The mission description from Angel Flight was:
SUBSEQUENT TRIP REQUEST: (11th & 12th Angel flights)It has been said that one man's trash in another man's treasure. And so it was when CASA issued an Airworthy Directive on Thursday, that effective from Friday, grounded some aircraft in Australia pending the inspection of the fuel system.A 37 year old lady from Gin Gin has been diagnosed with Breast Cancer. She is required to travel to Toowoomba every 3 weeks to undergo Chemotherapy.
With my aircraft potentially also affected, I called my mechanics early on Friday and got some heartening news; My aircraft is so old that is has a fuel system from another (now defunct?) manufacturer and the directive did not apply.
However, the aircraft of the pilot originally tasked with carrying Jacqueline home from Toowoomba to Bundaberg was affected and could no longer fly.
So when I got an email on Friday from Peta West at Angel Flight, asking for help, I was able to answer that
The weather forecast was pretty rotten for Toowoomba. So much so that I first called Andrew Mladden, who had flown Jacqueline and her husband Dave down to
Toowoomba in the morning. He ensured me that the weather men had again been working on the principle of
"The more clouds we predict, the more we get paid", with scant regard paid to the reality.
Which was to say that he got visible with the airfield from some six miles out and two thousand foot high.
Trusting as I am, I headed off toward Toowoomba full of youthful enthusiasm (well maybe no longer that youthful), only to discover that the weather men had short changed themselves today. The actual cloud cover, according to the automated weather information system at Toowoomba was "Broken at 400 feet, overcast at 1000". Broken does not mean not working but is weather parlance for "more than half the sky is obscured".
This was far worse than anticipated and below the minima for the NDB approach, but seeing that I was there, I decided to give it a try anyway. At the worst I would have to carry out a missed approach, head home and cancel the mission, at best I might get through one of the breaks and get visual.
I pressed on and, turning inbound, found myself in a large patch of clear, with a lower level a little ahead. Steepening the descent a little I was able to maintain visibility, just, and thus managed to somehow find Toowoomba airfield and squeeze the plane's tires onto the runway. Not surprisingly, there were few other movements at Toowoomba.
Having shut down, my passengers were nowhere to be seen. But this was anticipated. Peta had called me well before my departure, setting the whole trip back an hour,
because Jacqueline was being sent from one hospital to another in one of those medical musical chair episodes. So I waited.
Cheerful Earth Angel Jenny Arthur soon turned up with her charges. I hefted their luggage onboard, gave a quick briefing in the drizzle and we shut the doors to keep the wet out. We hit the clouds some 30 seconds after take off at 300' or thereabouts and turned north toward the Kingaroy beacon under the watchful radar guidance of Oakey airbase.
Once I had the autopilot engaged things seemed to settle down a bit. Reaching our cruising altitude of 9,000' we sat in glorious sunshine for the next hour or so.
The descent into Bundaberg had us going through some clouds, but at 2,500' we were clear and had great visibility - until we approached the airfield. A heavy rain shower was approaching from the north east and threatening to engulf the airfield. By doing a circling approach onto the grass runway, slightly favoured by the prevailing wind, we touched down in the dry and then went careening down the turf in very limited visibility, emerging a kilometre later into drizzle (again).
Even though I was able to enjoy the sunshine at 9,000' again, the weather gods were not done with me yet.
As I approached Brisbane, the air traffic controllers diverted me toward Amberley in preparation for an instrument approach as preceding traffic into Archerfield had failed to get visual. From there I got visual just at 4 miles away at a comfortable 900'. The splashdown on the tarmac was an anticlimax.