Learning to Fly - Helping the Tower

It's Saturday morning and we make the drive down to Van Nuys. The plane has been fixed, it now sports a brand new propeller out front and a dent in it's tow bar from an accident a week and a half ago. Thankfully, we all had nothing to do with it, the owner was with the plane at the time, teaching someone flying, so both our instructor and my son were not involved in the plane's downtime. Big sigh of thanks!

It's 7AM, due to the fact that we will be spending the entire day selling magnets, today. The weather is nice and up they go, leaving me, as usual, working. Things are pretty quiet for most of the time and I do my work thing. I take a break, since I hear an Amtrak train passing by and see that there are a couple of big guys getting ready to take off. I am so in! Grab the camera and shoot a few take offs. Go back inside and I hear my son's plane. They had returned from the practice area and Van Nuys Tower was asking them to do something. Lots of conversation going on, that I am not used to hearing, like "Hey, what are you doing up so early?". A normal day will find the Tower and plane are all business. Everything is very precise and normal in their communication. You are clear for take off, you are clear to land, that kind of stuff. I find out from my son that the tower was having some problems earlier and wanted to test their landing guidance system. Since they did not have anyone landing most of the time I was there, they asked my son's plane to test the equipment. So they are saying stuff back and forth for like 10 minutes, that stuff is not responding or changing, even as they do adjustments to their landing glide and finally they are just too high and can't get the plane down fast enough. So the tower tells them to move over to the other, longer runway, but the teacher decides to just come around again and so they fly over my location and make a loop back around, approach again and land safely. I walked outside, made sure they landed fine and then went back inside to pack up my stuff. As they came in, my son mentions that the wind was picking up a little bit. By the time we got to the magnet sale location, an hour later, it was really blowing a gale! My son wins again!