Dallas Aviation Expo

On Friday, another instructor and I flew into DFW for the Dallas Aviation Expo. The second week in November there was a flying contest to determine which instructors got to go. Whoever got the most flight hours that week, got to fly one of Spartan's airplanes to DFW. So, I thought it would be fun to go and then maybe get to see Cari. I worked hard to get the most hours, but because of some cancellations, I was 0.9 hours short of winning. The instructor that won was trying to get more time in the seminole so he could get his MEI (multi-engine instructor license). Since I have mine and could sign him off, I got to go also. We met at the airport at 5:30 Friday morning (too early for me, especially since I had too leave my house at 5!). We eventually got everthing ready to go and took off toward Dallas. We were a little nervous about flying into DFW since it is such a large and busy airport. Usually, airports like DFW don't like it when they have general aviation arrivals because we are much slower than the commercial airlines and cause sequencing problems. We got to their airspace around 8 and luckily they weren't too busy... yet. The controllers were all very nice (not grumpy like we expected). They had us land on the far east runway and then told us unfortunately we were going to have to taxi all the way to the west side of the airport, which was about 3 miles. Needless to say, we had a pretty long taxi. When we finally arrived at the American Airlines hangar where the expo was being held, we saw several other airplanes.

This is an airplane taking off while we were holding short of one of the runways.

The C130 can actually back up!!! We were getting ready to leave, but the C130 was blocking us in. So, we just sat in our little seminole and waited until they left to start our engines. It was pretty impressive.



The expo was for elementary through high school kids in the Fort Worth area. There were a couple of recruiters from Spartan there that had a booth set up. We pretty much just hung out all day and answered any questions anyone had. When the expo was over, we flew to Spinks airport, which is just to the southwest of DFW. Cari and Calloway came and picked us up and we went to eat. Since my birthday is Wednesday, Cari bought me lunch/dinner and got me some super cute pajama pants. It was a lot of fun to get to see her and play with Calloway. I can't believe how big she is getting and that she is almost 1!!!!

This one is really good of Cari and Calloway.














She is so cute and I can't wait to see her again at Christmas!!!!!