A few additions to the “What’s been going on?” post from last time. Less art, more airplanes…

… Miss You, Mad Dog! …

Back in May I went with John on his last trip as captain of the McDonnell Douglas MD-88, lovingly known as the “Mad Dog.” Delta had been planning to retire the fleet at some point, but with covid rendering air travel almost non-existent this spring, they retired early. It made me so sad. This was the plane John was assigned to fly when he first got to Delta, and he loved it because it was so old school: computers didn’t fly it, pilots did. You had to pay attention to the plane, not listen for electronics to tell you what to do. It had cable-and-pulley surface controls and, at over 72 feet from nose to mains, the one of the longest wheelbases of any currently active airline aircraft. In his farewell announcement over the p.a. John even said, “If you want to make an MD-88 captain nervous, ask him or her to turn around on a runway.”

The Mad Dog was quirky, made you a better pilot, and it took a unique personality to enjoy flying it. John was one of those. I’m glad I got to be with him on that trip, as surreal as it was with masks and a practically empty plane. He’s now flying the 737 and it’s fancy and just not the same. And the tail cone won’t fall off if you accidentally pull the lever that looks like the emergency staircase release… sigh.
Miss you, Mad Dog!

… BROKEN TOE …

On that trip, I happened to stub my pinky toe so badly on a hotel room chair that I could not wear my shoe on our flights home. I could barely even walk. I used my spinner suitcase as a rolling cane and after a while couldn’t even do that. John wound up pushing me around in a wheelchair. What fun! A handsome guy in a uniform taking me places. (I could get used to that.) After another week of my toe still hurting, I went to urgent care for x-rays and found out it had a tiny fracture. I got a surgical boot which totally helped and it took a good month and a half to be able to wear a shoe again. It’s the first bone I’ve ever “broken.”

… FLYING …

Last fall, John took the Starfighter apart so that he could strip the paint off, clean and inspect everything, replace worn parts, repaint it, and basically have a new airplane once it went back together. This summer the painting part was mostly finished (there was a lot of infrastructure to construct: a painting booth in the hangar, tools and equipment to buy, figuring out a way to get water up to the hangar, etc etc) and now things are slooowly going back together. More about this crazy project in another post.