Monocoupe Entry 7

Compared to yesterday, today was pretty good. We woke to 300 ft broken clouds -- the previously described "scud". We knew it would be so, because the temperature had been hovering near the dew point since dusk last night, and nothing would change until the air warmed up two or three degrees with the sun, probably around 9 or 10 am. So we went up to the airport at 8 and waited. 

While we waited, a local rancher started up his Cessna 210, took off and headed south to check out where his cattle had roamed to. He returned in less than five minutes and as he was tucking his plane back into its hangar, I wandered over for a pilot report. He said he barely got up to 400 feet and had his tail in the scud at that. He said the valleys to the south looked socked in, but it was better to the west. Then he pulled out his phone and showed me his flight planning software. I laughed when I saw it was the interstate highway webcams. That's how you fly VFR in Wyoming. 

So we thought we might get out. And we really wanted to because the forecast called for snow in two days. So we got in the plane and went up for a look see. The rancher was right, it wasn't too bad to the west. We seldom had to go so low as 400 feet and there were spots where the sun was beginning to break through the upper layers and spill through the scud layer just above us in beautiful, hopeful rayed patterns. 

You know, when you're not flying for your life, it's much easier to appreciate the beauty that is the Wyoming landscape. There is little vegetation in spots, we are flying near 8000 ft here after all, but the land is beautiful not in spite of that, but sometimes because of it. Here are a few shots of the terrain near the continental divide between Rawlins and Rock Springs. 

The terrain rises in spots, a particular ridge just west of Rock Springs comes to mind. Normally we would fly right by the hat box shaped butte that rises from the top of this 8000 plateau, but the scud was right at that level. I probably could have scraped by in the 100 ft left open, especially since the scud was getting thin here. But yesterday's experience soured me on risk taking, so I turned left and followed the falling ridge until there was more room to maneuver. And so we were back on course toward Kemmerere again. 

This is the green river just west of Rock Springs. 

The last high altitude runway on this route fits perfectly on a butte above the town of Kemmerer. We had our last brush with scud right there and passed a little lower over the town than we would normally like to. We bypassed the airport for a gas stop at Bear Lake 20 minutes hence, 1000 ft lower at 6000 ft. Rumor has it that the wind sock at Kemmerer is a chain on a stick due to the often howling winds, but this day had relatively calm winds. 

My selfie of the trip. The pilots lounge at Bear Lake was the best kept I have ever seen. Look. They have cloth towelettes in the bathroom, and Hank the airport attendant was extremely dutiful. The man was thoughtful and thorough and Bear Lake and traveling pilots are very luck to have him. 

Here's the 'coupe at the gas pump in Bear Lake. How much does it cost? 100 Low Lead aviation fuel is anywhere from $3.80 to $6+ per gallon. The plane burns about 9 gallons per hour to fly at about 112 nautical miles per hour (knots). So an hour is about $42 and 125 miles as the crow flies. Guessing a 30% decrease in total mileage because I don't have to follow the curves in the roads, that's about 25 cents a mile. It's probably higher than that, but that's ballpark. That's slightly higher than your average car, and I can't go all the places a car can go or carry, well, anything larger than a toothbrush, but, weather permitting, I get there a lot faster, and I like the trade-offs and will gladly pay the excess. 

After the weather in Wyoming, the Snake River Valley seemed like heaven. We turned the corner at Pocatello, which has an actual restaurant on the airport, skipping yet another chance at lunch in favor of westward progress. So we headed out across the great idaho desert. We almost immediately cross from fertile volcanic farmland to volcanic lava flows. It's amazing to fly over this stuff. It's so primeval. Just north of here is Craters of the Moon state park. 

Well, we have spent the last three days trying to escape the swirling arms of the giant low pressure system spinning slowly NE from the Colorado/Kansas border and we finally got past the last tentacle. We had about an hour respite and then flew right into a small front moving north out of Nevada, which all the locals tell me almost never happens. It was a result of a crazy jet stream the was flowing in a giant V shape down the California coast and up diagonally through Nevada into southern Idaho, and it was now blocking our path. We got to Gooding and had to sit on the freshly rain-wetted runway with a dark wall to our west. It seemed we would have to stop for the night around Boise or Pendleton. 

As luck would have it, my new best flying friend, and grand old college classmate had been reading this very blog and he and his lovely wife offered their hospitality for the evening. Funny thing. He was hoping the weather would hold us up long enough to stay and I didn't want to fly 4 more hours to the coast today. And the weather held us up long enough to ensure a stay in the metropolis of PARMA. 

I am terribly remiss in not taking a single photo of my hosts, but I did at least take Mike for a short flight in the 'coupe. In any event, it was a warm evening with good friends and great food and a welcome change from the string of hotels. Thanks very much Mike and Shelley. I hope to see you both again soon. 

It turns out that we have been very lucky to escape that horrendous storm. This is what it is forecast to look like on Friday (this was the post for Thursday's flight). Light green is rain, dark green heavy rain, light blue light snow, dark blue heavy, red is thunderstorms (and twisters). 

Thank you God for watching over us. 

Monocoupe Entry 6

Last I left you, we succeeded in planting ourselves firmly in the center of a rotating low pressure system. 

Well, there's not much to do if you're flying a VFR (visual flight rules) plane in IFR (instrument flight rules) conditions except sit and wait for the clouds and rain to clear. This can take days. 

You can take walks and look at the wild life. 

Or you can argue with your dad about which way to fly. Dad's argument is "The wrong direction is better than no direction."  Dad wanted to go south, maybe as far as Vegas and then up the left coast. I thought it would be better to wait for the northwest passage to open up. So we argued all morning until even the south passage was closed off by an arm of the storm. Then the weirdest thing happened. 

At 11 I was standing on the runway at Burlington in the center of a 10 mile wide beak in the clouds, and all the clouds were being blown from right to left from my perspective. I was at the center of the spinning low. It was like standing in the eye of a hurricane, only with lots less wind. 

By now a c-shaped storm system had surrounded us on 3 sides. Our clouds had started the day at a 200ft ceiling (illegal to take off under VFR with less than 1000ft) but had cleared to 3000 scattered by 11, but we had nowhere to go so we sat and argued and waited. Dad threatened to put me in his will (he has debts) I threatened to send him home on a bus. But there wasn't one. Seriously. You can't get a bus from Burlington to Denver on I-70. They don't stop there. At 1 the nw side of the c broke down inexplicably so we jumped into the plane and headed northwest to Greeley hoping to get Cheyenne and Laramie after that. 

Here is a thunder bumper building to our south when we took off for the north. The north route was great all the way to Greeley. Easy. We landed at Greeley under a light rain and quickly gassed. We thought we might be able to sneak behind the rain of this squall line to the west and duck into Laramie, which we knew was being inundated when we left Burlington, but we hoped that it had moved off toward Cheyenne by the time we got there. 

Side note-- sometimes you see the oddest things in building lobbies. The airport at Greeley had a Luscombe 8F "Observer". This is an example of how much of an OCD plane geek I am. I not only know the model, but I also know who the designer is and every othe plane he has had a hand in. In fact, he is the same schiester that had a hand in the design of the very aircraft I was flying. (See Monocoupe Entry 1). 

Anyway, it looked gorgeous nw out of Greeley so we gassed up and jumped in. And It did look good until Laramie, which was still being inundated by a deluge that hadn't moved in an hour.

Just before this leg went to hell, I took this shot of the unusual terrain on the muddled rocky slope that leads up from Greeley to Laramie. It was gorgeous, but only because we were so close. The rising terrain and unmoving ceiling was forcing us closer to the ground. 

The crud over Laramie wasn't moving, and we didn't want to backtrack to Cheyenne or Greeley, so we took a chance and cut the corner over a ridge and headed to Rawlins. Now, we experienced pilots know the rules of such engagements. 1) you must be higher or at least level with the ridge, 2) you must be able to see the valley floor beyond -- no trees, just valley floor, 3) you must be sure that the valley floor you see leads DOWNWARD toward you destination, and you better be ready for some seriously crazy winds coming through there. Check, check, check, and 85% check. 

But this was unlike anything I had ever seen. It was unbelievable. We could clearly see a good piece of light over that ridge from five miles, but as we approached it, a dark arm of the cloud dove for the ridge. Seriously. We fucking raced it. It was a temperature/dew point thing where cloud suddenly formed. Cold air pouring over the ridge was meeting moist air from below and turning to cloud before our eyes.  It was fucking alive and we were like a mouse to the cloud's cat's paw. And just like a mouse we squirted through there into the most beautiful green/yellow hillock plain beyond. Just a hair quicker than the cat's paw. 

This was our (temporary) reward. A chance to glide across this pristine, untouched, almost-spring meadow that we would never have seen without being forced out of our way by the hand of God. 

Speaking of God... You will notice in the above photo that there is a ridge in the distance. To the right of that ridge the clouds lower. Further to the right they reach the ground. That is the lower skirts of Elk Mountain, an 11000 ft monument on the route from Laramie to Rawlins that every VFR pilot that has crossed the continental divide has witnessed. It's like Independence Rock for pilots. And on the left side of that ridge is a passage and light. Pilots always go for the light. The map (and pilot lore) says there is a valley on the other side of Elk Mountain. The mountain is like an island that most planes traverse on the north side. But there is a little used south passage. 

This is how pilots die. They start on a path through the mountains and then get pushed a little farther, and then a little farther out into the wild passes by weather. Pilots that survive turn back rather than let the weather dictate a bad course. Unfortunately, we had sealed our fate when we raced the devil over that clouded ridge. We won the race but the devil closed the door behind us. (Yes, I realize I just compared an act of nature to both God and the devil). We could not turn back. 

That lovely, light gap in the ridge in the previous picture turned into this: a 9000 ft pass with snow and trees. But things are still light, obviously, because I'm still talking pictures. You know that when I stop taking pictures things are getting tense. This is the last picture I took on this leg. 

Down the other side of Elk Mountain flows the North Platt River (that can't be right. Look that up). Whatever. This river, in the space of 50 miles, goes from meandering mountain meadow stream, to twisting, deepening mountain river chasm, to larger stream in wider valley. We know this because cooling afternoon temperatures and a cold air mass pushing up the canyons from the north caused scud to form (when the air temperature meets the dew point, (the temp at which the air is saturated with moisture), water vapor precipitates in the form of clouds). Scud is just cloud forming at a very low altitude, say 50 to 200 ft. It first forms in patches with ragged edges due to the air currents around it. Once it becomes a solid mass it is called overcast, assuming you are underneath it. 

We know that River so well because the scud formed so low that we were forced to hug the river for dear life. We know the river goes to Rawlins. Rawlins is our only hope for a safe landing. That river is our life.

I think I mentioned that this valley held two airports, so says the map. Our little airplane on the iPad map is quickly approaching the first airport. We should be over it, and yet we can't see it. We are about to float over a small, rounded saddle ridge, and it seems that the airport must be on it somewhere. It can be nowhere else. I look to the side and there it is. It is he cutest little high mountain ridge airstrip in the middle of nowhere with not a spec of shelter within 20 miles. Couldn't land there even if I could turn around. But it was just such an amazing image. This barren strip on a wind, scud and rainswept saddle. 

Nothing to do but persevere. We continue to follow every surprising, beautiful revelation this river has to offer at 120 mph. Every scene is beautiful, majestic, shocking, and gone in seconds. Cute cabin! cows! Palatial A-frame! Rain-flooded treed meadow!  And we're actually flying for our lives verbalizimg this stuff. I'm flying, dad's calling out turns in the river from the iPad map and we're saying "Wow, that's a big spread, like the Blues Brothers evading police in the mall chase scene: "The new Oldsmobiles are in early this year."  15 minutes downriver from the first surprise airport we come upon the second one. It's actually a town called Saratoga. The river splits the town with the runway off to the left. Screw the runway, we're not getting stuck here with no gas. So we hug the river right through the center of town. We actually make a banking left turn over a country hotel with a backyard swimming pool with two people swimming in it. At the same moment those people were thinking "what the hell is an airplane doing 50 ft above me in this crappy weather?", we were thinking "what fools would be swimming in this weather?"

Not much after that the river jumped a few terrain features that under better circumstances would be quite interesting, but we were just ready for this ride to be over. The rain lessened as we popped out of the valley onto I-80(?). Just a couple miles to the west is Rawlins and its airport. IFR normally means "instrument flight rules", but every VFR pilot, when press by lowering clouds, also knows it as "I follow roads". We easily followed the highway to a safe landing at Rawlins. 

Here is a picture of the clouds without rain just after landing. See, I was exaggerating. It wasn't that bad. 

Here is the brave little Monocoupe in front of the opulent main hangar at the Rawlins Flight Center the following morning. 

And here is Bob, a man who admits to owning 128 RC airplanes. See Nan? I only have three airplanes. I'm not so bad. Actually, this is just one of the many airport attendants that work tirelessly to help wayward pilots get a room, a meal and fuel for the next leg of the adventure. Without people like Bob this couldn't happen. Thank you Bob. 

Monocoupe Entry 5

No pictures on this entry. Only words. 

We started early in anticipation of of hunting for clear spots in shifting weather. I thought the hole would be north, but dad thought NW. I think he was wishful thinking. If we could get through there it would be an easy trip. My way would put us well north through Nebraska, and if open we would go through North Platte and into northern Wyoming. Out of the way. As it turns out neither would have worked. 

Things started well enough. We took off into a south wind that helped a bit on our northwest track. Super smooth that early. Nice high ceiling. I thought this would be easy and I made the mistake of saying so out loud. 100 miles up our path the ground rose around a town named "Colby". About 20 miles short of there i noticed a slightly gray line of clouds right at our level, 1000 feet above the ground. "I don't like the looks of that."  Can't go over it, can't go around it, gotta go under. Well, this isn't so bad. We're down to 500 ft doing 120. Things are going by kinda fast, but we're plenty high. Oh, did I mention the towers?

Starting around the Mississippi there are some very tall radio towers. We saw one there that was 2400ft. Now, we usually fly around at 1000 to 2000 ft, so we went beside that one, but the guy wires come off the thing at an angle of 40 degrees, so you'd best treat them like a cone. Those guy wires cannot be seen and will go through you like your're made of cheese. 

The ones in Kansas are more modest. Mostly 400ft with a a couple 1000 footers. So here we are speeding along under 500 ft, watching the map for towers, straining our eyes through the mist to see the ones the map says should be there (In all our flying his week, I found only one tower that wasn't marked on the map). 

Anyhow, we get scrunched down to 200'ft 'cause the terrain is rising and the clouds aren't. I'm looking down at the iPad, dad's flying. I look up and all I see is white. We couldn't see the cloud before we flew into it. 

SHIIIIIIIIIT!!!! 

We skid a diving 180 faster than I could crap my pants (nearly). We dive for the ground and head the opposite direction, hoping it hasn't closed in all around us. It hasn't, but now we're flying along at treetops in the wrong direction.  What to do. Looks like the badness extends both ways. No holes. Well. We've been out here for an hour fifteen, and we like to get gas at 2 hrs and start to get scared at 2:15. So we start looking for gas. 

Hmmm. How did we get into a part of Kansas with no gas?  Here's a place 15 minutes in the wrong direction. Ok, head there. Wait. Look at the map. No nibs. A bare circle is a runway. One with nibs on the corners has gas. No nibs. Ok, here's another one just 10 minutes past that. Ok, let's go there. 

The ceiling is getting a little higher so by the time we get to "Phillipsburg" I'm making a curling right-hand base into final when we see a giant yellow X in the end of the runway (which means "this is not a runway). No. Couldn't be. Shit. Closed! The runway is all torn up and there are graders on it. Damn. We're up to 2 hours and now the closest gas is either a half hour north or south. We haven't yet seen the north, so might not be able to get through. South we've been. Flew over Hayes an our ago. Problem is, the wind is out of the south so it's more like 35 minutes. Crap. No choice. Lean the fuel mixture, slow down a bit and head south. We're gonna find out just how much gas this thing has. 

The gas gauges are up in the wing roots and work by a cork on the end of a metal rod attached to a pivoting metal cylinder with the numbers "F, 3/4, 1/2, 1/4 and 0" on it. The cylinder indicator is in a little window. When the fuel sloshes around, the numbers float up and down. When the cork hits the bottom of the tank, the number floats to 1/4 and bounces on 0.  When the cork rests on the bottom of the tank, the number quits bouncing and the zero sits there, rock solid. The tanks are tied together and the plane is slightly mis-rigged, so it flies left wing low, and so the left tank always reads slightly higher than the right. 

On this last leg back to Hayes into a headwind, first the right tank indicator started to bounce on zero. Then the left tank started to. Then the right tank stuck on zero. The left wasn't bouncing much when we finally reach Hayes. 23.3 gallons useable. Remember that. 

Ok. Crisis averted. But we're still on the wrong side of the front! We didn't get through and we have to try again, or at least get a little more west so when the front moves east we'll get out from under it sooner. So after filling up we head to the pilots lounge to search the Internet for a hint at a possible route through this soup. Here we meet Mark, who owns the 185 parked next to us and is trying to get from Dallas to Alaska. It looks socked so we all agree to go to lunch in the courtesy car to wait for the weather to move. 

After a lovely half sand and soup at a brewpub with awesome beer we couldn't drink, we thought the same route would open up to 1000 ft ceilings. So we tried again. Those forecasts were a lie!  We found better, but still low cloud, 25kt winds, and pockets of middling to heavy rain. But the ceilings were high enough if we followed the interstate to see through the oncoming clouds and rain better. We also found out how much a 1937 rag and tube plane leaks in a rainstorm. LOTS!  Dad got the worst of it. The flap handle is above his neck and lots of water got in there. 

So there we are, flying 500 ft over I-70 dodging cel towers, which is most easily done by flying directly over the freeway. We go on 15-minute legs from town to town. We only go on if it looks decent. We make it to Goodland whose airport is shockingly in a small pocket of light and 1000ft ceiling. Awe come on. It's just another 15 minutes to Kit Carson and out of the state of Kansas. So we give up on an easy landing and head straight into a huge, dark deluge halfway to Kit Carson. I can barely see the highway below us and am just about to turn around and risk flying right into one of four towers we just passed but dad talks me into staying on heading. We do, and the deluge doesn't last. At the rate it was coming down, it couldn't. 

It's still dark on the other side, but not impossible, and I don't want to go back through that deluge so onward. Well, it deluges it again as we near the runway. We're down to 500 ft due to rising terrain ands he rain is so heavy and the clouds above so dark that I'm locating the runway by the iPad alone. I'm so sure that it's gonna be where it's supposed to be that I throttle back and start to slow down for landing before I see the runway. Thank god it's there. But I still gotta land. 

I wish you could have seen that landing. 500 ft diagonal approach to a sight unseen runway in scud, driving rain and 25kt quartering crosswind in a 1937 tail dragger in which I only have 5 landings. Fucking nailed it. 

I was too busy and too scared to take a video of that landing (I should get a GoPro on this plane) but here is a video of the flag pole at the airport:

http://youtu.be/nDEJIC7MzGA

As we taxi off through 2" deep puddles a Cessna calls in final behind us. What other nut would be flying in this soup?  Turns out he knows Monocoupes and spent some time with Bud Dake and the other Monocoupe legends and wants to talk to me. He knows all the Blakesburg antique airplane gang and The Creve Coeur guys and he knows people that are putting together a flying antique circus down the west coast on only grass strips this summer. I think this is going to be fun. 

I only exaggerated a little in that story, or a lot. Who can tell. 

Oh, we finally ended up in the exact center of the revolving low at the NW corner of Kansas: 

Couldn't have planned that better. 

Clear skies,

BZ

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. 

Monocoupe Entry 3

Well, we bought an airplane today. 

And this plane actually participated in the 1938 national air races. 

But I really bought it because it is really my dream airplane. It's like a Buell motorcycle with wings, and by that I mean that it has lots of power, and very little else. 

Here's a video of it taxiing up after a short flight. 

http://youtu.be/Chu5czlRf5A

And I already have a really funny story about our first flight of ownership of this plane. 

We bought the plane, signed papers, and took the rental car back to Hertz at Richmond international, about 20 miles north of the small airport where this airplane was based. We planned to head west immediately and get two hours in (240 miles, enough to get us to Blacksburg) before sundown. We were back at the hangar, all gassed, loading bags in the minuscule baggage compartment when I realized that I'd left my wallet in the rental car. 

To understate: "Bummer..."  

Picture all our options:

1) screw it. Cancel the credit cards, forget the cash and reapply for all my IDs and licenses after returning home.

2) drive back up there and look for it -- 1 1/2 hours wasted and forget about flying tonight. 

3) call.  See if it's there and have them hold it. (Good luck even finding the number to the right place)

4) go online and fill out the lost and found form with Hertz and wait two weeks hoping to get lucky (I call this Nancy option, Switzerland passport story later)

We went for option 5) which is pure Polish logic. "I left my wallet at an airport. I have an airplane. Let's fly up and get it!"

Ok, this is funny. I've owned this plane for an hour, have one successful landing in it, have very little idea how any of the radios work or even where the damn altimeter is, have almost never flown into a tower airport, have not reviewed radio procedures for tower airports prior to this trip (I've been busy at work), and did you know this is not just a tower airport but a regional/international airport and they're landing MD-90s over there? 

And yet this guy who just sold me this airplane and wants me to just disappear, and my own father talked me into thinking this is the best idea. 

Ok, let's do this. 

The map gives the weather and tower frequencies, but we were too clueless to know that they only put that info on the chart for guys like us to call in and say "How do you do and I'm legally overflying your airport, have a good day". It's not for guys like us to call in to land. You have to call Potomac on 126.75 for sequencing. "Oh, OK." 

Here's a tidbit of the the radio exchange:

ME: "Potomac, this is Monocoupe 054 10 miles south at 1200ft inbound to Richmond"

Potomac: "Last calling station, say again call sign."

After a few tries they finally figure out we are the smallest plane you can imagine trying to fit in between the big jets. I think they understood all along but just wanted to point out to us just how ridiculous it all was. 

I was in complete agreement. 

But this is all completely legal and we persist in attempting to land so they finally route us in a 20-mile loop around the south and west sides of Richmond over to runway 25 which is a short, skinny little thing going perpedicular to the runway the big jets are using and is still 8 times larger than we need. We could almost land sideways on it. 

We narrowly missed turning off on taxiway "J" but the thing turns a 180 in its own shadow, so the ground controller asks to flip a U-ey and then they gave us an awesome tour of the grounds, finally holding short of the runway the jets were landing on. Yup. In comes an MD-90 landing right in front of us. We finally taxi over to a corporate jet service called "Million-Air". Not kidding. And they don't offer tie down but can park our little plane in their huge hangar with a bunch of jets for $75 a night. Fine, I gotta get my wallet. Go for it. 

We use dad's credit card (our sole remaining card now) to get a reservation at a nearby hotel that will send a shuttle for us. We talk the shuttle driver into stopping by at the Hertz car return lot on the way to the hotel. At the Hertz counter they send me to the lot, where they send me to the pumps, where the car has gone in the 3 hours since I dropped off the car. On the way I get to know Calvin, who is just working here temporarily to get money to pay taxes on the house he's not living in that his mother left him when she died..."  I guess my day's not so bad. At least I got a new plane. In the office at the pumps I find...  

MY WALLET WITH ALL CARDS AND CASH STILL IN IT!!!!

I gotta send those guys a cake sometime. 

But somewhere, there is a man named Calvin who gave me the excellent advice that "you just keep chugging along and it all works out."  And Calvin knows that there will be a man in Idaho who for a very long time will remember a man named Calvin in Virginia. 

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

The Monocoupe

It's been a while and it's time once again for an adventure. 

Where to begin?

This may seem utterly vacuous, and in fact, it is. I like airplanes, well every type of vehicle, really, but airplanes in particular. Dad always had one when I was growing up and I'm still proud to say that I'm the only one of his four children that never puked in one of his planes. 

On my return from the gulf war in 1991, I asked my dad why he never taught me to fly, and he said: "You never asked."  So I asked, and in 1992 he taught me to fly in a 1967 Citabria, which we then rebuilt: (http://teambluemonkey.com/bzmite/Citabria/Citabria.htm). 

I flew that plane for a few years (ah, I remember my first plane like everyone else remembers their first car, only more so). I've since owned a succession of planes: a 1960 TriPacer (flying milk stool that glides like a brick), a 1950 Mooney Mite, which I bought as a basket case and only recently is it nearing completion (http://bzmite.blogspot.com/), and I am currently flying a 1946 Cessna 140:

It's ugly. It's not much fun to fly, either. My motorcycle has more horsepower, and I think it climbs better too, even without wings. 

Notice that my planes keep getting older. 

But more than just flying, I am a student of what is known as "The Lore of Flight". My first job was at Boeing, where I took advantage of the excellent extended library to read every manufacturer's history that I could lay my hands on. I know what a Lockheed Cloudster is. I have seen a Douglas World Cruiser in person. I know where the only existing Boeing Model 40 is (Spokane). I have read extensively on the history of long distance record flights, and am particularly tickled by the 1939 record flight of Clyde Pangborn (a local flyboy who grew up in St Maries, ID) from Japan to Seattle, that actually ended in Wenatchee in a skid landing to a nearly endless nose-stand. I can look at an infinitesimally small piece of a picture of an airplane and usually tell the make, model and history of the type, and often of the particular plane, if it has any fame at all. I not only have been to Old Rhinebeck, I have a thorough knowledge of every aircraft there. 

It's a sickness. 

So when my dream plane came up for sale on barnstormers.com, I had to work pretty hard to avoid calling the owner for a week. What's my dream plane?  It's a 1937 Monocoupe. What is a Monocoupe?  I'm glad you asked. 

The Monocoupe is a plane that was one of the first of its kind during the age of biplanes. At the time, the only way to make a plane's wings strong enough to withstand the rigors of inept pilots was to make two of then in parallel and brace them heavily with struts and wires between. Hence, biplanes. The Monocoupe was one of the first monoplanes. And most early pilots relished the wind on their face to be more in concert with what was going on. But it's very cold out there in the wind, especially out of season, so when the first few planes were enclosed, they were a novelty. So this plane was novel in its time, and it's name is its description -- an enclosed monoplane, or a Mono-coupe. 

It was the brainchild of Don Luscombe, who in aviation history has gone down as one of the most lovable schiesters imaginable. But his planes always had a mystique about them that none others had, and always an extra 15mph of speed and they always seemed to weigh 100 lbs less than other planes in their class. 

The earliest model came out in the early days of the depression and was powered with a motor manufactured by a car company owned by Don Luscomb's father in law (what did I tell you? Schiester!). It was known as the Velie Monocoupe and was not completely uninspiring:

But for its day it was revolutionary. 

It took a few years of evolutionary modifications until it began to resemble something that could fire the imaginations of flyboys across the country:

It was in something like this that Jonathon Livingston -- yes the pilot who's name was the inspiration for Richard Bach's "Jonathon Liviston Seagull" -- won the stock class of the 1932 National Air Races. Yes, it was the fastest stock aircraft in the country. Livingston then proceeded to make it faster by shortening the wings from 32 to 22 feet and upping the horsepower from 90 to 110. The result was the  110 special. Further refinements eventually turned the type into a 185 hp beast that won the 1947 U.S. national Aerobatics championship. That plane, known as "Little Butch" resides in the Smithsonian http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19810858000

You can probably see why I like this type. It's the cutest, toughest, fastest pug-nosed bulldog of an airplane in U.S. aviation History. 

Eventually, the efficiency, reliability and simplicity of flat aero engines won out and the Monocoupe type finished its manufacturing run of 300 planes looking like this:

Welł, they're not quite as cute as the pugnacious round-engined Monocoupes of old, but still mighty cute, and much more practical. 

Here's the one I found:

Honestly, I waited a week to call the guy in hopes that it would sell, then I bought a one way airline ticket to Richmond Virginia to go test fly it -- 3 weeks from the phone call, just to give somebody else time to buy it out from under me. Nope. It's still for sale, and I'm going out there two days from now to see it.