Oh Brother
Copyright© 2016 by Old Man with a Pen
Chapter 7
The trip back to Knoxville was, by far, less friendly than the trip up to WillowRun. This time I had to do all the work. Crawling around a twin engined aircraft while the instructor hollers out the instructions read from a placard is not my idea of a good time. Especially when said pilot is lounging on a chair.
“One hundred feet doesn’t sound like much ... but you should see what 100 feet looks like to a watermelon,” Joe Pilot said.
So ... in the irregular course of events (My life lately.) a sheet of lexan was placed over a shallow crate. A GoPro camera was placed in the box. A second camera was attached to a ladder. The box was placed next to a ten story building and a reasonably good sized watermelon was dropped from the roof. (Not necessarily in that order.)
SPLAT
Viewed from a computer screen in slow-motion, the fall was pretty spectacular. A millisecond before the melon touched, the shadow was HUGE. The point of impact compressed the watermelon rind until the volume of water exceeded the ability of the rind to sustain the pressure. The picture from the second camera illustrated the split of the rind.
Watermelon everywhere.
“That’s just one hundred feet. The FAA requires a minimum altitude of ten times that. If it breaks up there... ?”
The instruction continued ... I was much more interested.
Now that I knew that the half-circle grab-bar wasn’t a secure place to grab ... and the futility of grabbing it ... I settled down and flew. Joe Pilot realized that, take off, I could; fly straight and level, I could; landing was his job ... and would be ... if I continued with lessons.
There was no one waiting at Downtown. I caged a ride with a bus and stepped in my door 10 days after I had left. The wife was sitting at the computer ... in the same place she was sitting when I left.
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