Catching up

I certainly have a lot of catching up to do -3 weeks without a post. These 3 weeks have been really busy.

I went flying a couple of times and was on stand-by a couple of more days. We got called out around 19:00 on Monday the 2oth for an ELT signal in what turned out to be a no-notice exercise. The senario was an ELT signal around the Lost Bridge area at the lake. We had a full a/c crew with Col Cherry as PIC, me as observer, and Craig Heinze as scanner. We realized it was a practice when we were given the practice channel to set the DF to. It was a beautiful evening for flying but we had no joy finding the signal. We finally resorted to looking for Max's red truck in the heavy foilage - no luck there either. The ground team turned out about 7 people and they also had a rough time of it. Max set off a couple of road flares to help them find him but the GT thought they were seeing someone setting off fireworks.

We finally found that the problem was loose wires in the practice ELT. The antenna on the van was also loose. Max got those fixed before they took off for the SAREX in Texarkana. We did several take offs and landings, Dennis saw 3 coyotes on the taxiway turn-off on our first touch and go so I got the camera and had Craig try to get pictures the next couple of times we landed. No luck.

I'm tired - am going to bed. More later.