Last day of filming in beautiful North Carolina this morning and it couldn’t have been nicer. Sunny, 80 degrees and light winds, perfect flying weather. Of course the professional weather guessers looked into their muddy crystal balls and predicted the exact opposite, but I digress. Today’s mission was to film ground to air footage. I’d be solo today because SG had finished her final interview yesterday and had jumped on the first plane back to collage having missed the first three days of the new semester, she was really happy about that. The cameraman positioned himself at various positions on and around the runway and I would fly takeoff and land in front of him, fly past him and generally make a nuisance of myself for any local traffic. One of the shots we got was an overhead landing shot where the cameraman stands on the end of the runway and I see just how close I can get to him without cutting his head off with my propeller. He has his back to me as I come in and just has to trust me on this maneuver, apparently he wasn’t counting beers last evening. It’s a dangerous shot because if I miscalculate my approach by just a few feet I could hit the cameraman and his camera, and I’m sure I’d have to pay for the camera.
We finished up, landed and I went inside the FBO to check the weather for the flight back to Greensboro NC where I was to drop off the plane back off for the owner and catch a flight back home to Wisconsin. The FBO was just the kind of airport office/flight school building I love the most. The walls were covered with pictures of airplanes, pilots and memorabilia. It even had a couch with an old Chocolate Lab laying on it’s back inviting a belly rub. In my opinion no airport is complete without an airport dog. Howie the owner and airport manager was a great guy who as it turns out was the only man to fly on Air Force One with five presidents. As the chief steward for these powerful men he had a ton of pictures and stories to share with anybody who would listen, and boy did he like to share! As a parting gift Howie gave me a golf ball with the presidential seal on it. “You can’t buy these anywhere.” Howie proudly said as he handed the ball to me. Howie was pretty proud of his balls. I pulled up the weather on the computer and thought “Oh goody!” I thought as I found out that Greensboro had low ceilings, visibility, moderate turbulence and rain. The cameraman decided that he wanted to fly with me to Greensboro to catch a flight home despite my warnings that this flight might be a doozy so off we went. Almost immediately my non-pilot co-pilot regretted his decision. The weather was as bad as advertised and it wasn’t long before I was scrounging behind my seat for something to catch anything that might come forth from the green man in the right seat. I found a Santa hat, don’t ask, and lined it with a plastic bag and handed it over. I really hoped he wouldn’t puke because there was a difficult instrument in my future and if I smelled puke in the enclosed cockpit I would probably puke as well, not fun when you’re trying to land in heavy rain. But I got lucky, the cameraman held it together and even though it was one of the more challenging approaches I’d flown, very windy, bumpy and low the runway lights finally appeared out of the gloom and I was done. Thus ended my Bonanza flight from Uruguay to North Carolina. SG had been a great co-pilot and I think we’d grown closer over the two weeks and she’d become a lot more independent. And you can’t ask for more than that.
