Nothing To Do WIth The Price Of Gas...

I wrote about Phlegm Z once, fully meaning to write about him a lot. He was such a livid, I mean VIVID character, always running around angry because he couldn’t find his pilot’s license and his toothbrush, cursing his friends who laughed at him as he desperately pulled himself together to make the 5:15 flight every weekday- the one he couldn’t miss because, quite simply, he was the pilot of the plane…

I was filling up my car this morning at our local gas station, and the owner of the four pump country station was in the mood for small talk while he unscrewed my cap.

I noticed a small go-cart parked by the front door of his office, and I asked him “Did you commute to work in that this morning?”

“Yeah, he said. “I did. With the price of gas and all…”

He was playing along nicely.

It reminded me of an airplane Phlegm Z owned that he towed into the yard of a property where we both lived. He parked it next to our workshop and somehow managed to get my New Zealand Carpenter friend Scott II and myself (Scott I) sucked into helping him sand the horrible paint job he had put on this plane so we could paint it again.

Phlegm Z was a pilot flying cargo planes out of Nashville before he came out to California to fly for Fed Ex. He lived quite a distance out of town. What he needed was a way to commute from a tiny airport to the larger one without it costing him a lot of money. What he found was a guy who had built a small, one-man kit plane. The man had built it and then not been able to find anyone willing to certify that the plane was safe to fly. There were too many things you couldn’t “see” inside the finished plane, and nobody would sanely sign this plane off as safe and therefore this man would not fly this plane but Phlegm Z would.

Phlegm Z test flew the little crazy looking one-seater with a Porshe motor that pushed the plane instead of pulling it, and then he offered the guy a thousand bucks for it.

To hear Phlegm Z, with his severe Danish accent tell it- “I got it for a tousand bucks, man!”

Phlegm Z had his commuter plane, and he got up every morning and filled up Jerry cans with regular automotive fuel, drove to the small airport, topped off the plane with gas, and then flew for twenty minutes to the larger airport where he put on a crinkled tie and went to work.

For months and months.

Five days a week, the same scenario.

Apparently, there was no fuel he could access easily at the big airport, so he needed to be topped off everyday, and everyday Phlegm Z made sure he was.

I’ll let Phlegm Z tell the rest of this…

“So I was flying along at about 22 hundred feet. I looked at my gauge and it was reading 2/3 empty. I thought, shit man! I’ll be late for work.! I thought, there must be something wrong with the gauge. I topped off the tank as I always do. And then I smelled a little gas, and I thought. Shit man! I’ve sprung a leak!”

“What did you do?”

I had to get to work, man! What was I supposed to do? I was more than half-way there. Another tank of gas and I could get there. So I looked around and saw an old gas station sitting out on this empty bit of highway.”

“You landed?”

“Right there on the highway. The place was full of old farmers who just looked at me. I taxied the plane right up to the pump, hopped out and filled her up. I bought some gum and paid the guy with a credit card, stuck the chewed gum over the hole in the tank and then taxied down the highway, waited for a truck to go by, and took off. You should have seen the look on the face of the old man at the pump, man!”

“Did you talk with him?”

“I told him I was late for work, man! He said “What kind of work you do?” I said, I’m a pilot! And he just nodded and took my credit card and swiped it.”

Scott II and I got the mono-wing sanded and a nice, smooth coat of red paint on it. Phlegm Z, in a hurry to get to work, bumped into the plane with a truck he was working on- one of his many, many projects.

The damage to the wing was small but severe enough to make Phlegm Z forget about ever flying that plane again.

Which may have been a good thing…