Wings For Mom

[Bill Greenwood]

Tomorrow is Mothers Day, and some folks might be a hit if they got her a flight in something fun, perhaps a glider in the morning when it is cool and smooth.

But there is one "wings" offer that I just read about that might get you cut out of Mom's will.

Hooters is offering a free lunch, limited to $10, for any Mom who comes in with their son or daughter.

To really make the most impact, go buy a $20,000 Harley and offer to give Mom a ride on it over to the local Hooters. This will really have the maximum effect if Mom is actually the Mother in law.

Some trips are better not to take.

[Floatsflyer]

Many years ago I flew my Mom for lunch to a large hotel in the country that had its own grass airstrip. It was configured in such a way that I could taxi off the strip directly onto the hotel parking lot. I continued on the pavement right to the hotel front door where I shut it down. My mother loved it and loved the looks she was getting from guests coming and going through the entrance way as we got out of the plane. To this day that was the coolest thing I've ever done in a land plane and remains a wonderful memory of time spent with my Mom. Lunch was pretty good too and we had quite the audience as we taxied for takeoff.

[Joe LaMantia]

Well my Mom was not a flyer, the only flight I can remember her taking was in an airliner on a retirement vacation with my Dad. She was born in 1920 and grew up in the days when engine failures and crashes were common place, she didn't like it if I mentioned that I had flown anywhere. Even in her later years when I would fly back to Wisconsin to see her she would tell me to drive not fly. My Dad on the other hand did like to fly and I remember taking him up to the "Twin Cities" to visit my sister. Even though he had a lot medical problems the flight took his mind off that and he had a good time. My Dad died in 2006, two weeks after his 90th birthday, Mom passed away this past November, two weeks after her 92nd birthday. These days I enjoy flying my grandchildren and remembering all the good times I had thanks to my parents!

Joe
:cool:

[Bill Greenwood]

I was having lunch at LMO, the Longmont airport on Sun. and there was a lady eating with her family. She was 90 and using a walker, but they said when she was 80 she went for a birthday glider flight and she loves to come to the airport and see the planes.

We have had great late season snow in Colo and one or two of the ski areas way up in the mountains have stayed open. At A-basin, on closing day Sun, there was a lady on tv, who was 100 and was skiing. Now she wasn't exactly speeding down the hill, but she was out there on her own legs going a bit.

[Hal Bryan]

I was very lucky that my mom got to fly with me once (as PIC, that is - we'd flown together in the family airplane many times over the years) before she passed away unexpectedly at a terribly young age.

Many years later, I took my mother-in-law flying for Mother's Day, which ended up being one of the shortest flights in my logbook. As she put it "I loved it! I just loved it so much that I got too excited and started throwing up..."

[Frank Giger]

I plan on taking my Mom up the last week of the month when she comes to visit. I'll be prepared for any motion sickness by handing her a Hefty garbage bag and daring her to fill it up as part of the passenger briefing.

;)

[Janet Davidson]

Frank,

Try offering her a travel sickness pill the night before the flight. That way she sleeps off any drowsiness & the anti-nausea stuff should still be doing its job so gets to concentrate on enjoying the flight. Have fun :)

[Frank Giger]

Naw, she's astronaut material when it comes to motion sickness....she'll think it's a hilarious joke. In fact I had to warn her that it will be a very conservative flight profile after she said she'd always "wanted to be on a loop."

The wife, OTOH, is a wonderous puke-o-matic machine that has to be witnessed to appreciate. The cure? Roughly a tablespoon of ginger an hour before flight. Better than motion sickness pills!

[Bill Greenwood]

Airsickness is no laughing matter for the person suffering. Any pilot should think about it before hand and plan the flight to minimize discomfort.
Normally it is best to go at 8 am when it is cool and smooth, and NOT in the middle of a 100 degree afternoon in Texas.
And it is not a matter of the passenger not being macho or tough enough, even Bob Hoover said he gets woozy when riding with another pilot in acro.

Mark Twain said that seasickness was the worst of all diseases since all the others might kill you, but seasickness could make you wish you were dead.
There was a famous English lady who took a ship to South Africa about 1800 for what should have been a vacation. It was so rough and she was so miserable that she never went back home, rather than get on a ship again, she spent the rest of her life in Capetown.

I have only had 2 people get sick riding with me. One was my youngest Son David when he was about 10 on a flight from Colo to Austin. He got sick several times even if it was not very bumpy, it was pretty warm near the ground. When he finally got sick again just waling across the parking lot of the hotel in Austin, we knew it was not airsickness and went to a doctor where we found out he had a stomach virus, which got better in a few days.

The other was a guy named Rick, who was not a pilot, but a real enthusiast. He was a volunteer who drove the shuttle van for our group each year at Oshkosh. We used to do a lunch fly out from Osh the 90 miles south to the Lake Lawn resort, so one year I asked Rick to fly down with me. He was all smiles and brought his camera. There were lots of other planes to see en route and we flew some formation. He was happier than a cop in a donut shop. We did a low pass or two and I asked him if he was ready to land. He said no, that he would really like to do some more. So we did another low pass, and roll or two and a tight turn to downwind. When I asked if he was ok, there was no answer on the intercom. Finally he came on and said, "I am not doing too good." So I made a gentle pattern and landed. Turns out on the last passes he had be trying to look through the camera as we banked and pulled a few gs. Sickness hit him suddenly, but instead of making a mess in the plane, he pulled out he flight suit collar over his mouth. He never had time to tell me he was having a problem and I was too busy flying to think about it.
What a great and considerate guy. He recovered pretty well and after lunch we flew back to Oshkosh very gently.

Those trips to Lake Lawn were great fun, and I miss them. The first year I went, 1984, we had a serious preflight briefing so as not to go too low since apparently the previous year one of the famous California pilots, ( no, not Steve or Tiger or Fred or Tom ) was said to have taken a tall c b type whip antenna off of the top of a pickup truck.
I certainly never heard any word from any of the public who came out to watch the arrivals or the management at the resort or airport as to us ever being too low or too fast. Fortunaly, some days someone is watching over you and we never had a midair or even a landing accident, but a heck of a lot of fun.

In those days most pilots didn't think you needed an IFR flight plan for a 90 mile trip in good weather or a control tower to land, so it worked out just fine.

[Floatsflyer]

Airsickness is no laughing matter for the person suffering. Any pilot should think about it before hand and plan the flight to minimize discomfort.

Wow...from Moms to barfing stories. This is quite the hijack but I'll bite.

I made the fatal error in allowing my better judgement to be compromised by a good friend and his 8 month pregnant wife. She said she'd be fine, the husband said she'd be fine. I took them up. For an hour everything was fine but on final for landing she threw up horribly in the back seat. As soon as I received the wiff, I had to do everything in my power to to prevent gagging and concentrate on getting on the runway. Even in high speed taxi mode, I couldn't get out quick enough.

I made the husband/friend clean up the mess. His wife was contrite, couldn't stop saying how sorry she was. I did not win a convert to GA that day but I was sure happy to have gotten out alive.

[Joe LaMantia]

OK, I can really tell some sickening stories from my days as an Air Force Loadmaster in the "Flying Boxcars". We were Tactical Airlift and flew a lot of large formations stuff with 360 overhead approaches. Once on a very windy day we flew a short hop from Mitchell Fld, Milwaukee to Glen View Air Station. We were supposed to pick-up some Special Forces Reserves for a training troop drop, but it was too windy and the mission was scrubbed. A few loadmasters and crew chiefs got a bit air sick on the way down to Glen View and those of us who "had never been air sick" gave them a hard time. We spent about an hour or so at Glen View drinking coffee and eating donuts. The return flight was worse as it was early afternoon and temps were up along with more convective activity. I didn't get sick coming back, we flew so many mission in the back of the plane with only those tiny "portholes" to see out that we got pretty used to the ride. We always did the 360 overhead when returning to base in formation, and each plane would drop gear on the "break" (base leg). One of my jobs was a call on the visual check for the landing gear which required standing up and walking around a bit. Well on that particular approach I started to feel a bit queasy but managed to get through the landing roll-out before using the bag. So I got "taxi sick" that day and can still claim to never have been air sick. Now about the consequences of group barfing. We flew a lot of support missions out of Lawson Army Air Fld at Fort Benning GA. This is "jump school" for paratroops and the flight was only about 6 minutes from takeoff to the "green light" at the drop zone. We always played "games" with the new troopers on the preflight briefing telling them that if anyone used a bag he was supposed to carry it out the door with and drop it on the guy falling below. The worst was to fill a bag with a carton of milk then the "Jumpmaster" or Flight Engineer would grab the bag and fake being sick, the loadmaster would take the bag and drink the milk! This could create a rush on bags!

What the heck have we done to Mothers Day!

Joe
:P