Thunder Down Under: Let’s go for an airplane ride!

By Vic Midyett

Last Sunday, our neighbor Jamie took Shirley and me for an airplane ride from Perth International Airport to a smaller but busier airport 40 miles away where all the maintenance for the larger airport is done. The photo shows the plane we flew in; Jamie was delivering it for maintenance.
    It was only an 8-minute flight, from “wheels up” to “wheels down,” but I managed to get several pictures from the co-pilot seat. What a blast!! Below are some of the photos I took.

    Jamie is 6'4" and in this photo seems to be wearing a bucket, but he isn’t; that’s one of the large exhaust pipes behind him.
    Here we are getting some fuel for the plane:

    Perth city blocks in the distance:

    Closer looks flying over the Swan River:

    Before we left to return home, Jamie installed sun reflectors inside the windshields of the cockpit:

    In the final photo, Jamie is sitting inside the airplane while Shirley, with her perpetual smile, stands outside calling us a taxi to go back to Perth airport:

Jamie has been an airplane pilot for many years, most recently working for Star Aviation Services, a privately owned and operated Australian business, founded in 2012, that serves both major and regional airports. Jamie has mainly transported mine executives and politicians around Western Australia (in King Air planes).
    He became a pilot because he was in a bad automobile accident in his twenties, and his life was saved because the Royal Flying Doctor Service flew him to a hospital. He always hoped that he could fly for the RFDS, in his mind “giving back” by honoring their service and doing the same thing for others that the RFDS had done for him. Well, he is now only about one week away from his dream coming true when he starts flying for the RFDS! (I have prepared a separate piece about the Rural Flying Doctor Service, which will be published here soon.)

Something we learned from Jamie: under aviation safety rules, these planes cannot be flown more than 30,000 hours. At that point their bodies have to be scrapped. The two planes on the right, closest to the camera, are being stripped by Star Aviation of everything instrumental and electronic so they can be donated to two different grade schools, safe and ready for kids to crawl all over them. (I took the photograph standing on the steps of the plane we flew in.)

Copyright © 2018 by Vic Midyett