A photo with a story attached..

This is a Cessna 152 that the club had online for a while. It was the plane that I picked on Dec 17 2003 on the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight, when we decided we just had to go flying that day of all days! Myself and one of the club members had a chat and decided we should do something we hadn't done before. We decided that 10,000 feet in a 152 was a good thing! I remember it was 13 degrees on the ground, so ISA conditions, and I also remember grinding slowly up to 10,000 feet. The controller couldn't grasp why I'd ask for 10,000 feet but not want to actually go anywhere!!!

So, almost an hour after takeoff, after passing the service ceiling for the aircraft many thousand of feet below, and while holding 65kt, nose right up, mixture 1/4 turn from ICO, we made it to 10,050 feet. This was the absolute ceiling, as in it absolutely wouldn't go any damn higher!!! Turning the mixture at all or pulling carb heat out at all resulted in a loss of 100 or so feet, and it just wouldn't go a single foot higher!!

Then we started down the hill, I suppose we could have shut the engine down really - instead we did lazy circles to keep the airflow from turning the prop too much... Finally we landed, 1.2 after takeoff!!!!