The mission description from Angel Flight was:
SUBSEQUENT FLIGHT REQUEST (81st & 82nd Angel flights).I had previously carried Kayla on Mission 224 in December 2004 and Mission 668 in November 2005 .After a very traumatic series of treatments at the Mater Children's Hospital, doctors have recommended that a 14 year old girl return to Chinchilla to get some normality back in her life.
However she'll have to travel from Chinchilla to Brisbane three times per week for Haemodialysis at the Brisbane PA hospital.
Having been held up by a fuel truck that had sprung a major leak in its fuel tank, I was still in the middle of the daily inspection when Earth Angel Lynette Volkers
arrived with Kayla and her grandmother Pamela. I asked them to stand in the shade of another plane and to avoid the huge puddles of Diesel fuel in front of the plane
while I completed my duties.
We started up just at 3:15pm (bang on time), and I proceeded to fire up the avionics. We heard a little bit of the ATIS (Aerodrome Terminal Information Service - which the tower controllers record onto tape to advise pilots of the duty runway, wind directions etc), when the radio went blank. This is not unusual, for a change in conditions requires the controllers to record a new message and while the message is being recorded there is no transmission. But after 3 minutes it was still blank. Fiddling with all the buttons on the radio and attempting to do some percussive maintenance did not resolve the issue one little bit.
So I had no option but to put the flight on hold, taxi to the avionics shop and get the experts to have a look. Having been roused from his afternoon lunch break, the avionics mechanic walked to the plane, switched on the radio, and, would you believe it, everything worked just fine! Try as we might, we could not make it fail again.
Thus suitably delayed, we finally got airborne about 10 minutes behind schedule. The winds were on the nose, but the sky was largely clear of cloud and turbulence, so the frequent travellers soon either fell asleep or did their crossword puzzles.
Landing at Chinchilla was a little more challenging than usual. The main runway was being re-sealed, leaving only the dirt strip available for landing. This strip is only about half the length of the main runway. So using full flap and being extra careful of the airspeed, I put the wheels on the dirt at the threshold. Due to the badly rutted surface we slowed down in no time.
Pamela and Kayla were glad to be back home in a little over an hour (instead of the three and a half it would have taken by road).
The sun was just starting to head for the horizon behind me, to disappear shortly before my landing at Archerfield at 5:20pm.