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.