I woke up at 6.00 am this morning (and that is a real shock for my body, let me tell you). After resuscitating my brain with some tea, gathered together my flying gear and drove down to RBD.
(NOTE - RBD used to be known as Redbird, until 3 years ago when it was renamed Dallas Executive - that's the name that the City of Dallas chose in order to take us up-market so as to attract more dollars-to-noise conversion machines. There seems to be more jet traffic now, and a nice shiny new FBO opened a couple of year ago, but the City has yet to spend a cent on re-surfacing either of the runways, and those runways are getting bumpier every month, which is not good for a Long_EZ).
Arrived at RBD to find the ceiling at 8-900 feet, mostly overcast. This was vaguely reminiscent of the Spring or Fall weather in my home town of Margate, UK, except that in the UK it would be around 44 degrees; here it was 72 degrees. The amusing thing was hearing the AWOS intone "Temperature 19, Dew point 17..."
Just after I arrived there was a large patch of blue sky directly overhead, and a couple of small planes made a run for it. Then the clouds descended again, and the only activity after that was a King Air which snuck in on the ILS, and a helicopter who called in to land, and after being told that the field was IFR, remembered his FARs, smacked his forehead, and requested an SVFR landing clearance, which was promptly granted.
My flying compadres scattered around the Metroplex reported similar conditions i.e. IFR or marginal SVFR at best. None of us wanted to lift off in marginal/scud-running conditions for a 1.5 hour flight, especially with weather reports showing that nearly all of the enroute airports and our destination were also marginal VFR.
We waited until around 08.40, then, by common consent via the cellphone network, we all decided to abandon the plan to fly to Hondo. Postponed until tomorrow or Sunday. Apologies to Skip, who patiently arranged for a Friday fly-past by canards at Hondo. Next time, Skip, next time...