Flying with the Family

Last Saturday we made our first trip as a family. We flew from KLZU (Lawrenceville, GA) to KPXE (Perry, GA) to visit with family and generally burn some 100LL.

I arrived at the airport about half an hour before my wife arrived with the kids. You would be surprised how hard it is to load two car seats into the back of a Cessna 172! I had double checked the weight and balance to make sure that I could have all three of them set in the back. This is a luxury that I have that most do not when loading four people into a 172.

I weigh in at 160lbs, my wife is normally about 100lbs (but she's still losing the pregnancy weight). Our two year old is 30lbs and his two month old brother is a little over 12 lbs.

Still when you add in a flight bag, diaper bag and two car seats we were within 50 lbs of max gross weight with full fuel. After finally figuring out how to load two car seats into the back of the 172 we jumped in and departed. The flight was uneventful going down and both boys were at least tolerating the trip pretty well.

We spent several hours in Perry visiting with my parents and left at about 4PM. The trip back was also uneventful but the visibility was a very hazy "10 miles". I've seen better visibility when they've called it "5 miles" but that's another story. The boys both gave in to the drone of the engine on the return trip and my wife was able to take a number of pictures on the way back (including the one above).

So I finally managed to put the PPL to use! (After $8,000 and seven months.)

- Fly safe!