SUBSEQUENT TRIP REQUEST: (20th Angel flight)Warren, the boy in question, had previously travelled with me on Mission 612 and Mission 901. The mission had originally been assigned to another pilot who decided, on the basis of the weather forecast that he would not be able to make it with his VFR (Visual Flight Rules) rating.Twelve year Warren from Roma has a complex congenital heart problem. Last year Warren underwent surgery to have a new Pace Maker.
This trip he will have his pacemaker checked and have a cardiac review in Brisbane with specialists.
So, in response to a last minute alert on the morning of the flight, I could not but volunteer my services for this mission.
The weather forecast, when I accepted the mission was for the thunderstorms to have abated by 6:00pm at Roma. So I set a departure time of 5:00pm. However,
on leaving the office at 4pm I got an update of the forecast to discover that the thunderstorm activity was now forecast to persist until midnight - so much for
prudent flight planning.
On the drive out to the airport it did indeed look rather ominous, but it was forecast to be insolated. As I did the pre-flight inspection a few splatters of rain hit the windscreen, so I decided to taxi the aeroplane up to the terminal building to save Warren and his dad Michael a wet walk to my parking spot.
They were dropped off right on time by Earth Angel Sylvia Stares, and I put two small bags in the back before putting Warren in the back seat and Michael in the front next to me. We taxied off and got airborne just before 5pm, turned west and climbed to 8,000'.
The view out the windscreen was pretty good straight up the nose, with the occasional heavy shower either side of our track. Gradually it got a little worse and I had to divert about 5nm north of track to stay clear of the thunderstorms, and in order to better see them, we descended to 6,000'. At one stage we hit the outer edge of one small cell, with the accompanying staccato hammering of rain drops on the windscreen. But we were out of it in a few minutes.
Later on we had to diverge south of track, but by the time we got to Roma it was pretty good.
We touched down on the wet runway at about 6:45. Warren's mum and sister were already waiting to take them home for tucker.
I now turned around and did a text-book departure, out of Roma, which was just as well, for someone was watching. When I got home I had an email in my in-basket from
Graham McKnight who heard me cancel SAR on arrival and waited for my take off. On the right is the shot that
he managed to pull off as I flew over his house soon after turning east for Archerfield.
Graham also downloaded a set of radar images from the Bureau of Meteorology web site covering the period of my flight. While this is only half the picture (I few almost twice as far west), they nonetheless illustrate the conditions encountered.
I managed to completely avoid the thunderstorms (lightning is easy to spot in the dark), touching down at Archerfield at 8:25pm.