Back in Ohio!

We made it back! We flew from Mobile, AL to Indianapolis Metro today. We outran some skunky weather and shot the GPS approach into KUMP. I'm going to have lunch with my family tomorrow and head back into Columbus.

As far as how we did, we took 3rd place leg prize on the leg from Great Bend, KS to Borger, TX. Overall, we came in 20th in a field of almost 50 planes. That may sound so-so, but the second place airplane, a Cessna 172R, only beat us by seven minutes out of almost nine and a half hours of total flight time on the race. Since the course was so short, the scores were very, very close across the field. It was anyone's game.

We didn't incur any penalties, and never were in any sticky situations, so I feel very good about this race. We ran a safe, clean race and had a lot of fun!

Sunday, June 26

Today's agenda contains a breakfast debriefing and the awards banquet tonight. We will have the afternoon free to pack and get ready for an early morning departure tomorrow. Jo and I don't think we're in the top ten because our airplane wasn't called for a second inspection. Boo. On the bright side, we incurred absolutely zero penalties at the score sheet signing! That's something at least.

Yesterday was a busy day. We finished the score sheet signing and headed out to Teledyne Continental Motors for a tour. We mostly toured the plant floor and got to see how the different parts of an engine are manufactured, rebuilt, and processed. They have some very impressive machinery there.

After that, we headed almost immediately to the battleship to meet up with our girl that we had sponsored through the Boys and Girls Club of Mobile. We had a nice lunch with her and attended the graduation ceremony for the BAGC. Jo and I took some pictures of planes sitting around and popped aboard the ship quickly, and headed back to the hotel.

After getting cleaned up, we headed out to dinner at this place called Wintzell's Oyster House. Jo had bacon-wrapped shrimp, and I had grilled triggerfish. I don't know where she got this idea, but Jo didn't want to split a bread pudding dessert with me on the grounds that she thought bread pudding was a disgusting dessert. I convinced her to try the awesomeness that is bread pudding, and she actually liked it. Must have had a run-in with nasty bread pudding in the past . . .

We're looking at the weathr tomorrow, and it looks as if we should have relatively smooth sailing up until about the Kentucky area. I think we'll just file and be done with it. That's so much easier (usually). We'll need to make at least one fuel stop, because it's over 500 miles to get back to Indianapolis from here. We haven't picked a stop yet.

I'll worry about that later. Time to go to this debriefing breakfast.

Saturday, June 25

The agenda for today is fairly full. We have to go do our score sheet signing, maybe get the airplane inspected again, go on a tour of Teledyne Continental Motors (!), and then we have an event with local area kids on a battleship museum. Pretty busy day.

We won't know how we did until Sunday evening. That's when the award banquet is. The score sheet signing is just to verify your times. We may have one issue with the Texas fly-by, but I won't know until I have that sheet I my hands. I recorded all of our times enroute so we can see If there's a vast difference between what we have and what the timers have.

Yesterday was a relaxing day. Jo and I walked around downtown and poked around all of the stores. Mobile seems to be a big art scene; there are galleries everywhere! Unfortunately, that makes souvenir shopping a little difficult, as we can't really cram a canvas into the airplane. We had lunch with her husband at a little hole-in-the-wall place that was pretty good. I had shrimp creole!

All of the teams made it in yesterday. A few teams have had mechanical problems and had to scratch. It seems problems started in/around Texas. I wonder if the heat just baked their engines or whatnot. It was HOT!

That evening after all of the teams were in, there was a party on top of the hotel that we're staying at. It has a 180 view of the harbor area. It was fun watching the ships go in and out throughout the evening.

Time to get ready for the score sheet signing!

Landed in Mobile, Alabama

We are down safe and sound in Mobile, Alabama!  Today has been another long day, but we get to sleep in tomorrow!

We departed Borger, TX ahead of a good-sized thunderstorm.  It was almost comical how everyone and everything this morning seemed to be trying to keep us from getting ahead of this storm.  I wanted to capitalize on some low-level winds, and the sweet spot was about a 9:00AM departure.  Everything was conspiring against us: there was a screw-up with the shuttle to the airport; we had to wait for people; folks needed pictures; the camera jammed; traffic; and then the airplane was parked in a hole that we needed four people to get it out of.  All the while I'm watching this storm bearing down us.  We made it out though, but then the GPS decided to have a brain fart on takeoff so we had to troubleshoot that.  We sorted it out and were on our way.  We cleared the storm and had smooth sailing to Norman, OK.

Norman was an interesting fly-by.  The airport lies just south of two class C airports, so the airspace is busy.  I elected to not contact approach to save us the agony of getting vectored all over creation.  We contacted Norman tower, and it was game on.  That controller was awesome.  He was juggling a megaton of traffic doing low approaches, landings, and departures and managed to get us straight in with no delay.  When we came back to land, he had us flying about a 500' pattern and inside of a Cherokee.  It was a carrier landing, but we got it down.  He was a champ.

The volunteers at Oklahoma were awesome and gave us some cool souvenirs.  We checked the weather and decided to go for El Dorado, Arkansas.  We were in line for a long time waiting for departure, since Oklahoma State's fleet decided to all return at once.  Once we had some space, we did the departure and were on our way.

We landed at El Dorado, AR and had to decide if we wanted to push to Mobile or not.  Lots of teams were milling about and waiting to see what everyone else did.  I went somewhere quiet and talked with a weather briefer for about a half hour trying to make a decision.  There were bad storms over Mobile, and storms along the route along with precipitation, but the briefer and I both thought that if we just waited a bit, we could get in behind them.  Jo and I elected to wait for about two hours, and depart about 5:00PM to push for Mobile.

Time came, and we hopped in the plane and departed.  Some teams had departed ahead of us, and we learned this evening that quite a few had to divert or land at different airports due to crummy weather.  We had smooth sailing almost all the way to Mobile with tailwinds to boot.  We came across some cool cloud formations, and only ran into a teeny tiny bit of precip right before doing the fly-by at Mobile.  When we came in, the airport was dead.  Normally it's very busy with scheduled service as well as cargo and general aviation operations.  We landed with little fanfare and got the airplane parked.

Once we got the airplane parked, there were some kids from the Mobile Boys and Girls Club that came running out to greet us.  Jo and I showed them the plane, and I let them run around the ramp with my iPad to see the moving taxiway diagrams in action.  They got a big kick out of it.  We packed our stuff up with Jo's husband, and headed to the hotel.

I had to use a scraper to get the grime, dirt, sweat, oil, and fuel off of me, but I'm finally clean and ready for bed.  I am sleeping in until I can't stand it tomorrow.  We don't have any mandatory things to do until Friday (I think).

We're Not in Kansas Anymore!

We made it to Borger, Texas!  For those of you keeping score at home, we did two legs today:  Alliance, Nebraska to Great Bend, Kansas and then to Borger, Texas.  We had decent tailwinds enroute to Great Bend, and a little bit of crosswind action on the way to Borger.  Each leg was pretty uneventful.  The fly-bys are always a little hairy, but they weren't too bad.  We had to extend some downwinds, go-around, and do some 360s at each airport, but we never were in any danger of swapping paint with anyone.

After petting the fainting goats at the corn farm, we left for the airport in Alliance.  We departed about 1:30PMish to miss the mad rush of people screaming out of there at the noon release time.  It was still pretty busy when we left, but nothing too bad.  We were doing about 150 knots ground speed for awhile, but lost the bulk of that when we got closer to Great Bend.

We landed at Great Bend to get some snacks and fuel.  We were only there for a bit before departing for Borger.  We stayed low enroute to Borger, and man was it hot!  The outside air temperature gauge was reading about 100F for most of the route.  It's really dry too, so you don't really notice that you're baking until you're already cooked.  We were passed by a few aircraft, but they were faster aircraft than us (mostly Cessna 182s) so I wasn't upset.  We just chugged along until we got to Borger.

Enroute, I managed to embarrass myself yet again.  I was chugging water and on to my second water bottle.  I grabbed it and went to flip the little straw up, and did it a little bit too quickly.  Since the poor thing has been at every density altitude from Iowa City to here, guess what happened?  A geyser of water started to shoot out of the straw and up into the ceiling, only to rain back down all over me and my charts.  Thankfully, it missed all of the electronics and the important charts, so it wasn't a big deal.  It was drier than a bone too, so it disappeared pretty quickly (except for the stuff dripping from the sun visor into my lap for fifty miles).  Jo was laughing so hard, I thought we were going to have to divert to let her out to use the bathroom.  After about twenty miles of laughing at me, she finally settled down.

The fly-by runway at Borger was tough to spot.  They had a nice, black runway that stood out, but the fly-by runway was one of these dirty brown affairs.  It looked like a field from far away.  We finally managed to pick it out and did the fly-by with little difficulty.

The tentative plan for tomorrow is to make it to El Dorado, Arkansas.  That's pronounced El-doh-RAY-doh as Dan (my weather buddy) informs me.  As always, we'll see what the weather has in store for us. 

Time to go to bed.  I'm about seeing things at this point.  I don't even know what time zone I'm in anymore!

Let the Games Begin!

We are doing our planning for the day and selecting our routes and how far we want to go.  I think we'll push for two legs today.  I don't want to give away too many details, lest we have spies peeping on the blog . . .

Now that I'm more coherent, I can fill you in on the flight yesterday.  We departed Iowa City, IA and filed to Great Island, NE (KGRI).  I wanted to try and get out ahead of a line of convection that was predicted to fire up in the early afternoon.  We elected to go south and risk having to wait out a few nasty bits of weather versus doing hard IFR through the north.  Well, we had screaming headwinds enroute to KGRI and decided to divert to Omaha, Nebraska, which is a Class C airport for fuel.  I wanted to divert there because if we had to wait, they generally have very nice facilities and amenities because small jets frequent there.  Getting into the airport was interesting.  We had been in varying light IFR and hard IFR enroute, and ran into a wall of hard IFR at the airport.  We had to shoot the ILS into 14R to get in.  The kicker was that we had to land with a gusting quartering tailwind.  Not fun.  But we made it down and grabbed the crew car to head into town to get lunch and wait out the really nasty stuff.  We wanted to wait for the surface winds to die down at Alliance (gusting to 45) before we made a run at it.  We had fun eating lunch and poking around downtown Omaha.  We barely avoided a parking ticket, but my charms won out! (Right . . .)

After the weather wasn't so terrible, we left Omaha at about 6:00PM enroute to North Platte for another fuel stop.  It was more IFR enroute.  When we got to North Platte, things had cleared up and the winds were calmer.  We had an uneventful stop and ate the free cookies in the FBO! 

We did some night flying to Alliance.  It was very, very pretty.  There is nothing in between North Platte and Alliance.  We are talking NOTHING.  I played the ranch game while Jo rolled her eyes at me.  When we got to Alliance, it was pitch black, since there are no city lights to help you.  We had to do a black hole approach into the runway.  That's always a little eerie.  In hindsight, I probably should have stayed IFR and just done an ILS in versus having to think that hard at the end of a really long day.  Imagine landing over the water at night, and that's what it looked like.  I knew what to expect (thanks Brian!) and we made it in in one piece.

All of the hotels in town were booked up, so we got ourselves a room about 45 minutes from the airport on a corn farm.  The drive over was beautiful.  Stars as far as the eye can see.  I was a little confused about the directions that the proprietor gave us, and we accidentally ended up giving the poor lady a lawn job at 10:30 at night.  Very embarrassing.  We apologized profusely and stumbled into our room and promptly went into a post-flight coma.

The goal is to get to Texas today, so hopefully my next update will be from there!

Landed in Alliance

I'm falling over tired, so the longer post will have to wait until morning. Long story short, we made it to Alliance via Iowa City (KIOW), Omaha, Nebraska (KOMA), North Platte, Nebraska (KLBF), and into Alliance, Nebraska (KAIA). We've been going for 12 hours through all kinds of weather. We filed all the routes, and we needed to because we did quite a bit of instrument work.

I'm whipped and on the iPad, so a better update will be coming tomorrow. My guess is we'll do two legs tomorrow. For now, I'm hitting the hay in a room we've rented out on a corn farm. You can't make this stuff up.

Trying to Get to Alliance, Nebraska

Jo and I are planning on attempting a run at Alliance today.  We have an interesting conundrum, though.  If we leave early today, we'll be out of the threat of convective activity, but then we're going to have to deal with 35 - 45 knot winds on the surface at Alliance.  If we wait, we won't have to worry about the super strong surface winds, but we'll be dodging and weaving through storm cells in rain.  Neither one of those sounds like fun.  If we want to get there today, I'm seeing really two options: take a detour north through the heavier rain but away from convection, or take a longer detour south out of the rain and get to Alliance later and hopefully after the winds die down.  I'm thinking we're going to end up taking a little field trip south.  Did I mention it's headwinds all the way there?  At some levels up to 50 knots?  Boo.

I'm going to keep watching the weather.  Maybe something will change and make my life easy.  We have to let the hotel know by noon what we're doing, so we're in a bit of a crunch to make a decision.  I'm positive we can make it today; I just hate taking detours all over creation.  Oh well, maybe we'll find a really colorful place to stop for fuel.

Change of Plans

Well, today has been  . . . interesting.  There's been a major change of the race due to the incoming crummy weather.

Here's the plan: no racers are going to be departing tomorrow on the race.  We had three teleconferences today with a weather briefer, and he says "It doesn't look good for the next couple of days for what you want to do."  The first three legs for the next few days appear to be impassable unless you're IFR.  Obviously, since this is a VFR race, that doesn't work, and the race can't be delayed for that much time.

So, the race start is going to be pushed back until Wednesday at 12:00PM Mountain Time in Alliance, Nebraska.  All of the previous legs will be removed from the race, and the deadline to arrive at the terminus has been extended to sunset on Friday.  Racers are to get themselves to Alliance, NE any way possible (IFR, VFR, some combination?).  Jo and I are looking at winds and trying to pick a date/time to head over.

Tonight's weather for Iowa City is supposed to be terrible.  Hail, thunderstorms, wind, maybe tornadoes . . . we bribed someone at KIOW to get the airplane into a hangar, so we're not too worried.  We'll be mostly worried about tornadoes and the river flooding, since it's right across from the airport.  We didn't think it was worth ferrying the airplane out.


Speaking of ferrying, I was approached by a few teams today to ferry their airplanes to other airports that had hangar space available.  I declined, because none of the teams in question had any plan to get me back to Iowa City.  Not my idea of fun, ferrying a strange airplane to a strange airport to be ditched there for the night.  I'm not stupid.


A few teams have elected to stay tied down in the grass.  With the weather that moved through last night, several of the airplanes got loose and had their stakes flapping in the wind.  No airplanes were damaged. 
 Right now Jo and I are in "wait and see" mode.  We're going to evaluate the weather tomorrow and see if we want to make a run for Alliance tomorrow or narrow down a time for Wednesday.  It's about 500nm, so it's not exactly a short trip, especially with headwinds.


In the meantime, I have the hotel drapes open so I can watch this storm roll through.  It should keep us rockin' and rollin' for some of the evening.  Cheap entertainment!

Day One of Briefings

We've completed our first set of briefings.  The briefing this morning was just over generalities, so nothing really entertaining was gleaned from that.  There was a part where we had to go over a refresher of how to get a clearance through Class C and Class D airspace.  It was a little alarming how many ladies thought approach/tower speaking "Aircraft calling standby" was a valid clearance to enter the airspace (they have to speak your callsign or tail number for you to pass through).  Flying through Norman, OK should be interesting for them.

I did get a pack of Jeppesen plates this morning for the fly-by airports.  They came packaged all nicely in a "Special Air Carrier Trip Kit."  I told Jo something along the lines of, "We're a special air carrier, that's for sure."  I want to take a picture of them; I feel so professional!

I was invited to lunch with the collegiate teams.  The conversation went something like, "Well, you're not on a college team, but you're in college, so I guess you can come."  It was fun.  I was the oldest person there out of twenty college folks, and they're all looking at me like I'm some old, crickety grand dame at the end of the lunch table.  It was pretty funny, since the median age of the rest of the racers seems to be sitting at about 55.  Many of them were first-time racers, so they were looking at me like I was some font of knowledge (which I'm not).  Yikes.

Jo and I attended the Takeoff Banquet this evening at the hotel.  I sat with two older ladies who were completely lit up, courtesy of the bar.  They were lots of fun.  The one older woman (70+ years old who snuck her own bottle of red wine to the event) jumped up in the middle of one of the racer's speeches and started trash-talking her.  Her equally lit up partner had to grab her and sit her back down, spilling red wine over the two of them.  Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that they had been cut off, until they produced a second bottle of red wine from under the table.  I wonder if they made it back to their room . . .

Tomorrow's agenda is full of briefings.  There will be the fly-by briefing, a safety briefing, and a weather briefing.  Then we're cut loose about noon.  Jo and I signed up for a Rockwell Collins tour, but we'll see if we will be able to make it.  We have quite a bit of planning and hashing out to do, such as divvying up pilot flying/pilot not flying duties, stop duties (fuel, paperwork, flight plans), preflight, postflight, fly-by callouts, and we need to review our routes and look at the weather for Tuesday.  I don't worry about the later routes until we get there, but we'll still need to review the fly-by procedures and routing for the next day's flight (s).

Tomorrow is when the madness really starts to hit.  Throw in some maybe nasty weather, and Monday/Tuesday can quickly turn into a zoo.  We're just going to have to wait and see.

Day Two of Credentials

Credentials check-in is almost complete.  We have three teams left to check in that arrived late due to weather issues.  We're going to grab them tomorrow in between briefings, and then we'll be done!

Today was a bit slower than yesterday, since we got the bulk of the teams yesterday.  Again, no real issues with people's credentials.  There is one team that is having a rather large problem with the paperwork for their airplane.  They have gap seals for the ailerons and flaps (a speed modification) that was never recorded in the maintenance logbooks.  It's a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC), so it's supposed to be in there.  Ruh-roh.  They've contacted the previous owner, the shop, and on and on looking for this paperwork, but so far no dice.  If they don't get it straightened out, it looks like that airplane will be disqualified.  We'll see.

There was a hangar party this evening that was a good time.  There was a good jazz band, BBQ, and nice weather.  Jo and I attended and made friends with a team from New Mexico.  Super funny ladies!  They gave me New Mexico aeronautical charts to bring home (similar to the Ohio aeronautical charts).  I'll have to add them to Ohio and Florida!

I actually got to use my weather smarts today.  Some of the handicap check flight people need to take teams out tomorrow early, but weren't sure about the weather.  Word has gotten around that I can read weather charts, so I got approached about doing forecasts for the handicap flights.  I spent this evening trying to predict the fog for tomorrow morning and afternoon, when it was going to lift, where it was going to lift to, and thunderstorm probability.  We'll see how my forecast turns out.  If I screw up royally, I'll probably have about twenty or so type A ladies breaking down my door wanting to strangle me.  Oh well.

Lesson of the day: waxed airplanes are slippery.  I was showing some girl scouts our airplane, and was leaning against the strut like I usually do.  Well, Jo did a really, really, really nice job on the wax.  There were hardly any little bugs or grime to catch me, so I promptly slid down the strut and landed on my face in the grass, much to the amusement of the nine year old girl scouts (brownies?  I don't know . . .).  I was the most popular racer with the girl scouts after that.  They had great fun picking grass off of my clothes and out of my hair.  It's for the children!

Day One of Credentials

We've survived the first day of credentials check-in. Surprisingly, we had very few problems with people and their licenses, medicals, flight reviews, insurance forms, and training certificates. Nobody really got into any trouble! Almost all of the airplanes are here; I think we're only missing about six or so. Tomorrow is the arrival deadline, so everyone should be pulling in at some time or another.

Today was a very, very long day. Did you know it gets light in Iowa City at 5:00AM local time? I didn't either until this morning. Sunshine laser beams through the window! We were up at 6:00AM, reported for credentials at about 8:00AM, and we've just gotten settled back into the hotel (10:30PM). We had a really good dinner at this place called "The Brown Bottle." It's Italian, and boy is it good. I'm just about ready to go into a pasta coma.

This airport is starting to get flooded with planes. I'm anticipating a nightmare when all fifty of us try to depart at once. The airport does not have a tower, so it should be . . . entertaining. I'll have to run out and take some pictures once all of the airplanes report. It's nuts.

I did see something entertaining today. A big medical helicopter came into the ramp, and was setting down next to a very nice Bonanza (the Bonanza wasn't part of the race). Well, the downwash from the rotor was rocking this poor Bonanza, and it didn't have a gust lock in. The control surfaces were flapping and fluttering, and I'm fairly certain it took a little bit of damage. The owner comes running out, and words were flying between him and the helmeted helicopter folks. I'm not sure what was said, but it ended in the Bonanza being tugged down to the maintenance hangar. Ouch!

Our airplane is all inspected, handicapped, and checked in, so after we get everyone else checked in, it *should* be smooth sailing for us until departure. We'll see. It's still a little far out to be worrying about weather, but I'll start watching that very closely probably around Sunday.

Time for that pasta coma . . .

Arrived at KIOW

We've arrived at KIOW, Iowa City. The flight from KUMP to KIOW was uneventful; we stayed very low to keep out of the direct, strong headwinds. Other than some poofy fair-weather cumulus, it was very clear all the way over. It took about two hours and forty minutes to make the trip. I thought we were going to have to start paddling about half way there because of the winds. We averaged about 104 knots on the trip over.

We got the airplane tied down in the grass in our designated parking spot, and we've checked into our hotel, so we are pretty well settled. We're getting all of our ducks in a row for running credentials check-in tomorrow. Rumor has it that we may have problems with people who didn't do their safety training, so we'll see how that goes.

The airport layout at KIOW is a little goofy and a little small for having over forty airplanes arrive. Again, we'll have to see if madness ensues.

Jo and I ate at an awesome hamburger joint called "Shorty's Burgers and Shine." Fantastic. It's very close to the University of Iowa. It seems as if the downtown area takes a lot of influence from campus. It's pretty nice.

Jo and I are both beat. I think we'll be turning in early tonight. Got to be ready for credentials tomorrow!

Packed

I'm all packed up and ready to go! I don't think I've forgotten anything . . .

I'll be heading down to Cincinnati tonight to say hello to the family, and then I'll drive on up to Indianapolis tomorrow. From Indy, Jo and I will be traveling to Iowa City (KIOW) to prepare for credentials and check-in. We'll have a little bit of downtime Thursday, so hopefully we'll get to see what Iowa City has to offer.

Time to pack up the car and head down to Cincinnati!

Getting Ready

Final preparations are being made before I head over to Indy to meet Jo. The plan is for me to drive out to Indy on Thursday early to meet up, grab lunch, and then fly on over to Iowa City. I've updated my iPad with all of the A/FD information, approach plates, diagrams, VFR sectionals, and low enroute charts that we'll need to fly out to the race, fly the race, and fly back to Indy. I think I'm going to save the actual packing for Tuesday or Wednesday. I hate packing! Jo has provided me with a take-along list, so I have a reduced chance of forgetting something important (like pants).

Jo is doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of preparation, what with paperwork, the airplane, and all of the details that go along with that. For that, I am very grateful. She's made it easy on me! I practically just have to show up at the airport with my flight bag and a smile on my face.

We still haven't hammered out exactly how we're going to do a piece of the race, specifically the chunk between Spearfish and Rawlins. I think we've got a pretty good idea, but to give you an idea of what we're seeing, I've stuck a piece of the sectional here for you to look at. That line is the direct line. For the non-aviation folks out there, the two or three digit blue numbers are the tallest obstacles in that sector, times 100 in feet mean sea level. So 87 is really 8,700 feet. There is some tall stuff out there! We want to go direct as possible, but we don't want to hit anything hard, either. I think we have an amicable solution. I might post it at a later date, or what we ended up flying. Things can still change!

Oddly enough, according to the sectional, there are quite a few sand dunes out along that route. I've never been out there, so it's a weird visual to picture sand dunes in the Rockies. I'll be sure to keep my eyes peeled and take lots of pictures. Oh, and I think I'll have a fun game for us to play in flight. We're going to play "spot the ranch," since those seem to be the only things out along that piece of route (that are marked on the sectional at least). There are a few windmills charted, and a few pumping stations, but that's about it. I guess we'll see what's out there!

Our Team

For those of you that are not familiar, I thought I would put in a little blurb about who the heck we are.


Jo (Pilot)
Jo hails from Winterhaven, Florida and has flown in four previous Air Race Classics. Jo flies extensively all over the country to locales such as Indianapolis, Fargo, and of course Winterhaven. Jo is a commercial pilot with an instrument rating, and works with her husband as president of an aircraft sales company in Winterhaven, FL.



Meredith (CoPilot)
I'm originally from Cincinnati, Ohio but attend school and work in Columbus, Ohio. This will be my second Air Race Classic, and my first time flying out west. I am a commercial pilot with an instrument rating and work at The OSU Airport.

Precious (Airplane)

Precious is the name of Jo's airplane, a beautiful Cessna 172R. The airplane has an installed IFR GPS, a 496 with weather on the copilot's yoke, and a storm scope. It has been wonderfully maintained and runs like a scalded dog. The airplane is all stickered up with sponsors, and will be getting washed and waxed before the race.

New Season of the Air Race Classic!

I've finally gotten the blog cleaned up a bit and ready for posting! I'll be using this blog to track our team, Classic Racer 19, throughout the 2011 edition of the Air Race Classic and to post other aviation ramblings. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the race, you can learn more about it at the Air Race Classic website. In short, it is a cross country air race specifically for female pilots. You can find a map of the race route on this blog as well as the Air Race Classic website.

Please stay tuned as I will be making further improvements and content updates regularly.