jmaynard
Cleared for Takeoff
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2008
- Messages
- 1,487
- Location
- Fairmont, Minnesota
- Display Name
Display name:
Jay Maynard
This past weekend, I wasn't going in to OSH, because I had another trip I needed to make.
It started Saturday morning with a photo shoot. A story about the Tron Guy and his airplane will appear sometime in the next few weeks in the City Pages newspaper in the Twin Cities. They wanted me for a photo shoot for the cover. I'd already planned to go to Chicago to appear at a comedy club there, but since I was flying myself, it was no big deal: fly from Fairmont to Crystal (MIC), catch a ride with the photographer downtown, do the shoot, catch a ride back to the airport (where he got some pictures of me climbing into the airplane), fly out.
As I'd guessed would happen, I got routed around the north side of the Minneapolis class B, though they did let me climb up into it. The rest of the flight to Schaumburg, IL (06C) was uneventful, though because of the workload surrounding Oshkosh, nobody was doing handoffs, so I got to call up several ATC frequencies as a new arrival. Of course, I was told to remain clear of the Chicago class B - which meant that I got down to 06C's 1601 MSL (800 AGL) pattern altitude early, and bounced around a lot. I used 29 even though there was a slight tailwind.
I got to 06C about 5:15 PM. From there, getting to the hotel was not hard, but took a long time: I checked in about 7:45, just long enough to order a room service dinner and take a shower before heading to the comedy club. Went and did two shows, had a lot of fun, got back to my hotel, went to sleep about 1:45 AM.
Woke up about 6:45. *yawn* That was enough time to catch the 8:30 Metra train back out to Schaumburg. I got there about 9:45, to discover a snafu with the plane's fueling: they had no record of putting fuel in it, but it only took .7 gallons. The Zodiac's efficient, but not that efficient. Turns out it took 16.7 Saturday afternoon, and they had to dredge up the record.
That was the easy part. There were two lines of thunderstorms over northwest Illinois and northeast Iowa. I wound up waiting till 1 PM for them to dissipate; I had something to do in Fairmont this morning for which I had to be back, so I took extra care to compensate for the get-home-itis in my decision making and only launched when I knew it would be safe. Plan B would have been to leave the airplane, rent a car, and drive; that turned out to be unnecessary, fortunately. While I waited, I had a very, very nice brunch in the airport restaurant, Pilot Pete's. That's a popular destination for good reason. They've even got what looked like an airworthy Breezy hanging from the ceiling amongst the models.
I'd routed my flight north of the remaining weather by going to JVL before turning for Fairmont. That turned out to be of less use than I thought, as the ceilings were closing in on me. I checked the METARs for airports more or less ahead of me, and diverted to DBQ: I decided I'd rather figure out how to complete the trip, if possible, on the ground instead of in the air. The FBO was easy to deal with, and even gave me the OSH discount ("you are coming from Oshkosh, right?"). A check of the weather around the area showed that things were fine as long as I stayed south of MCW, so I planned to go direct to FOD (wonder how many turbines fly into there, with that code?) and then up to Fairmont. Plan B was to fly into Ames and get my roommate to come get me, if the weather continued to suck.
Headwinds, yuk. I was at 4500, and dealing with pretty much a 25-knot direct headwind. Along about ALO, I checked the weather again, and found that the clouds had cleared off, so I went direct FRM from there. That saved me an hour or so; the flight was still 2.3 hours. It stayed pretty much clear the rest of the way, plus or minus some haze. I finally landed at FRM about 6:15.
There's no way I could have done that weekend in my car. It would have meant 11 hours driving total on Saturday, and 9 or so on Sunday. The airplane made it possible, and even routine.
It started Saturday morning with a photo shoot. A story about the Tron Guy and his airplane will appear sometime in the next few weeks in the City Pages newspaper in the Twin Cities. They wanted me for a photo shoot for the cover. I'd already planned to go to Chicago to appear at a comedy club there, but since I was flying myself, it was no big deal: fly from Fairmont to Crystal (MIC), catch a ride with the photographer downtown, do the shoot, catch a ride back to the airport (where he got some pictures of me climbing into the airplane), fly out.
As I'd guessed would happen, I got routed around the north side of the Minneapolis class B, though they did let me climb up into it. The rest of the flight to Schaumburg, IL (06C) was uneventful, though because of the workload surrounding Oshkosh, nobody was doing handoffs, so I got to call up several ATC frequencies as a new arrival. Of course, I was told to remain clear of the Chicago class B - which meant that I got down to 06C's 1601 MSL (800 AGL) pattern altitude early, and bounced around a lot. I used 29 even though there was a slight tailwind.
I got to 06C about 5:15 PM. From there, getting to the hotel was not hard, but took a long time: I checked in about 7:45, just long enough to order a room service dinner and take a shower before heading to the comedy club. Went and did two shows, had a lot of fun, got back to my hotel, went to sleep about 1:45 AM.
Woke up about 6:45. *yawn* That was enough time to catch the 8:30 Metra train back out to Schaumburg. I got there about 9:45, to discover a snafu with the plane's fueling: they had no record of putting fuel in it, but it only took .7 gallons. The Zodiac's efficient, but not that efficient. Turns out it took 16.7 Saturday afternoon, and they had to dredge up the record.
That was the easy part. There were two lines of thunderstorms over northwest Illinois and northeast Iowa. I wound up waiting till 1 PM for them to dissipate; I had something to do in Fairmont this morning for which I had to be back, so I took extra care to compensate for the get-home-itis in my decision making and only launched when I knew it would be safe. Plan B would have been to leave the airplane, rent a car, and drive; that turned out to be unnecessary, fortunately. While I waited, I had a very, very nice brunch in the airport restaurant, Pilot Pete's. That's a popular destination for good reason. They've even got what looked like an airworthy Breezy hanging from the ceiling amongst the models.
I'd routed my flight north of the remaining weather by going to JVL before turning for Fairmont. That turned out to be of less use than I thought, as the ceilings were closing in on me. I checked the METARs for airports more or less ahead of me, and diverted to DBQ: I decided I'd rather figure out how to complete the trip, if possible, on the ground instead of in the air. The FBO was easy to deal with, and even gave me the OSH discount ("you are coming from Oshkosh, right?"). A check of the weather around the area showed that things were fine as long as I stayed south of MCW, so I planned to go direct to FOD (wonder how many turbines fly into there, with that code?) and then up to Fairmont. Plan B was to fly into Ames and get my roommate to come get me, if the weather continued to suck.
Headwinds, yuk. I was at 4500, and dealing with pretty much a 25-knot direct headwind. Along about ALO, I checked the weather again, and found that the clouds had cleared off, so I went direct FRM from there. That saved me an hour or so; the flight was still 2.3 hours. It stayed pretty much clear the rest of the way, plus or minus some haze. I finally landed at FRM about 6:15.
There's no way I could have done that weekend in my car. It would have meant 11 hours driving total on Saturday, and 9 or so on Sunday. The airplane made it possible, and even routine.
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