The mission description from Angel Flight was:
INITIAL TRIP REQUEST:On the night before I was taking my parents, who had spent a few days in Brisbane with their grandchildren, back to their home near Taree. A week before I had checked the Angel Flight web site to see whether there were any missions that I could combine with this trip.A six year old girl from Guyra was born with Spina Bifida and Williams Syndrome along with some other medical/developmental challenges. She has Club Feet and no rotation in her hips. She can walk, steps may prove to be an issue.
Her regular trips to Sydney for medical treatment have involved a full day's journey by train each way for the whole family. She has 4 siblings, including a newborn.
The cost and time of train travel has intensified the challenges of attending necessary treatment & assessments. Travel provided by Angel Flight will ease a huge financial burden the family struggles to cope with, and will enable the parents to just take the newborn as care can be provided for the other siblings at home.
This mission was still open, so I ran Jaye at Angel Flight to offer my services. Jaye, not being backward, not only immediately put my name down for it, but further shanghaied me into also accepting Mission 599 which needed to be flown on the afternoon of the same day from from Bankstown to Narrabri (half way back up to Brisbane). So I would 'piggyback' that mission onto this one.
Having to kill some time between the arrival of this mission and the departure of the next, I then managed to also arrange a business meeting in Sydney. Thus I would not miss out on doing work for the day.
I had to get up at 6:00 in the morning in order to complete the flight planning, have breakfast and then be chauffeured to Taree airport by my father.
With a cup of strong coffee kick starting my metabolism, we were soon at the airfield, untying the aircraft and doing the daily preflight inspection.
I was airborne just before 8:00am, heading across the Great Dividing Range toward Armidale. The weather was picture perfect with just enough cumulus clouds around to give the sky some character, but not enough to make it threatening.
I arrived some 40 minutes later at Armidale and, having prepared the cabin for my passengers, started looking for same.
I found Bieanka, her mum Louise, dad Warren and
her little 2 month old brother Patrick waiting inside the Armidale air terminal. Moving from airside into the terminal building had been easy, but again the efforts of the
local security experts had us stumped as I tried to take them back to the aircraft. The door through which I had entered the terminal was a 'one way' door, not having a handle
on the inside of the building. The gate on the departure side, had a combination lock on it, which did not open. The code for that lock was not published in the relevant
documentation. Since the daily flight had departed some 15 minutes prior to my arrival there was no-one available to tell us the code.
So I had to do a high jump over the 5' fence, walk around to the arrivals gate, open, and hold open, the door for my passengers so that they could make their way toward the aircraft. If they were not impressed by my organisation, they at least should have been impressed by my athleticism.
I quickly put the bags and Bieanka's wheelchair into the luggage compartment. Giving the the safety briefing to the first time flyers seemed to do little to allay their apprehensions.
Bieanka occupied the left back seat with Louise, cradling young Patrick, next to her. The ugly fellas, Warren and I, made up the front row.
We got airborne right on time at 9:00am and climbed to our cruising altitude of 9,000'. With 150l of AvGas having already consumed on the way to Armidale via Taree,
and the temperatures being low, the climb was reasonably quick and, for once, the winds were with us, giving us a gentle push of 5kts.
The flight proceeded smoothly until after we had passed Richmond and were descending toward Bankstown, where the temperature was already 28°C and considerable convective turbulence had built up. Louise looked a little worse for wear, but managed to keep the contents of her stomach contained within same.
With a little turbulence on short final I managed to do an arrival of sorts, and taxied to the air terminal.
Having arrived 30 minutes earlier than anticipated, the Earth Angel was nowhere to be seen, but a phone call established that he should be arriving in the next 10 to 15 minutes. I was attending to the refuelling of the aircraft when the Earth Angel arrived and took the family to their accommodation at the hospital.
I then had to move the aircraft to the general parking area (staying for more than 1 hour, I was denied parking outside the terminal building), tie it down and met my buisness contact who had come out to meet me.