Cool air and another new passenger

Plane: Cessna 150
Route: 40I, Local
Weather: High clouds, 61 degrees, wind 330 degrees at 6 knots

A vendor that I work with is down in Dayton at our office for a few days. He's a nice guy that I exchange aviation-related emails and phone calls with from time to time so I had a feeling he might want to go flying. After we finished up at the office a little past five, I asked the question and he said he'd love to go up. One quick phone call to Stewart reserved the 150 for an hour and we were on our way to Waynesville.

A slightly modified sightseeing route is what we flew this evening

The plane checked out clean in the preflight so we climbed in and I started the engine. Climbout was slightly anemic given the colder temperatures but all the gauges were in the right place and I headed straight out towards the lake. We then flew north by my office so I could show it to Jim from the air and also passed over The Greene enroute.

I flew us over top of Wright Brothers on the way back and then attempted to find the neat corn maze I've flown over at least two distinct times. No luck was had and in reviewing the GPS track back home I realized that it's located about 3 miles further East than I thought. So with the sun beginning to set behind us, I showed Jim what a forward slip was like to quickly drop 1,000 feet and enter the pattern at Stewart.

Electing to make a simulated engine-out approach, I pulled the throttle to idle abeam the numbers and gently turned back to the runway while gradually adding in flaps until they were at the full 40 degrees. I intended to land long but when we were near the halfway point of the runway and still 50-100 feet in the air I knew things weren't going to work. In with full power, lots of forward pressure on the yoke, and a gradual retraction of the flaps to 20 degrees and then all the way up when in an established climb. There's nothing wrong with a go-around! I then made a standard approach and landed long so that we essentially finished our rollout just as we reached the tiedowns.

It was a beautiful sunset - even with the bug splat!

Jim had a great time and I'm really glad I had a chance to take yet another new (to me) passenger up. The fall air has definitely arrived and it looks like we'll have some great fall colors here in a couple more weeks. That is unless the serious drought of the past few months causes the leaves to simply fall off. Either way, my favorite month of the year to fly is finally here!

Flight Track: Google Earth KMZ File
Today's Flight: 0.8 hours
Total Time: 176.9 hours