Aviation Merit Badge

This is Spencer heading off to summer camp with the JROTC. They stayed at Camp Williams just north of Lehi. They spent the week doing drills, obstacle courses and service projects. They earned points for everything they did. At the end of the week all the points were tallied up and the male and female who scored the most points overall would go on an airplane ride with Colonial Wicker.
While Spencer was gone, Bro. Gary Hawes, a member of our ward, called to see if Spencer wanted to go flying to complete his aviation merit badge. Since he wasn't home, I made the executive decision and set up the time.
When I picked up Spencer on Thursday, he was so exited about the week he'd just had. All the kids were telling me, "Spencer's like spider man!" He's this, he's that and so on. It turns out that the Colonial knows Bro. Hawes and is thrilled he's taking Spencer flying because he can take another cadet up to fly. Spencer still received recognition for coming in first.


So, Friday morning we get out to the airport and Spencer is the only one going up with Gary, so I got invited to go along.

This is Bro. Hawes

Spencer's is in the drivers seat...

I'm in the back.

As soon as we got on the runway, Gary turned the wheel over to Spencer. I wasn't quite ready for this and pretty much thought I was going to die. I had no idea Spencer was totally in his element. He was born to fly. If all goes well, he should get his license to fly by the time he graduates high school.

Once we got in the air Gary asked Spencer where he wanted to go. They decided Zions was our destination.

I wish I knew how to do an arrow to point to our house. It's pretty much smack in the middle of the photo from both directions with the swimming pool. The pool is one house away from the main road running along the bottom of the photo. It's in the L shaped culdesac.

Here's Zions. It's quite amazing from the sky.

Gary's taking our photo.

There were a couple times I really got queazy. It's hard to feel safe in a little piece of metal. At 8,000 feet the flight is smooth, but getting up to that point is pretty rough as is getting down. Gary took the plane up really steep at one point then tipped the nose down really fast and I thought I was going to fly through the roof. My bum totally came off the seat. I screamed, " I'm going to puke". Gary just laughed at me.

We're safe on the ground.

Spencer helped get the plane tied down so it wouldn't blow away. Um, okay, now I'm really glad we made it back down to the ground.

And finally taking a reading of the instruments for the log book. I was totally amazed at Spence.