We had plans to fly to Waterloo, Iowa last Saturday for our niece Ella’s birthday party. On Friday, Steven called and said “Skill called me” (Skill is the school we rent the planes from). It sounded like he had bad news!

I immediately thought they canceled our reservation. We had the Cessna 172 we usually fly (N378MA, aka MA, pronounced “Mike Alpha”) reserved, but when we’d been there the previous weekend, we saw the other Cessna 172 Steven is checked out on (N408ES, aka ES, pronounced “Echo Sierra”) was sitting in the hangar with the cowling removed. It looked like it was undergoing some serious maintenance so I figured it was still out of commission and they wanted to use MA for the students who needed training, not for the folks renting it to visit family. Bummer, but made sense to me.

I was wrong.

“They want us to fly ES,” Steven said.

“Um, ES, the plane we saw torn apart last weekend?!”

Steven went on to explain that ES needed two of the engine cylinders replaced, and that was all done and they’d taken it on some test runs, but what would really be great for it was a long cross country trip to break it in, which is exactly what we had planned — a two hour one way flight, twice!

“You sound like you are calling me with bad news,” I said. “What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is ES is slower and doesn’t have as high of a useful load, but we did the weight and balance, and it will be fine with less fuel.”

Okay, this is true. MA had an engine rebuilt in 2024 and has been our preferred plane since. But ES is just a few knots slower and we weren’t carrying passengers so whatever.

This whole new cylinders thing though… that did change our planning and flying a bit. We made sure to review engine out procedures the night before, we flew at a higher altitude so we could glide farther if we had an engine out, and I practiced finding the nearest airport on the GPS a few times while we were flying and made sure to locate the airports along the route and have them in sight. It’s good to practice these things!

We obviously made it there and back.

And that was a lot of words about why we flew ES. Ha.

We had beautiful weather by us Saturday morning. The wind was barely moving at 3 knots when we took off at 7:55!

We had scattered clouds at 9,000′ — well above our cruising altitude of 6,500′.

Steven kept an even closer eye on the oil pressure and engine temperature because of the new cylinders. And there were reminders EVERYWHERE to put mineral oil into the plane instead of regular oil (which we made sure we had when we left, but didn’t need to use).

The clouds lowered and become broken with an overcast layer as we got into Iowa, so it looked a bit gloomy out.

But I was all smiles because Steven let me fly! He said I am getting good at keeping the plane straight and level. It’s starting to feel more intuitive.

I felt like I had to touch the yoke a bit more than with MA and Steven told me he was noticing some differences in the controls and throttle too. I flew for about 15-20 minutes then Steven took controls back and we did our typical discussion to prepare for landing (runway approaches, how many minutes we need to descend to pattern altitude, etc.).

We landed at Waterloo Airport at 9:56.

My snis picked us up (with a chai and coffee! Thanks snis!) and we hung out at her place for a bit,

then went to the 4th Street Car Cruise around noon and hung out with my parents and older brother and his family. It’s fun to chill and watch the cars drive by over and over and over (they’re on a loop course). We all kept noticing ones we hadn’t seen before then we’d say “is that one new?” and someone else would have noticed it earlier, lol.

We left there around 3:00? Gosh, the days feel so freaking long when you have an early sunrise, get up early, and don’t spend your whole damn day working or doing chores or errands or other bullshit. It’s amazing. We had more adventures later in the day that I’ll share in another post!