Monocoupe Entry 2

This is not the first time I've done this, you know. In 2003, dad bought a Citabria with a high-time engine in Cape May NJ. Take a look at a map. It's almost as far east as you can get in the continental U.S. I heard about that and asked if he needed company retrieving it. He accepted and off we went. I can't remember the season, mid or late summer, but on our commercial flight out, there were serious thunderstorms at our stop in Dallas and that's the first time I'd ever seen stewardesses fly. Serious turbulence. Wow. The rest of the trip was uneventful, and I don't even remember what airport we flew into. 

The fellow selling the plane picked us up and within two or three hours we completed the deal and were loaded up and headed north over the Delaware River. 

Flying light aircraft on the east coast is a shock after the west. In the west you can fly for 4 hours and not leave the state. But in the east we were seeing a new state every 15 minutes for a while. We had only to avoid Dover Air Force Base and soon we crossed the upper reaches of Chesapeake Bay and settled into York in SW Pennsylvania, still east of the Alleghenies, for our first night's stay. 

In those days, aircraft GPS were just coming out, but finding a hotel that would pick up from the municipal airport was a trick carried out with a very small, dense book called the U.S. Pilot Guide. It had a list of every airport in the U.S. And what services were available and the relevant phone numbers. Maps were also paper back then, so the way it worked was one person piloted the airplane while the other navigated, picking out terrain or building features on the ground, comparing it to the map to confirm location. This was an important job because there are lots of places you don't want to fly over in a small aircraft, especially around DC. And part of that job was to find the night's hotel. The navigator calls out airports on the path ahead and quickly (sort of) looks up the services for that airport in the Pilot Guide until a hotel is found that is either close, or picks up, or the airport has a courtesy car. Sometimes you end up looking ahead quite a ways before a suitable place is found, hopefully before the sun goes down. You can fly at night, and it's very smooth air, but it's probably not a good idea over unfamiliar or unlighted terrain. 

Not a very interesting hotel stay in York, so I'll get right to the Alleghenies: 

They're known as pilot killers, and I was a bit worried about them until I saw them. They're small! None top 3000ft. Heck, my house is at 2800 ft in Idaho and it's not that high. They run in loooonnnnnnngggg ridges, and there is ridge after ridge. Seems easy enough, but then after a while you realize how these mountains kill pilots. Dense deciduous forest with few landing opportunities in the valleys between the ridges. You go down in there and they will not find you for months or years. And your plane will definitely get busted up, and you along with it.  Better hope you engine keeps running. 

To give you an idea of how close everything is out here, our first leg, should we actually buy the airplane, could be from Richmond to Columbus OH. This plane cruises at 120 mph, and it should be about 2 hrs and 40 minutes flight time hopping straight over the middle of West Virginia. If we make that stop for gas and grub short, we stay the first night in Illinois on less than 6 hours flight time. 

Well, this is getting wordy so I'll try to speed it up. Eastern Ohio is hilly with 70% treed terrain and 30% open fields, and by western Ohio it's the same but flat. Going west, the percentage of open fields continues to grow until you pass the Mississippi, when the tree seem to disappear altogether, except for the the banks of the Mississippi. 

The Mississippi is very wide. The Missouri is not. 

And you know what, I'm just gonna skip over Nebraska and give you this one shot of Wyoming. It's very high. Here we are flying at 8500 ft altitude above sea level and only 300 ft off the ground. We were scraping by under thunderstorms this day so we got a good, close look at the terrain. 

Pocatello was sunny, as was the rest of the trip. 

Here's a part of idaho people rarely see. Lava flows north and west of Poky. Those little holes in the middle of the picture are each large enough to swallow the airplane. 

Dad flew us through the wilderness area between mt Adams, Mt Rainier and Mt blew-itself-up, over the Gifford-Pinchot forest. You get a good look at a lot of roadless trees through here. This is Mt Adams from the NE. 

Here we are delivering the plane to its rightful owner. Mom. 

As for this trip, we're stuck in Denver due to our connecting plane being stuck in Amarillo due to thunderstorms. That will put us into Dulles quite late and we have an early morning tomorrow. 

Clear Skies,

BZ