Bad karma? Gremlins? Maybe Voodoo? It must be something really ugly since I’m finding myself grounded again—this time without both wings and wheels. I’m trying to look at it as a valuable learning process—getting a “crash” course in dealing with insurance companies.
A couple of weeks after the examiner gave me that wonderful gift on Christmas Eve last year and I was back to being a genuine, certified, legal, private pilot, my Cessna 180 went into the shop for annual inspection. It began in mid-January and dragged on well into February, but no problem—the weather was pretty gruesome around here, and I can’t yet do any cloud aviatin’. Come March, and I was flying the wings off 72B in spite of an unusually stormy, wet spring in the Midwest. I was nearing the point where I could again hand-fly my auto-pilot-less airplane under the hood while manipulating ForeFlight and a WAAS-enabled Garmin GNS 430 in preparation for the instrument practical test.
