The mission descriptions from Angel Flight were:
Mission 2644 - INITIAL TRIP REQUEST:I had just submitted a bid for Mission 2644 when I received email notification of Mission 2657. Seeing that travelling to Tambo normally does entail a landing at Roma for fuel, I also bid for 2657, allowing us to combine the two missions.A 78 year old lady from Roma has multiple tumours, one specifically in the adrenal gland. She requires speciality reviews in Brisbane with an oncologist at the PA Hospital to assess her fitness for surgery.
Road travel is very long and taxing for her in this state.
Mission 2657 - SUBSEQUENT TRIP REQUEST:A lady from Tambo who is on a pension is required to attend hospital in Toowoomba on a monthly basis for treatment of breast cancer.
The frequency of travel is prohibitively expensive and the distance exhausting for her so an Angel Flight will ease some of the strain at this time.
Earth Angel Gary Baguley was very efficient, dropping off Shirley and her daughter Heather a good 40 minutes before scheduled departure. With me having arrived
early too, we were able to get away about 20 minutes early.
Shirley and Heather seemed to enjoy their time in the back I climbed to 10,000' for the one and a half hour trip to Roma.
Conditions were mostly fine with scattered cumulus cloud about. As we got closer to we had to skirt some of the bigger ones, but we managed to have a reasonably smooth flight.
Because I had to refuel at Roma, I pulled up outside the bowser instead of the terminal building. This meant that Heather and Shirley's lift had to come an extra
100 or so meters from where they were expected.
Shirley was going to wait in the shade of a tree for her lift to arrive. Realising that she was none too firm on her pegs, I 'borrowed' a chair from the nearby aero club verandah, and left her thus installed on her throne, while I busied myself with pumping some 94 litres of AvGas on board.
I managed to get away before the Qantas Link Dash-8, that had arrived while I was refueling. I climbed to 10,000' again, and spent the next hour or so dodging more clouds on the way to Tambo, where I arrived a little before the schedule departure time, only to find my passengers to be absent.
Consulting my briefing papers I managed to extract Jennifer and Neil's phone number and they promised to come out to the airfield soon.
So with about a half hour's delay we headed back east at 9,000' where we again were dodging the odd cloud or two. I eventually climbed another 1,000', which put us just above the stratum of cumulus, allowing us to 'cloud surf', occasionally dipping into the top of the layer.
About two and a half hours later, with a Royal Flying Doctor King Air hot on our tail, we descended into Toowoomba for a straight in approach on runway 11, alighting about 2 minutes before the doctor.
Earth Angel David Nugent was already waiting for us.
The twenty odd minute flight to Archerfield, flown at only 5,000' and in the clear, was a joy. I elected to leave the autopilot switched off and handflew the aircraft
all the way, keeping a watch out for the surprisingly active traffic at Amberley: Two F111 doing practice circuits passed underneath me as I crossed the extended
runway centre line, and various other aircraft were also milling around the area.
I landed back at Archerfield at 5:00pm, satisfied at having completed two missions in one day.