And back home now! The whole event was a success. I left Williamsport Friday morning in the Aztec, taking off into overcast at Williamsport, and flying in and out of IMC towards AGC for my first stop. Checking the NOTAMs for AGC, I saw that 10/28 were closed and the ILS10 and ILS28 were closed. Just my luck. So I shot the GPS28 circle to land 31. The approach ended up being right down to mins, and the most interesting approach I've done to date.
I picked up another ARF pilot and then headed down towards Georgia, after loading the some 600 lbs of dog food that we were bringing with us. The flight down to Georgia was uneventful, other than having instrument conditions. Once we got down to Georgia, we were rewarded for our efforts with a scattered layer of clouds and no thunderstorms. We met up with another ARF pilot, my friend who has a Travel Air, and we filled up on cheap gas, then did a formation flight over 15 miles for lunch. We picked a staging airport that had cheap fuel and instrument approaches, but no courtesy car and no food. Go figure.
While we were eating lunch, we decided we'd do a formation flight for the hop over to the destination airport (KPDK), and do a formation low pass for the crowd and media that were there. After a good briefing on how we were going to do it, we took off. I was the leader, and from takeoff to landing my friend followed doing a great job of it. We got some great pictures, and in formation did a low pass of the airport, followed by an Oshkosh style landing and taxi up to the FBO.
At the FBO, there was a large crowd including several media representatives and local political figures. We had quite a greeting, which did make the local news in Atlanta. See a few videos taken:
Flight of two low approach (yes, tower approved it):
http://www.youtube.com/user/Gumboz1953#play/uploads/6/CN_WsES-ovM
Arrival at the FBO (still as a flight of two):
http://www.youtube.com/user/Gumboz1953#play/uploads/5/Xg1ZiTarBkg
After spending a few hours with that, we went back to the hotel for a quick shower before the evening's event. Back in February I did a flight for a documentary of animal rescue group called Rescue Ink (see
http://www.rescueink.org/). National Geographic is starting a series on them called Rescue Ink Unleashed (see the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gMeL_fg3rQ), and that evening was the premiere of the first episode. Unfortunately it didn't have the flight that we did for them, but hopefully that will make one of the episodes.
Saturday morning we woke up and headed to the airport for the real part of the whole trip, transporting more animals. My passengers were all heading to New Hampshire and Maine, so I was to head to Manchester, NH with my crew of 8 dogs, 2 cats, and 3 humans (including me). Aside from my copilot, we also had a camera man who was documenting the whole thing. I ended up filing non-stop to Manchester, looking at the winds aloft forecast and weather. Unfortunately, conditions got worse and winds weren't as good as forecast. I had to drop my AGC pickup back off in AGC at some point anyway, so we decided to just divert there to drop him off. That gave us a good opportunity to wash out the dog cages.
Then heading on over to Manchester, we got better tailwinds and were seeing 185 kt ground speeds for most of the trip. The weather was getting interesting closer to Manchester with rapidly changing conditions, and so I put the radar, eye-dar, and 496 to work for dodging some cells, making what ended up being a visual approach into Manchester. We unloaded the dogs, and looked at the radar on the weather station, observing worsening conditions. AdamB had come to help unload, so we got dinner and then checked the conditions again, and they'd gotten worse. Adam offered me a bed for the night, which I was glad to accept and decided to fly home this morning when the weather was more agreeable.
This morning after getting breakfast, I hopped back in the Aztec for my last flight of the weekend back to Williamsport, shooting an easy ILS in.
Overall, this weekend everyone involved delivered close to 50,000 lbs of dog food (including a semi truck filled with it) to Atlanta shelters to keep them going. We also transported 200 animals, completely emptying a shelter down there. While this was certainly the largest event we've done, this is the sort of thing we do regularly. Now for the fun of doing some retroactive fund raising for this event, and moving forward for the next one.
