One week before this flight, Chris asks me how long it takes us to fly to the airport by her sister’s house (about 20 minutes) after she sat through some Friday afternoon traffic to get home. I said, I’d be happy to fly us as a family down there, but just remember that the amount of time will be pretty close to the same because we have to drive to and from the airport and pre-flight the plane. She said, let’s do it.

So we did!

This was the first time that we flew as a family where everyone was outside the womb. Payton flew once before when Chris was pregnant, but n0t since she would need her own headset.

We got to the airport, moved all of our gear into the DA-40, and got started! Unfortunately, Chris had to hold Garrett’s car seat on the way down because the seat was too large to allow me to fully control the yoke to fly the plane (which could be a very serious problem). Garrett sat right seat and enjoyed!

It was a busy day, and ATC vectored us around several areas of congested airspace and around other airports. We did not have clearance in to the class Bravo airspace on the way down, but did get cleared on the way back (FWS AFW DTO). I took FULL advantage of the autopilot so I could monitor the radios and watch for traffic (in addition to relying on the collision avoidance feature of the G1000).

We landed without incident, were marshaled in, and met the cousins outside the FBO. This was the first time that they saw a small plane, and both kids were crawling all over it while we unloaded our gear.

We loaded all the kids up in the van, waved Buh-Bye, and then headed our way back to the plane to get going! Upon takeoff, we saw the kids in the van and flew right over the top of them before heading back to KDTO. We went direct Alliance first, then direct Denton to avoid traffic. We landed on a very warm ramp, expedited our taxi off the active, and parked right back where we started just an hour prior.

Fun little flight, and my new audio cable works FANTASTIC!  See the video below!