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I knew it would be downright irresponsible for me to try to get into the air with the propeller acting that way. The only thing I could do with any good conscience was to call Kenton and see what his recommendation would be. Not that there was a lot he could do over the phone, but at least he now had a phone which allowed me to be able to reach him quickly.
I punched his name in the contact list on my phone, then put it up to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Morning sunshine,” I said.
“Maybe giving you a direct line to me was a mistake,” Kenton said.
“Get over it,” I told him. “You are the one who got a cell phone, now you’re going to have to deal with the consequences of that mistake.”
“Great,” he said, the sarcasm in his tone making me laugh. I knew he was being a shit toward me because of the fact it was early, and he likely wanted to be sleeping in. Sunday was the day when he rarely opened his eyes before noon, and I was definitely waking him up before that.
“So,” I said. “There’s an issue with the plane.”
“Again?”
“Very funny.”
“What are you doing to that thing?” he asked. “You know it’s not a stunt plane, right?”
“It’s the damn propeller,” I told him, ignoring the comment he made. “It’s not like I’m doing anything but flying it.”
“And you’re not beating the throttles to shit?” he asked.
“I don’t know, maybe I should talk to the last mechanic who looked at it,” I said.
“That’s so funny I forgot to laugh,” he told me. “But seriously, what’s going on with it?”
I described to him the sound it was making, then told him how I was trying to get it up to full speed, but the entire propeller sounded as though it was going to come off the plane.
“The last thing I want to do is blow the engine,” I said. “You know how much those cost to fix.”
“The last thing you want to do is get up in the air and lose the propeller,” he replied. “You might think you’re Houdini up there, but you’re going to find yourself in a whole world of hurt if you wind up being mid-flight and you lose your propeller.”
“I know how to land in a situation like that, but I don’t know how far we’d make it, or whether we’d be able to find a safe place to put down. If it was just me, that would be one thing, but with it being me and a passenger, I wouldn’t want to put her through that, you know?”
“I’d hope not,” Kenton said. “But you’re going to have to get a special part to fix it. I can call and order it for you, but you won’t be able to do much about it until tomorrow. I don’t know of anywhere that’s going to be open and ready to take you on a Sunday.”
“Shit,” I said. “We were leaving in an hour.”
“I don’t know what else you could do short of buying another plane,” he said. “So you might just be waiting until tomorrow afternoon to fly. I’d recommend it, anyway.”
“Fair enough,” I said with a sigh. I knew there wasn’t anything I could do to get around this. I couldn’t fly if I wasn’t sure it was entirely safe for Laurel, and there wasn’t anything we could do until tomorrow. With those being the facts, that meant we were stuck.
I hung up and waited the half hour longer before Laurel showed up. She saw when she walked over to me that there was something wrong, and she immediately asked about it.
“The plane’s not ready to fly,” I told her. “I need a part for that left propeller, and from what my friend back home says, we’re not going to get it until tomorrow. I can have us going once it’s installed, but until we get that part, we’re stuck on the ground. Sorry, darlin.”
“Well, shit,” she said.
“I know you wanted to get up there and I do apologize. Do you want me to call your boss and tell him that this is on me? I don’t mind taking the heat for this. It really isn’t anything you could have controlled,” I offered.
“No,” she said with a sigh. “That’s okay. Really. Um, I guess we’re going to have to just wait until tomorrow. There’s not much good to stressing about it when we can’t do a thing about it, you know?”
“That’s kind of where I’m at,” I said. “But I still worry that you’re going to take the heat for this when it wasn’t your fault.”
“It’s just technical difficulties,” she replied. “I’ll tell Leroy that we’re having trouble with the plane, and if he thinks it’s worth calling you over, then he can. I don’t think he’ll have much to say about it, though. What can he do when we don’t have a plane to fly?”
