By the end of my last post, 15 Delta Chuck was officially mine and I was waiting for my Nimbus and multiple Schweizer-owning buddy to come up from Florida to help me get my airplane out of its trailer to see what I'd bought. He showed up at my doorstep not long after with an armload of old Soaring magazines and we headed to the airport to see what we could do about moving the trailer closer to my hangar. After some twenty years of doing nothing, I expected the trailer to have become one with the earth, but the tires held air when we pumped them up and the trailer followed obediently behind my truck once we got it hooked up. After much arm waving and shouting on the part of my friend, I finally got it backed up to my hangar door. Once we figured out how to unlock everything inside, we had to muscle the fuselage most of the way out because the bottom fell out of the trailer about halfway along. It was hard to tell if the airplane was glad to be out in the daylight for the first time in two decades because it was covered in dirt, bug poop and other stuff we couldn't identify. When I rolled the canopy cover forward to peek inside, it all but fell apart in my hands. The white splotches you can see in the photo are spots I'd washed earlier with soap and water in order to get an idea of jyst how bad things were. And that's me in my bald vastness, squeezed bemusedly into the cockpit for the first time. There is no question that I will have to lose weight if I am to fly this thing.
