Curt Niermann took Samith and I flying yesterday while Lauren went to some dinner celebrating the school accreditation visit. I think I got the better end of the deal.
About two years ago, at Lincoln Lutheran’s dinner & auction, Curt bid on and won a flying package. I was expecting to just take off, fly around for a bit and land. I think that’s what we all thought, because we were surprised when our pilot asked if we wanted to go to Nebraska City to see the flooding.
We were all up for that, but we made a little detour first. We flew up to Seward and I have a 4 minute video that didn’t really turn out very good. In person we could pick out all sorts of detail, but the video isn’t that good. I might try messing with it and posting it later. We practically flew over Sam’s house.
Then we followed highway 34 into Lincoln.
It was cool to see the trip I take every day to school from the air. My favorite part of air travel is seeing things from this relatively low altitude. It’s like a real life game of Sim City. The Lincoln air traffic controller in Lincoln gave us permission to fly over Lincoln. We were actually pretty close to Curt’s house right before we flew over the airport.
The safest place to fly near an airport is right over the airport. It took me a while to figure out why.
I was on the wrong side of the plane to get a good shot of the capital or Memorial Stadium. But as we cruised down O Street, I got a good view of Lincoln Lutheran
Once we left Lincoln we headed to Nebraska City. I had lots of questions for the pilot, but my headset wasn’t very good, so after a few failed attempts, I just sat back and enjoyed the scenery. When we got to Nebraska City, not only was Highway 2 closed into Iowa, but I-29 was closed as well.
Sooo much water, and there are lots of places in Nebraska that are worse off than this. Best not to dwell on that. The trip back was a little quieter. Curt got to fly the plane for a little bit.
The landing was pretty rough, and our pilot really wasn’t satisfied with it. So he said, “It looks like we have about 10 minutes left. Do you want to try that landing again?” We all agreed so we did the riskiest parts one more time. This time the landing was as smooth as silk.
So. Jealous.
Those views are so interesting. I don’t know about the flying though. It seems kind of scary. And landing twice? On purpose? Yikes!
I’m glad you all enjoyed it. I would have lost my lunch.
Me too!