Aviation Rally

Last Saturday was the annual Larks Rally for Hesston Aviation. The entire weekend we had speakers talking about missions in aviation, not necessarily missionary aviation. One speaker shared about his witness as a captain in the airlines and how he sees opportunities to share Christ ever day. He also gave a glimpse of what the airline structure is like and how that relates to his faith.

Saturday was a nice sunny day and we were getting fired up for the flour drop and landing competition. We had seminars in the morning with various speakers. One of them pulled up mid noon in a beautiful Beechcraft Bonanza, which made our Cessna 172's look that much smaller. After a delicious barbecue lunch in the hangar, we started to preflight the planes. The wind had started to pick up, and so we hoped it wouldn't go over Hesston College standards. Unfortunately it went past 20, the limit gusting to 30 or so. After waiting 30 minutes or so it was decided that an instructor would go up with each team to ensure safety. Our team was the second off the runway. We stayed in the pattern, fighting a stiff crosswind, and made our first run in the flour drop. Needless to say dropping flower bags out of the window of a Cessna at 300 feet is a lot harder than it sounds. My teammate found it difficult to judge where the bag would fall. Sadly, none of our bags on our three runs hit the target. Travis was on the ground judging, and our team would later help him judge as the second group went up.

After we dropped our last bag we came around the pattern to do the landing competition. Once we were abeam our landing spot we were to do a power off landing. No throttle adjustments after that point, safety permitting. But the wind was so strong we needed to make our turn to the runway immediately even though it looked as if we were going to get there too soon. And boy did the wind factor in. With no power, the wind practically pushed the plane down. It was extremely hard to judge. Of our three landings we only had points on one of them. Our team came in last, but the day was still a fun experience! And I got to log 0.7 hours of free time, which is always a plus. What a day!