We had a Jonah in our club, he had the most beautiful cessna 172 with an OS 1.20. In this case he would be there before anyone in the club then would say that he flew three times and his Tx battery is too low now. One sunday morning a few of us arrived early and saw him pulled in then wait inside his van for about 15 mins. Eventually he got the Cessna out and after a lot of requests from us to see it in the air he started the engine and taxied out. Somehow the engine seem to accelerate then decelerate in a sinusoidal fashion as the airplane attempted to take off, this happened on three consecutive take-off runs. Two of us got next to him for the 4th attempt and this time the engine ran so smoothly it was a miracle. The airplane hoped a couple times before he actually pulled on the elevator then started a nice ascend for what seemed was forever. When I looked at our friend Jonah he was sweating bullets and with a mild case of the shakes.....by this time the airplane looked like a dot on the sky and he asked one of us to help him out. I took over and turned it around and let it fly straight back to the field, seemed like 10 mins just waiting for it to get finally over us so I asked him if he wanted it back and he said I better land it he doesnt remember if he filled the tank all the way. After I put it back on terra_firma and taxied back to the pits he pumped the rest of the fuel out and cleaned the gorgeous machine. We didnt make a comment to him about the incident and neither did he. The rest of the day continued as usual, him drinking coffee and talking to the other fellows. Two weeks later we saw the cessna flying beautifully around the field, not to our surprise one of Jonahs buddies was flying it. Jonah finally declared he is too old and his nerves too weak to do the flying. He makes the most beautiful birds and has some of the nicest stories so we just accept him as that. If all club members were exactly alike it would be quite a boring place after all. The moral of the story, we need Jonahs and everybody else to make life more interesting.

Happy flying..............and watching too