The mission descriptions from Angel Flight was:
SUBSEQUENT FLIGHT REQUEST:I had previously carried Kayla on Mission 224 in December 2004, Mission 668 in November 2005 and Missions 975 and 1013 in May and 1038 in June and 1148 in August 2006sixteen year old girl from Chinchilla who had a failed kidney transplant and is now back on home dialysis. However she still needs to receive medical treatment at the PA Hospital?s Dialysis Unit (Brisbane) three times per week.
Angel Flight will assist the family and fly this young girl and grandmother twice per week while she makes the lengthy trip via road with her mother once per week.
Kayla and her gran Pam arrived half an hour early, as I was still in the process of doing the daily pre-flight inspection, so they had to wait a few minutes. Normally Kayla and Pam like to sit in the back, reading a book or doing a Sudoku and don't even want to wear headsets. So, during boarding, with Pam already stepping in, I was a little surprised to hear that Kayla wanted to sit up front with headsets on. To my comment "I will have to move the bag to the back then" (meaning my flight bad that was occupying the passenger foot well), Pam responded "All right, all right, I am getting in the back". Her words, not mine!
So with Kayla watching my every move in the front and the bags in the back, we got away 15 minutes early at 3:15. As we climbed to 8,000' on our way west we passed through a few layers of cloud. But all the way to Oakey I could glimpse the ground occasionally. After that it started to get very solid, gray, gray and more gray.
I started the descent into Chinchilla as planned and found myself visual with the ground at about 700' to 1,000' above the ground as we approached the town. The road from Dalby serving as a great navigation aid. But initially I could not see the airstrip. Kayla spotted it first only half a mile off the left. But the positioning of the aircraft, combined with my altitude did not permit a landing. So I circled around in what little clear airspace there was, but on turning back toward the field, it had disappeared right under a solid downpour.
I tired three more times, circling around, trying to sight the airfield, but it was to no avail. With daylight starting to fade in the late afternoon gloom, I decided to head back east to Oakey, where we at least had an ILS instrument approach that could guide us to the ground.
Kayla and Pam, having been in this position before took this decision in their stride. Pam called her husband to ask him to pick them up from Oakey in the car, and Kayla, who has acquired her own log book, where she keeps track of her flights, learnt a lesson: Don't fill out the log book until you are on the ground - for as I turned east she was crossing out Chinchilla and putting Oakey in the logbook.
So about half an hour later, now in the dark, I entered the holding pattern at Brymaroo and commenced the ILS into Oakey. The weather here, while raining was not as bad as it had been at Chinchilla, I could make out the VASI from 8 miles out, and we touched down a few minutes later.
However, the weather was not as bad as anticipated, and from Amberley I proceeded in visual conditions to Archerfield, being the last aircraft to touch down before the tower closed for the night at 6:00pm sharp.