Monocoupe Entry 4

A lot has happened since my last post and since we are grounded due to bad weather, I'll try to use the down time to get caught up. 

Last entry was the story of two dummies flying a small plane into an international airport to retreive a wallet. I was surprised to arrive at the airport the following day to find no police or prop-clamp on the plane. Nobody wanted to arrest us. What a relief. And it was much easier to leave that airport than to enter it. We were off by 7:30 and flew straight west across southern Virginia. 

Here are some Virginia farms well to the east of the Alleghenies. It was a beautiful and smooth morning. 

Here are the Alleghenies just east of Blacksburg. Here the bumps began and they didn't end until Bolivar MO. I whacked my head on the side of the cabin a couple times, good and hard. 

After you leave the Alleghenies, the hills beyond, still in Virginia or those in eastern Kentucky, all look like this. 150+ miles of this. Nowhere to land and houses in every little crease. Hillbillies. Lots of karst. Lots of coal mines, lots of fracking wells. Blessed Lycoming don't fail me now. 

I'm including no pictures from east Kentucky to the Missouri. No reason, just boring. 

Here's the Ohio. We then passed across the southern tip of Illinois. 

And 20 minutes later we crossed the Mississippi, just about right over my sister's house in Cape Gerardo. 

Trees, trees and more trees across southern Missouri, just north of fort Leonard Wood. No pics. 

Trees turn to fields in west Kansas, and the trees are gone by Wichita. 

So there it is. We flew five 2-hour(ish) legs in one day to get about 1000 nautical miles in one day. And I'm sure you have a lot of questions. Where do you get gas? Rest stops? How do you navigate? How fast is the plane? Why 1000 miles the first day? Good questions, I'll start with the last one. 

See the diagonal line from west Texas to Minnesota?  That was setting up as a severe weather fromt that was forecast to fold like a pocket knife around NW Kansas. We thought there would be a week spot at the fold and wanted to be in Wichita by nightfall to take advantage of that gap to fly through to southern Wyoming on Tuesday morning. We were correct, there was a weak spot there, but it was full of very low cloud, which I will tell you about in the next post. Excellent plan and execution, but bad luck. 

Navigation:

I'm flying a seat-of-the-pants 1930s Golden Age of Aviation racer, ish. And some are disappointed that I use an iPad app to navigate. 

This app is a $67/year subscription with a huge downloaded database of charts. It places the plane on the moving chart using gps data (not flying right now so the plane is at the hotel). It places blips on the map where you will be in 3, 5 and 15 minutes, you can pan and zoom the map, the table on the left is my route, so all I have to do is make the little little blue plane follow the little pink line. Easy! Every runway on the map can be clicked to find weather at that location, including cloud elevations, winds and forecasts, also you see what services are offered at every airport, and finally every restaurant and hotel with 5 miles of that airport, with phone numbers. 

It's a pretty amazing app, but the problem is you can't fly and run the touchpad of the finicky iPad in that unstable little airplane. You need two people. So if im flying, then my 80 year old touchpad illiterate dad is messing up the chart. More on that tomorrow. That's a little harsh. Anyone would have trouble running the fine-click interface in that bouncy little plane. 

The Plane:

Do you know what a Buell is?  Harley sport bike? American iron with no excess anything?  It's like that, with wings. Jumps off the runway in 500 ft. Climbs at 1200 ft/min fully loaded. Halfway dynamically stable which is frickin fun -- you gotta hold the stick. Big honkin engine 2" from your toes and only 1500# gross. Glides like a brick. Stalls out the bottom on landing flare below 60mph if you get too high a sink rate, which slams you down on the runway, which is ok if you hit the tail wheel first. Otherwise you might as well push the throttle back in because your going to be flying again anyway. 10" wheels (big for a small plane) with canoe-size wheel pants. I LOVE THIS PLANE!

150 hp and 120mph cruise. 

Rest stops:

Every Kansas town has an airport, and most of them have onfield staff to help with gas, parking, and they usually have a pilots lounge and a couple courtesy cars. They just throw the keys at you without asking you anything or charging. Just make sure the tank isn't empty. Today I got a white Ford Ferrari.

Here we are driving a Ford Expedition (frickin tank) Main Street Newton City KS, hunting for dinner after a thousand mile day. 

We drove all over this turn of the century town of 10,000 looking for grub and the only place was the first one we passed up. It was a local buffet burger and ice cream joint. So we were headed back there after wondering what the hell people here eat when we were just beat there by a bus load of adolescent kids. So we headed to the truck stop near the airport for chicken fried steak. Monster plate for 10 bucks. Appropriate after a long haul. 

On the whole it was a really good day. Here's dad flying the 'coupe.