Red hot and glowing.

The idea was that I would at long last take dad’s plane (fondly known as “Chip” since, as my dad joked, you needed to be careful walking around it lest you get a chip of paint in your eye) up in the air and get in at least three take-offs and landings. In order to take up passengers, I needed to have done that in a single-engine-land airplane within the previous 90 days, and, sadly, I hadn’t.

One reason for my failure to do this (besides lackluster devotion to aviation, I admit) was that nearly every time we attempted to go up, Chip had a maintenance issue that kept us grounded.

Things were looking well; I pre-flighted it and everything looked OK. The tanks were topped off with fuel, and soon we had clearance from ground to start the taxi.

Sure.

It was a windy day, to be sure, but I was really bothered by the fact that I had the left rudder mashed to the floor and still finding the airplane veering hard right. I imagine Mark thought his former student was really out of practice and perhaps a questioning my lack of ability to even taxi on the yellow line, but I could not, for the life of me, get it to go straight without incredible effort. I was practically lying down in the seat to work the left rudder down. Finally, I caved; I could not figure it out and was thinking this was no way to start a flight.

“Is there something wrong here?” I asked. “I have the left rudder to the floor and it keeps going right.”

He thought maybe it was the wind, and he took the controls. It wasn’t long, though, before he was finding the same difficulty. I was looking out my window down at the left tire, and I saw him do the same.

“Oh, we have to go back,” he said. “We won’t be flying today.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked, highly annoyed since, yet again, the airplane refused to let me get off of the ground.

“The right brake is stuck. It’s glowing bright red and shooting off sparks.”

I contacted ground and told them I had to return to the ramp, which we did. We were lucky, I was informed, that the tire didn’t burst into flame and let us have a little barbecue out there on the taxiway.

In the end, we used a different plane so that I could get my landings in and so that we could take photos of an event that had been requested.

I dreaded calling dad; yet again, Chip was going to be heading into maintenance. I described the day to dad, and after expressing his frustration as only he could, went on with instructions.

“Tell them in maintenance to just take off the wings and work on the engine so it cooled better so that at least you could drive it down the road.”

That seems a little severe.

I do hope it gets fixed by this Friday and that all of the things going bad will have worked themselves out by then as well. I have a little trip scheduled in which I will be tasting the roller coasters at Valley Fair, and Chip is going to be our transportation there.

Theoretically.