Mission 2209 - Toowoomba to Tambo

Background

On Tuesday the 4^th of September 2007 I flew Mission 2209, making it my 70^th Angel Flight.

The mission descriptions from Angel Flight was:

SUBSEQUENT TRIP REQUEST: (14^th Angel Flight)
A 46 year old lady from Tambo needs to attend Toowoomba Hospital for Chemotherapy every 3 weeks and because of a long and arduous journey an Angel Flight will alleviate some of the stress experienced.

I had previously carried Wendy on

Mission 1314 in September (her maiden flight),
Mission 1430 in November of last year,
Mission 1610 in February, and
Mission 1775 in June this year.

This time I would be taking them home again, with the first stop Toowoomba to for the pick up, thence Tambo to drop them off. After that, down to Roma for a re-fuel, then home to Archerfield.

Leg 1: Archerfield to Toowoomba

The twenty odd minute flight over the ranges into Toowoomba was uneventful.

Waiting for me at the terminal area, however were Wendy and Peter, as well as Earth Angel Kirsty McLean.

And Wendy was bearing gifts. Both Kirsty and I were the lucky recipients of a bag with some fancy chocolates inside - apparently Wendy had two 'door prizes' and we were the only ones to show up.

Leg 2: Toowoomba to Tambo

Having carefully stowed my chocolates and thrown Peter and Wendy aboard, we got away a little earlier than our planned 1:30pm departure and headed west via Oakey and Roma before veering slightly north toward Tambo.

We spend a great part of the trip in cloud, and about half way had to descend from our original 10,000' to 8,000' as we were picking up a little ice.

Both Peter and Wendy nodded off a couple of times. Later on they got a bit of a shock; Peter, turned around and pointed at Wendy, saying, "Oh, she's finally woken up!". To this I replied, "And so were you about 10 minutes ago, when I woke up" It did not take them too long to recover.

We were still in and out of cloud as we started our descent, but at about 4,000' and 20 odd miles out we were visual. The landing with a slight crosswind produced the normal squealing of the stall warning, the protestation of the tires and the groaning of the undercarriage.

Leg 3: Tambo to Roma

The local ambulance with Rosie aboard arrived to pick up Peter and Wendy as I finished my business in the terminal building - so without further ado I climbed into my trusty steed, actually managed to raise Flight Watch on the HF radio and blasted back toward Roma.

I again spent a fair bit of time in the clouds and approached Roma in slight drizzle - here I added some 142 litres to the fuel tanks to make sure they wouldn't quite run dry on the way home.

Leg 4: Roma to Archerfield

I took off a few minutes before sunset and thus spent most of the time in the dark clouds, eventually just getting clear of them at about 3,000' overhead Amberley.

From there I affected another manoeuvre that shall go down in the log book as a landing.

Summary

I was back on the ground in Archerfield after having

spent 6 hours and 18 minutes in the air and taxiing
consumed 336 litres of AvGas,
completed 4 take-offs and landings
covered 862 nm, 923 sm or 1,485 km