Is this story perhaps related to why you hate the -99 so much? Remember the making-deals-with-God discussion we had in Vegas?
I'd be lying if I said I remembered said discussion
very well, for obvious reasons. But there's a very dim bug-light going off in the ole domepiece. IMS, the triggering event for the deals-with-God was a much earlier flight...right at the beginning of my tenure at FLX (stop me if I've told you all this one before...oh, you can't, too bad!). It would have been late 2005, and I'd been at CPS maybe a couple of weeks after about a month of flying a run out of Jackson, MS, which had mercifully never required any serious weather flying. And THAT was right after my flight training/check ride at FLX, which was itself right after I hadn't touched an airplane for a couple of years (and I'd NEVER touched one, let alone flown one as BIG and threatening as a 210). My 135 IFR PIC checkride at FLX was also my BFR/IPC. So let's just say that I was, as you kids might say, a bit of a Noob.
Got to the hangar at my normal OhmygodO'clock show time, walked in through sheets of rain to see that all of the other planes were gone. Well, gosh, they're mostly going the same way, so if they can do it, I can do it! Right? Uh, right. It was pretty much a disaster from start to finish, other than I kept breathing, shockingly. Blasted off and, wouldn't you know it, some joker had put VIH out of service, and welp, I'm /A so I'm a gonna have to go east down towards FAM. Except that's where the squall line is. No worries, those controllers have radar, right? RIGHT? I'll spare you the next hour and a half or so, except to say that the KC Center controller didn't hand me off to Memphis in a timely fashion (or I didn't hear it), and I got a quick refresher on "where do you find center frequencies on a sectional".
Except I couldn't read said sectional because I was in the middle of a line of level 3-4s and pooping my Pampers. Like, literally, it was impossible to read the frequencies due to the turbulence, and it was constant. For something on the order of 45 minutes. Came up on Guard to get a frequency and got the predictable "YER ON GUARD" (no screwing poop! Does it sound like I'm trying to order a pizza!?). Some kindly Sky Nazi or another finally told the Guard Police to shut up long enough to get me a frequency and I got vectored, finally, in to SGF. Where I proceeded to shoot a VOR to 20, miss (this is right around the time of frontal passage at the field...they're putting out specials as fast as they can press "record"), then shoot an ILS back in to 02. Landed in, and I'm pretty sure I'm not making this up or exaggerating, although I do have Halfheimers, a 40G52 knot crosswind from 10 degrees off the right wing. Put it on the right side of the runway, and by the time I'd stopped, the left main was almost in the grass on the other side. Had to taxi over to the right side of the runway to turn around, because my right leg was shaking so hard it couldn't hold the brake to turn the other way.
Now, here's the funny part. Once I got out, I had the Athiest's Epiphany. I mean your religious type might say that God answered my prayers and if I had any sense at all, I'd never fly again, as I'd promised over and over again. But, being a Supra-Genius, I recognized that all that had happened was that I was an Awesome Pilot. So I got right back in and off I went. I must have been right, because I haven't been struck down by lightning since! Oh, wait, well, that's not exactly true...
But this thread was supposed to be about COOL things. My bad.