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Absolutely beautiful day for flying today...clear skies, temperature in the low '50s. The leaves are changing color along the Cascade range. Dead smooth, the cockpit reasonably draft-free, the helmet, jacket, silk scarf, and gloves doing a wonderful job of keeping me comfortable.
Had one chuckle, though. Was flying along blissfully, when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one of the gauges flicker. Full attention to the panel immediately, but nothing. Everything's rock-steady.
Hmmm. Relax a bit. Start looking around.
There it was again. I think back, hard, to what I thought I saw. It looked like a needle flickering back and forth. But it was on the flight-instrument side of the panel...not the engine gauges. You'd expect a tach to flicker a bit, if the cable was binding. You'd expect the oil pressure to flicker, if Very Bad Things were about to happen to the engine.
But the flight instruments. I thought very carefully about what I thought I saw. It made even less sense...if I had to get pinned down, I thought I knew which gauge had the flickering: The compass.
The *compass*? I'd just refilled it a week or so ago, but I really couldn't think of ANYthing that would make a whiskey compass appear to have a flicking needle.
So I stared at the compass for about fifteen seconds...then saw it again. And started laughing.
The flickering? It was a reflection, in the compass window, of my silk scarf fluttering in the breeze.....