
• Restless Leg Syndrome (Longest time spent airborne increased to 4:21 )
• “How’s the weather down there” (Dodging weather on an almost continual basis)
• “Well that was fast” (Personal ground turn around record of 20 minutes … GPS track confirmed)