(August 5th) In harsh environments its funny how things work…. or not.
Today was going to very hot (over a 100F) and of course “Blue”. The north winds had laid down, the fire on Dyer hill was out or at least in mop up. In addition, winds where shifting from the south so any smoke from the Dyer hill fire would stay north. Randy had joined us and it was Mia’s turn to fly so I agreed to tow.
At 1pm, Mia was first up taking a very soft tow (hardly any lift) finally pinning off well south of the gravel quarry. Lift was broken and she had to work for it. It was soon pretty obvious she had a problem, she stopped receiving (or at least hearing anything). She did a few blind transmission but she soon figured out something was wrong. The “funny” part, we did several radio tests and everything seemed perfect on the ground. Of course Mia has a talent with electronics… they seem to simply die in her hands… now it would be up to her ground electrical support team to solve the “problem” (….. that would be me).
Despite the radio “glitch” Mia decided to stick to the planned flight down to Dry Falls (same route that Randy was going to take) . After Randy got into the air a tow that was the complete opposite of Mia’s, with strong lift and a high tow position (and with working radio), we were able to “get a visual” on Mia frequently enough to keep track. Besides, Mia was also flying with her Spot GPS tracker so she was not going to go missing (as long as she did not put one of her electrical curses on it?). When I back tracked into Mansfield with the tow rig and picked up the air conditioned Suzuki I did a quick check of the Spot web page and yes, the Spot was tracking, putting Mia in Saint Andrews and heading south. Well doing the vehicle exchange, we did get a blind transmission from Mia indicating she was in Saint Andrews at 6000ft asl and climbing.
As I left Mansfield to head out on chase, I looked out to the West and sure enough we had another fire starting. At first it looked like a relight of the Dyer Hill fire but turns out it was north of Chelan Airport (and it looked pretty big!)
(Antoine 2 Fire, probably weeks worth of poking and prodding for the local fire fighting industry)
Caught up with Randy in Saint Andrews. He was heading south whining about the slow climbs and not getting high…. oh boo-hoo… life is hard.
It took a while but eventually I spotted both Mia and Randy in the air over Highway 2…. looked like Mia was turning around and heading for home. Randy was sticking with the plan and continued to the West to Farmer (so I followed Randy knowing Mia had enough altitude to get at least close to home). Randy made Farmer but landed short of Mansfield on the return leg. Mia made it back to the tow site then back to the house in Mansfield. After picking up Randy we arrived back in Mansfield to help Mia breakdown on the front lawn, then it was off to Park lake to cool everybody off. Hard scratchy day but both pilots where happy. (oh, and Mia’s Radio?… working perfectly when tested on the ground… minor fray in the headset wire so I guess I should replace it)
Mia's 3.4hr 71km OR and Randy's 3.1 hour 67km "almost" OR
(August 6th) A no fly day, thick cloud from the fire was hanging around to the west and some sort of upper disturbance threatening minor thunderstorms so its off to Summer Falls for some R+R. Was reading Nicole's Blog about the PG nats in Pemberton, Day 1: 4 pilots crashed in trees and 3 parachute deployments…. yikes, wonder how the PR department can spin that bit of news?
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