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I thought I'd be able to take my mind off my troubles by reading a bunch of humorous and/or inciteful post here but there seems to be a paucity of conversation today---what gives? Happy, Frank, Steep, Roland, Plthijnx, Mike, Turbomallard, Chuckar--------HELP!!!!!!!
So I headed to the airport today for the first time in over a week. I'm still not well enough to fly (I'm still getting over a sinus infection that I've had for 12 days now and caused me to cancel my trip to Florida in the Arrow a week ago) but wanted to help out a friend who is finishing up his instrument rating and is slogging through the oral stuff.
He was there when I arrived, along with two CFI friends of mine. They were there, it turned out, to give some girl scouts ground orientation intro stuff on our training airplanes, an activity done with our local Challenger Learning Center. Every 15 minutes or so the groups of four girls would rotate, and we learned they were supposed to ask questions of the CFIs as part of their activity. Being bored and having evil minds, it didn't take long for me and the instrument student to start suggesting questions for the girls to ask. They'd excitedly write them down and head off to the hangar. It was all we could do to not start giggling like a couple of schoolgirls ourselves, picturing the expression on the CFIs' faces as the children started talking. Among the questions we had the girl scouts ask were:
* How does compressibility affect indicated air speed below 300 knots?
* If one spark plug fails in a cylinder, how come that cylinder has a higher EGT than the others?
* What's the minimum vectoring altitude for the approaches for runway 29 here?
* I noticed that the museum's F-14 doesn't have an area-ruled fuselage... how come it didn't suffer from mach airspeed compression problems like the XF-92?
* Did the museum's F-14 have glove vanes when it flew?
* Which parts of the Diamond Star's spar sandwich layers have carbon fiber reinforced plastic?
And so on.
Eventually they got done and the two CFIs stomped back into the lobby. They made a bee line straight for the instrument student and I.
"Which one of you [CENSORED]ing [CENSORED]ers was the one that [CENSORED]ing turned the little girls into [CENSORED]ing aerodynamic engineers and F-14 experts?!?!"
Just goes to show that you don't have to actually fly to have fun at the airport...
TM