Flight to Kirksville - Part 5

Flying under visual flight rules to Missouri and back to Texas in the springtime is a bit like playing Russian roulette. I had watched the weather for over a week to take what luck I could out of the equation. I knew I had wedged the flight in between a couple of cold fronts; and that while the weather looked great going up, getting back to Texas would be problematic, even more so than I first thought.

A cold front was supposed to push through on Wednesday night; and while it was supposed to be mostly dry, the winds behind it would really kick things up on Thursday. Friday had been and was still forecasted to be clear. When we got up on Wednesday morning, we met a cold and clear day, a nice change from the hot weather back in Houston.

Connie and I had slept upstairs in her parent’s nice, white, wood frame, two-story home down the street from the town’s combined elementary and high school. I had helped rig up a high-speed wireless network in the house, and I tapped into it using my PowerBook to check the local weather forecasts and the current METAR’s coming from Kirksville’s airport. This was the second time we had visited using the Cheetah, and I wanted to use it see the farm as well as the rest of the area from the air. We were only going to be here two days, and the main purpose of the trip wasn’t a family visit but for Connie to scout and clean up a condominium she was renting out. The weather forecasts were suggesting that today was the day to do a Green City tour, so we gathered our gear together and set off for the airport as soon as we could after breakfast. Connie’s dad let us use his new Chevy Colorado 4x4 pickup to drive out there.

When we got there, high-clouds dotted the sky and the winds were blowing about ten knots out of the west, meaning we would have a strong crosswind on takeoff. I still had enough gas in the wings to complete an hour flight but Connie was nervous about it, so I went into the FBO and requested they gas my plane up to its tabs. Once the airplane was fueled, we hopped in; but I was irritated about the delay and a bit nervous about getting it started. I was pretty certain we had flown more than long enough to bring the battery up to full charge after the Rogers affair, but one never knew. Fortunately, the Cheetah started right up.

After we had gone through the start checklist, I throttled up a little, the airplane taxied forward, and I hit the brakes to ensure they worked. You can’t taxi the Cheetah without them. They did, so I pushed on the right pedal to engage the right brake, spinning us to the right, and we taxied over to in front of the Terminal. Left again, right again, and onto taxiway Alpha, we headed to the north end of the runway to take off southward. Connie seemed nervous and asked me if something about the airplane was okay and I respond it was, getting irritated at her wanting to invent something. Then she said, “Is the baggage door closed? I’m not sure I closed it.”

Not being in a particularly good place, I answer angrily “How the hell should I know?!” and stopped the airplane in its tracks, shut the engine down, and got out of the airplane and look. I was really pissed (knowing that people are watching us, which they weren’t) but realized back in the cockpit I needed to calm down because she was apologizing profusely and saying, “I shouldn’t have said anything.” That’s the last thing I wanted. I always wanted her to tell her what she’s seeing, even if it’s not really a concern. I now understand the anger pilots felt with me when I asked a “nonsensical” question as a fighter radar intercept officer in the F-14.

“I’m sorry I got so mad,” I said. “I always want you to say something when you think something is wrong. It just would have been a lot better if you had said something before we taxied out.”

It was really no big deal. My magnifying mind. We had been the only airplane in sight, so it wasn’t like I was blocking somebody. How often do my own reactions get me in trouble…

I taxied us down to the end of the taxiway and ran through the takeoff checks. The airplane was ready to go and so was I, so I rotated the airplane around like it was on a merry-go-round to look for traffic. Seeing none, I pulled us out onto the runway and announced our departure over the radio as I pushed the throttle full forward.

The airplane accelerated; and at 60 mph, I pulled back on the yoke and the nose came up. The airplane hesitated and then leaped into the air, immediately weathercocking into the wind. I applied rudder to stop it and track the airplane, nose angled to the side, straight down the runway centerline. She accelerated to best rate of climb speed at 90 mph and I pulled the nose up to hold that, watching the vertical speed indicator (VSI) push up toward six hundred feet a minute. Rolling us into a gentle right bank, I turned us back to the northwest toward the heading and VOR radial I could fly to get to Green City.

I had driven the country a hundred times, but I was still a bit surprised with what the airplane was showing me. In the car, I was aware we were driving up and down hills but somehow the land still seemed kind of flat. The sectional charts I use to navigate my airplane tended to show exactly that, but now that I was seeing it, I became aware of just how wavy the land was. Flat pastures were more the exception than the rule. Though there was pastureland everywhere, broken into parcels by trees, it was slanted this way and that. I could see Kirksville’s red brick downtown to our north and the irregular shapes of the lakes at Thousand Lakes State Park nestled in dark green forests just to the right of us. We were angling toward the highway I had driven innumerable times, the one that led west to Green City via Novinger and Greencastle, small towns composed a cluster of homes and a few businesses.

We were bombing along at twenty-five hundred feet on the altimeter, a thousand feet less than that over the ground. The GPS was pointing and giving me “range to go” as I watched the farmlands roll under us. Soon, I could see the familiar water tower that marked Green City’s “downtown” and the brick school building and its open athletic fields that were near Connie’s childhood home. We had told her mom we were coming and to listen up for us.

Crossing over the school, I rolled into a left bank to look down at the house. I didn’t see my mother-in-law anywhere, so I did a few more turns around the place before breaking off and heading west, following the small grey ribbon highways that led to the farm. We found the old, ragged, grey barn and the tin-roofed farmhouse where Connie’s grandmother had lived, and we circled it looking for some sign of Connie’s dad and Marty we suspected were out there. We found them feeding the cows in a field a little to the west, so I “rolled in on them” diving down to my lowest legal altitude. We circled them once more and wagged our wings to acknowledge we had seen them before heading back east again toward the house. We circled the house twice more looking for Mom but saw no one, so I headed us back east again, the way we came.

A few minutes later, we could see Kirksville poking out from a forest of trees, looking as if it had been cut out of the forests, an impression I had never had of it in the all the times I had driven through it. Highway 6, the route we had driven a thousand times, was to our left as I cut south of its intersection with US 63 coming in from the north, a joining marked by the noticeable presence of a Super WalMart and a McDonald’s restaurant. I followed the small road next to them that led east into homes then curved north and back east again, a road we jumped off of when we were over the top of the condominium Connie owned. I rolled us into a left bank so we could see the place from the air and circled it and the area a couple of times to ensure we saw all we could before rolling out southwest bound. We circled twice over the red brick downtown square with its shops and country courthouse before heading south toward the airport.

As we approached, we heard a Piper announce over the radio coming in from the south. I asked Connie to help me look for it. By the time we got to the airport, he was already on the downwind leg, so I took interval on him and rolled into downwind behind him. We did a full-flap touch and go and then one more before landing. By the time I had taxied up, the Piper pilots had disappeared. I had no idea where they had gone. Surely, it wasn’t into the dentist’s office that strangely is located in a hangar at the airport.

Continued…

Flight to Kirksville - Part 4

We taxied onto the ramp past an empty twin-engine turboprop, slowly loping along as I looked for a parking spot with tie-down ropes. Much to my surprise, there weren’t any. So, I pulled us into a spot that was convenient and shut the engine down.

“I can’t believe there aren’t any tie-downs,” I grumbled. “I left ours at home since there had been some last time.” Our last visit had been at the end of summer for the Ayers family reunion. “Where is everybody?”

“I don’t know,” Connie said. “I told my mom what time we would be here.”

I put the control lock and the throttle lock in place and then started gathering up our cockpit items and storing them in my flight bag. I hadn’t brought any chocks, either; and there were none around, so I felt like I was getting out of the airplane naked. The airplane was at risk, and I hated how that was feeling.

“There they are,” Connie said.

I looked up and saw Connie’s father and mother ambling out toward us. Connie’s sister in law Julie and her son Marty had arrived at the same time. We hopped out of the airplane one at a time, a necessary ritual in the Cheetah since two people at the rear edge of the wing at the same time could rock her back on her tail. An airplane is, after all, a see-saw with wings, and this one continues that behavior on the ground. We engaged in the requisite “hello’s” and handshakes and hugs. They asked how the flight was. The weather was fine, I said, but we had headwinds and it was bumpy all the way. The talk quickly shifted to where to go for supper.

“I hate to interrupt this,” I said. “But there are no tie-downs here. I need to go somewhere and get some rope.”

I explained that they had been here during our last visit, and that had lulled me into a false sense of security, so I had not brought ours with us. While Connie’s dad, Louis, Marty, and I talked about where the best place was to get some rope, Julie got on her cell phone and busily talked to someone. We decided to go to a hardware store on the nearest end of Kirksville.

Connie and I piled into her parent’s sporty red Chevelle and drove down to Westlake’s hardware store. Dad and I made our way back to the ropes, where there were several different types in either pre-manufactured lengths or cut from a spool. I picked up a bundle of twenty-five feet of yellow nylon rope and headed to the cash register. We paid for it, piled back into the car, and headed back to the airport.

When we got there, we found the airplane had already been tied down! As it turned out, Julie is quite well-connected in Kirksville, and she had called one of the gentlemen who worked at the airport and harangued him about there not being any tie-downs. He had to come out and meet a corporate twin coming in anyway, so he had traveled out early, gotten some rope, and tied the Cheetah down for us. I shook his hand, thanking him for his courtesy, and telling him how much I appreciated it.

I would later learn why there were not tie-downs there. Turns out it is a “winter thing”.

Kirksville is a nice little town, its economy driven by Truman State University and agriculture in the area. Connie had lived there a large portion of her life, though she had grown up in much smaller Green City, some twenty-miles west. The Kirksville airport is actually about five miles south of the city and has a single paved runway, 18/36, that is 6000 feet long and 100 feet wide. The charts show a small grass runway perpendicular to it. Runway 9/27 is 1393 feet long, 100 feet wide, and hard to see from the air. (I’ve never seen it at all.) The airport’s taxiways connect the Terminal and the hangars with 18/36. Taxiway Alpha (A) runs the length of the runway. Taxiway Bravo is at roughly mid-field and connects to the Terminal. Taxiway Charlie is south of Bravo, a little more than halfway down the field again from Bravo, and could be used for “intersection” takeoffs to the north, as Bravo could be if you were going north or south. (Me, I’m a strong believer in the old saying that “Gas and runway behind you are useless” and rarely use intersection takeoffs at all.)

The airport also has a full compliment of runway lights there as well as LOC/DME, VOR, VOR DME RNAV, and GPS approaches. There is talk of instituting an ILS there, especially after a commuter airliner crashed on an approach in the dark, killing nine people. A regular commuter airline connection from St. Louis flies in twice a day and corporate props and jets in addition to light plane traffic make up the rest of the sporadic traffic flow. Since 9/11, there has also been a small contingent of Transportation Security Administration agents there, located in a small office in the Terminal building. They’re there to screen the passengers for the commuter airline and the occasional Boeing 737 that diverts there for weather. (It has happened.)

We ate dinner at the Ponderosa, a steak house on the road back into Kirksville, and the we made our way back to Connie’s parents home in Green City.

Continued…

Flight to Kirksville - Part 3

Talk about a Freudian slip. During my first write-up of this leg, I totally forgot what was one of the more important things about it. I’ve added that to this write-up. Look for changes surrounding the Rogers departure.

I had never been in this part of the country before. As we plugged northeast toward Fort Smith, I gazed at the long highway bridges on the ground, grey cement ribbons braced on arches that spanned miles, carrying car traffic north and south. Beyond, the brown land twisted into mountain green. Ahead of us, I could see the large expanse and crossed runways of Fort Smith Regional Airport, and we listened to the approach controller vector a helicopter and a Cessna practicing instrument approaches around the airport, though we saw neither. Slowly, we ambled across the wide girth of the Arkansas River just north of the airport, passing east of the Twin Cities airport on the river’s north side. Approach switched us to a different controller on a different frequency, and as the GPS showed us rolling inside of thirty miles to go, I requested lower. Approach cleared me to descend; and once again, I reduced power only slightly and started a gentle but higher speed approach, clicking off 120 knots over the ground for the first time this trip.

The city of Springdale crawled underneath us as we looked down one of the long runways of Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport to our left. I could see a clearing on my nose that could be Rogers, but the GPS was telling me that our destination was further away. Still descending, we crossed slightly to the west of Bentonville’s Municipal Airport, gazing down at the airplanes on its ramp, when Approach cleared me for a straight in approach to runway 01 and told me to switch to Rogers tower. I called them ten miles out.

“November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, not in sight,” the controller said. “Report a 3 mile final. Winds two four zero at six.”

“Wilco,” I replied. No sooner had I said that than I wondered if I had heard the winds right. Surely, the tower wasn’t landing me with a tailwind.

We pressed toward the runway, easily in sight now. I kept the letdown going, called three miles, and started trying to slow the airplane down. As I crossed the runway threshold, I felt fast as hell; and as we settled toward the runway, me fighting turbulence, the bottom dropped out when we were still about ten feet up. I slammed on the power and caught us but had added a little too much; we started climbing. I pulled the power back again to stop the climb, gauged the remaining runway as adequate, and settled us back down again. We touched down a bit firm and close to the mid-field turn off. Not wanting to go all the way to the end of the runway, I stood on the brakes pretty hard and got us slowed just enough to spin us onto the taxiway. The tower told us to taxi to the ramp and remain his frequency. I acknowledged the call.

Beaver Lake Aviation’s white, small, Southern mansion style building was to my left next to a ramp full of corporate jets. Trying to stay clear of them lest my airplane get blown over when they left, we taxied around their right side, angling toward a humble spot near a fence where the only other single-engine airplane sat. I spun my airplane around in front of it and waited for a second to see if a lineman came out; when no one did, I shut the engine down and Connie and I crawled out. So far, things just weren’t going well here.

Several people in business suits were filing out of a corporate jet we passed as we walked toward the FBO. We also passed a lineman who asked us if we wanted gas, and I answered I did. We pressed on inside the building where the large lounge and travelers in business attire let us know that this FBO was owned by Wal-Mart for a reason. I immediately felt out of place, especially when no one behind the desk even acknowledged us. But I had more pressing matters at hand and searched the hallways for the bathrooms. I found them just down the hall, past the car rental agency where the woman there became the first to say “hello” to us, and next to the Café that I discovered had closed at 1:30 p.m. It was open for breakfast and lunch only. Good thing Connie had made a couple of sandwiches and put them in the airplane. We wound up buying some Cokes from a vending machine and eating the sandwiches at an empty table in the café and feeling neglected.

I paid for my gas at the desk and we wondered back out to the Cheetah. As we walked out to the airplane, I was a bit nervous. I had tried to spot the airplane out of harm’s way, but any of the Gulfstreams or Challengers or Lears sitting on the ramp could easily damage my airplane with a careless move. One of the jets was manning up, but it was far enough away where it wasn’t a threat. Another Lear spotted behind and to the right of the Cheetah was starting its engines, though I wasn’t too worried about it since it could easily taxi around the airplane on its far side. Whoever had fueled the airplane had put a single set of chocks around the nose gear, and that made me feel a little better, though not much. With its freely castoring nosewheel, the only effective way to chock the airplane is to put chocks on either side of both mains. Chocking the nosewheel was the second best move. It had at least some chance at being effective.

Popping open the fuel caps in each tank, I looked in to make sure the fuel was colored blue, especially important at an airport that fuels jets. The tanks were full, which meant that, with me and Connie being the size we are and with our bags, the airplane would be within pounds of its gross weight limit. I sealed the tanks up and did a quick walk around looking for normal function and for damage. I found nothing unusual. So, I climbed in the cockpit and strapped back in as Connie climbed aboard and I fetched my pre-start checklist.

As I did, I knew something was out of whack but didn’t know what until I came to the pre-start step that said “MASTER – ON”. OOPS! It ALREADY was! I wasn’t too worried about it until I hit the starter button. Instead of wheeling around freely, the engine hit twice and the prop stalled, engine groaning. The battery was out of juice! I was shocked I could have run it down by simply leaving the Master on in some forty-five minutes, but then I remembered that the Cheetah’s bastardized light wiring had some of the radio lights wired on even when the light rheostat on the instrument panel was turned off and there was, of course, an electric turn and bank indicator. (In our Cheetah, the fuel tank gauges are always lit and were designed to be; what I have goes beyond that.) OH NO!

“My God!” I gasped. “Damn it! We could be stuck here until we get the battery recharged.”

I shut everything down and we sat for a few minutes, just to see if I might get enough of a battery “bounce-back” to get the engine started. I ran through the checklist again, hit the starter button, the engine groaned and stalled. We waited a few minutes more with everything shut down and tried it again. I got lucky, and the engine roared to life!

“THANK GOD!” I breathed, even as I glanced at the Ammeter with a needle deflected well over into the + side. It slowly moved back toward the center. We were SAVED! HALLEJUAH!

After waiting for a Learjet to get past, I taxied down the ramp toward the taxiway. Calling Rogers Ground on the radio I got no response, so I switched up to Tower Frequency to find out I had written down the wrong frequency. Once I got synched up, Ground directed me to taxi to the runway. Spotting a wide area to my right where I could do my take-off checks, I asked Ground for permission to stop there. They, instead, directed me to a run-up area further down the taxiway I couldn’t see from where I was.

We did the takeoff checks, and everything checked out; so I requested takeoff clearance and got it, lined up on the runway, and pushed the throttle forward. The takeoff was smooth but almost as soon as we got in the air, I started feeling that our climb rate was just too low. As we cleared about three hundred feet, I did the only thing I could do to see if I could get an improvement, i.e., I slowly pulled the mixture out to lean it. Sure enough, the engine cranked up another hundred RPM or so. While the field elevation was only 1358 feet, it was a warm day, so the density altitude could easily have been at three thousand…or more. I had learned early on with this airplane that leaning it was a function of the density altitude, not the altitude shown on the altimeter. The Pilot’s Operating Handbook said leaning was not necessary until five thousand feet, but several climbs at gross weights and on hot days had proven to me that four thousand was more like it.

I had requested flight following, so we checked in with Razorback Approach as we passed through four hundred feet. A few moments later, we got high enough for him to see us and he called “radar contact” as we turned northeast. This would be the last leg of our trip, and I had decided to fly past Springfield, Missouri just to get a look at it from the air. We were into Missouri airspace only a few moments later, and as we tracked the Missouri towns in front of us on the charts, Razorback handed us off to Springfield Approach.

I had thought that since we had cleared the mountains, the turbulence might let up. It didn’t. If anything, it got worse, making me work almost every instant to keep the nose lined up with the correct heading as well as hold my altitude. As we approached Springfield, marveling at how big the Regional airport was, we went through a washboard ride which culminated by the approach controller asking me to turn my mode Charlie off. It was reading 600 feet, he said. I complied, as we pressed past the city heading east northeast. In the distance, we could see the tall buildings of downtown to the south and the runways from Springfield’s Downtown airport. We watched several aircraft land and depart Regional, and then pressed on toward the green, flat plains beyond.

The shortest distance course from where we were to Kirskville would have had us turn significantly northeast. The problem was that there were several Military Operation Areas and even a Restricted area in our projected line of flight. Though I could fly through the MOA’s VFR, using flight following and air traffic control services put doing so in a different light. ATC will generally fly one around those areas; so, rather than get into any kind of a squabble, we purposely followed a Victor (low altitude VOR) airway that paralleled the MOAs’ southern edge. The GPS’s were especially helpful in keeping us clear, the Airmap 100 giving us slightly better resolution than our panel mounted KLN-89B.

Ahead of us, I could see the forested, rolling hills that housed the myriad of lakes that make up Lake of the Ozarks country. The hills came up only a thousand feet or so, but they still looked like small mountains from my perch. I had flown the country north to south and vice versa before instead of our southwest to northeast line; the bumpy relief of the land jumped out at me. It would have been impossible to miss it, though, just from how the airplane was acting; turbulence really kicked us around, again. I was convinced that the mini-mountains had something to do with that. Following the GPS and the VOR, I continued taking us northeast, hugging the southern edge of the Truman MOA’s and hoping the engine would hold up because there were few clear places to land. Forests and lakes took up most of the entirety of the ground below.

Springfield approach dropped us off with Columbia, and I checked in. The controller acknowledged he had radar contact but then said he could not see our Mode C.

“That’s ‘cause I turned it off at the request of Springfield Approach,” I answered. “He said he was reading 600 feet. I can turn it back on if you’d like to take a peek at it.”

“That’s up to you,” the controller replied.

“Okay. Coming back on.”

I switched the transponder from ON to ALT as the GPS units showed us we were just clearing the eastern edge of the MOA’s. A turn almost due north would take us direct to Kirksville. So, we rolled and turned to put Kirksville on the nose. I called Approach and requested sixty-five hundred; they approved it and I climbed the airplane up.

In the distance, we could see the large, rolling Missouri river and Jefferson City, the Missouri capital. A few minutes later, we were approaching Columbia; and were close enough to be able to make out details in the town. Connie began calling out landmarks she recognized, places she’d been, and looking for a hospital she thought a family member was visiting that day.

“November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform, “ Columbia called, “I’ve been watching your Mode C for a while, and it looks okay to me.”

“Roger,” I said. And that was okay with me. The turbulence had been especially rough just before Springfield had told me to turn the Mode Charlie off, so I suspected a not-so- tight connection somewhere might have scrambled the altitude encoder’s electrical brains. It had been working fine when I left Houston not to mention for most of the trip and was working fine now; I was not going to worry about it.

The air at sixty-five was a bit smoother; but as usual, I could see I was still in a layer of haze that cleared a thousand feet above. There was smoother air up there, I bet; and it was my usual luck not to be able to reach it.

We pressed on north and Columbia approach turned us loose. We flew on past Macon and Monroe City further east where tornados had ravished the town. Pulling the throttle back slightly, I began a long leisurely descent as we watched cars travel down highways below and listened to other lightplane pilots talking on the Unicom frequency of 122.8. We were trucking down at better than 120 knots. I had told Connie to tell her mom we would arrive at approximately 5:45 p.m., and I was working to hit that target. Leveling off at 2500 feet (1000 feet AGL), we pressed in toward the Kirksville north-south runway I had been looking at for at least ten miles. The wind favored landing on 18, so we easily paralleled the runway, making a left downwind, as I slowed us down and ran through the landing checklist. Pulling the power back more, I started us down and turned us onto left base and then onto final. We touched down smoothly on the runway. I was slowing too fast and the turnoff was at mid-field, so I added power to help us scoot down the runway. We turned in toward the terminal, stopping to let a four-place Cessna taxi down the outgoing taxiway. The place looked deserted. We had expected Connie's parents to meet us.

Continued…

Flight to Kirksville - Part 2

It was the curse of a very clear day. There was blue sky everywhere, but the winds were out of the north and vigorous, bouncing us around and keeping me active on the controls. Passing over the white triangular cone of the Daisetta VOR, we jogged ever so slightly to the north to make a beeline to Lufkin’s VOR and its airport slightly beyond. The land below was green with forests, though far to our left we could see the irregular shape of Lake Livingston. Using the maps and the GPS units, we tracked our slow progress across highways and small towns until we crossed the Lufkin VOR and could see the crossed runways of Lufkin’s airport beyond. From our perch, we could see the southern outlines of Nacogdoches and some kind of grass fire directly in our path, its black smoke drifting slightly east and below our altitude. Nacogdoches airport soon snaked below us as well, putting us about forty nautical miles from our first stop at Longview.

The airspace surrounding Longview was and is a Terminal Radar Service Area or TRSA. I had looked up its radio contact frequencies and put them on my navigational log, so I dialed our communications radio to the proper frequency and listened to the controller as we approached. Pulling back the throttle slightly, I began a long, leisurely descent. Keeping the power up would help keep the engine’s cylinder heads from cooling off too fast, cut our overall fuel consumption, and give us some added speed. With about thirty miles to go, I announced my arrival to East Texas Approach. He gave me a squawk but couldn’t see me yet; a few miles later, he announced he had radar contact. He told us to expect runway 35. That was fine with me. Not only would I not have to maneuver but the runway was the one closest to our destination, requiring only one turn off the runway onto a taxiway that fed directly to KRS Express Aviation.

Long ago, when we had first considered flying the Cheetah to Missouri, my wife and I we had talked about the logistics that were important to us when we stopped. At our ages, it was a sad fact of life that bathroom access was important to us. I had read a lot of good reviews about KRS at AirNav.com, and so we had stopped there to check it out even though I could have gotten cheaper gas at an airport 20 miles east and more in a direct line between Houston and Kirksville. We had been so impressed with KRS we vowed to stop there whenever we could. Secondly, the Longview airport (formal name “East Texas Regional”) had plenty of IFR approaches for the inevitable day when I got IFR current and proficient again.

KRS is located in a big, white, new hangar with showroom floors. The lounge has leather sofas, a good-sized TV, glass tables with aviation magazines, a popcorn machine, some recently baked cookies, and is collocated with the receptionist’s desk where you pay for your gas or whatever else you choose to buy there. The flight planning room has two new computers and another TV and some more furniture where pilots with some extra time on their hands can flight plan or watch a movie. There are some soft drink vending machines to assist with your thirst, and a small hall empties into an area with a table some chairs and the doors to the restroom. The men’s restroom comes complete with a toilet, a shower, sinks, and gold accoutrements, making it a restroom fit for a king or the discriminating corporate pilot who might as well be treated well by somebody. The women’s restroom is just as nice but there is no shower; at least, that’s what my wife tells me and I have to take her word for it or get into trouble exercising my old fighter RIO genes.

We knew KRS had class before we even saw the insides by how they treated us as we taxied up in our “low rent” Cheetah. The lineboy came out to direct us in and taxied us up, chocked us after I shut the airplane down, and offered to fuel the airplane. From the way they acted, you would have thought we had taxied up in Daddy’s King Air or in Air Force One. But it was only us in T-shirts and ball caps getting out of our airplane that needs a paint job. If there was one thing that was obvious to the most casual observer, it was that we were not going to be big spenders.

After gassing up the Cheetah and eating some popcorn and a cookie, we hopped back in the Cheetah and took off to the north again. We began a climb up to forty-five hundred feet to give us about two thousand feet altitude over the eastern end of the Ozark mountains ahead. But there was still an hour over Texas and Arkansas plains to go. It seemed to take us forever to get to altitude and level off into any kind of a reasonable cruise. While not checked in, we listened to Fort Worth Center handle his traffic and once calling us as traffic to someone he was controlling, but neither of us saw the other. Soon, we could see the outlines of Texarkana at a distance off our right wing and the large snake that was the Red River cutting the land ahead of us.

In the distance, we could already see the ragged outlines of the Ozark mountains. While my charts reassured me we were above them, the mountains ahead and far in the distance looked as high as we were and threatening. Using GPS and VOR tracking, we were making a beeline to the Rich Mountain VOR just west of several Military Operations Areas. I planned to hop on the VOR and track toward Fort Smith down a mountain valley that would keep me clear of a Restricted Area southeast of the town. But first, I had to cross two razorback-like ridges with a highway in between them; and though the ridges were easy to spot, I never saw the highway. I could see east toward Mena, Arkansas where I knew a pilot friend of mine had stopped to gas up several hours ahead of us; he was on a “quick in-and-out” flight to Sedalia, Missouri in a Cessna 120 to take care of some family business.

I spotted the VOR ahead of us and sitting on one of the ridgelines, looking more like we were going to hit it rather than fly over it. As we approached, I asked Connie to help me keep an eye out for other airplanes doing the same thing; flying directly over a VOR always made me nervous since the odds of someone else doing the same thing were fairly high; and, in our case, we were making just enough of a northerly jog to require a change in VFR cruising altitudes, making us more vulnerable than normal to a collision. Thankfully, no one was there but us; we hit the VOR and turned north toward Fort Smith with only the turbulence, mountains below, and blue sky above for company.

As we plugged northeast, I used the charts to locate a nearby city and lake on our left. Ahead, a mountain jutted out of the otherwise flat valley, and we scooted down its ragged west side, as the city of Fort Smith loomed head of us. On the radio, I contacted Razorback Approach who gave us a squawk and asked about our destination, which was Rogers Field. We were headed to Beaver Lake Aviation, the only FBO we knew of owned by Wal-Mart. Hopefully, we wouldn’t be met by protestors; we were only stopping for gas.

To be continued...

Flight to Kirksville - Part 1

One of the reasons we bought the Cheetah, or at least one of the rationalizations we used to buy it, was so we had the freedom to travel back to my wife’s home in Missouri when we wanted. Of course, when you’re talking about flying anywhere under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), then the words “freedom” and “want” take on a qualified meaning. That’s especially true in the springtime when fronts start pushing through the country like speeding railroad trains. To accommodate that, I had set aside a full week to get up there and back. It was the week spanning from March 11 through the 19th.

I had watched the weather reports all week. Our initial intent had been to fly up on Saturday, the 11th. However, the trip up looked marginal to me; and every forecast indicated that I would have much better weather in a few days. So, I told my wife we were not going to launch out on the weekend; and that we would look at flying up early in the next week.

Of course, as the day wore on and I watched the forecasts, I became convinced that we could have made it up there. That night, though, and on Sunday, Missouri got hit with almost one hundred different tornadoes. Though the Kirskville area we had been headed for did not get hit, they did take a severe beating from golf-ball sized hail. Had we gone up, our airplane would have been sitting out on the line at the Kirksville airport. I was and am fairly convinced it would have been totaled.

First lesson: You not only have to consider the weather on the flying leg but must also consider what the weather’s going to do after you arrive, even if the plane is going to be on the ground.

On Monday, as I studied the forecasts, I became convinced that we only had one shot at making the trip that week. That was to leave on Tuesday and return by Friday. It would be a severe clear day all the way up on Tuesday, though fronts were supposed to roll through the mid-section of the country after that. Saturday and Sunday were starting to look problematic both in Missouri and in Houston, where a stalled cold front and a second one pushing through were going to make it a wet weekend or so said the forecast. The difficulty in judging forecasts more than a few days in advance is that very little aviation weather products are available and you become dependent on the generic forecast with some probability of rain and thunderstorms. So, thumb-rules have to be applied with the knowledge that they are inherently un-rigorous in their application. Twenty to thirty percent chances of rain are acceptable. Forty to fifty means you will encounter rain but the ceilings are probably marginal VFR. Sixty or more means the rain will be fairly continuous and there’s a good chance ceilings will be IFR.

Of course, the trick is to watch the weather as it actually develops and see how close you are.

Based on what I was seeing and how the weather forecasts over the past week had matched what had happened, I thought that the best chance for us to get out was on Tuesday and to get back was on Friday. Saturday and Sunday were starting to look like washouts in Houston, though the weather forecast was saying that there would be few problems between Kirksville and Longview, Texas, our last planned stop before reaching home. So, Connie and I agreed to give that schedule a try. While the weather did not look too great for getting back into Houston on Saturday or Sunday, that would still give us two extra days to mull things or try to sneak back in one airport at a time.

Tuesday did turn out to be a CAVU day (Clear air, Visibility Unlimited). We took off from Pearland at about 8:50 a.m., a bit later than I had wanted but not bad considering how hard it is to get Connie to get anywhere in the morning. We climbed up to fifteen hundred feet in a beautifully blue and almost cloudless sky and leveled off heading east, flying over the houses that were Friendswood and between the grey ribbon highways of NASA Road 1 and FM 518. As we passed south of the open, grey, striped, and green patch that was Ellington Field and the white block buildings of Johnson Space Center, I called Houston Departure on 134.45 with a request.

“November 9848 Uniform, say your request,” Departure answered.

“Yes, sir. We’re VFR to Greg County airport; requesting flight following.”

“Give me the designator for that airport…and say your requested altitude and route.”

“Golf-golf-golf,” I answered, “and we’ll be requesting fifty-five hundred and headed toward Daisetta.”

The controller gave me a squawk and asked me to IDENT. I complied.

“Radar contact,” The controller said. “N9848U, you’re cleared into the class B airspace; climb and maintain three thousand for now and continue on course.”

“Four eight-uniform, cleared into the class B and leaving fifteen hundred for three thousand.”

I pushed the Cheetah’s throttle in all the way and raised the nose gently to maintain a 100 mph climb. We edged upward and entered the invisible Class B airspace, pointing the nose to the northeast to cross the north end of Galveston Bay. We passed over the boats, yachts, restaurants and carnival rides of Kemah, crossed over the stacks and pipes of petroleum plants of La Porte, and watched the twin wire-tressed spires of the Fred Hartman Bridge slide down our left side. Reaching three thousand, I pushed the nose over and let the Cheetah pick up speed. But we were already in the strong north winds that would plague us all day and were barely making a hundred knots across the ground.

We were too far east to see Houston Intercontinental Airport as we passed it; instead, we contented ourselves with tracking roads, power lines, and small towns as our two GPS units led us northeast. I was steering both by the black line drawn on my chart and my panel-mounted KLN-89B GPS unit while Connie was tracking us on my handheld Airmap 100 GPS. My first checkpoint was the Daisetta VOR, and I was riding not only the GPS steering toward it but the VOR needle in my Nav/Comm radio as well. As we neared it we also cleared Houston’s airpace, and the departure controller “told us to maintain VFR” and switched us to Houston Center. We checked in, and I informed the controller who was busier than a one-armed picture hanger that we were with him and climbing to fifty-five hundred. The controller rogered the call and then left us for the airliners and high-flying airplanes that had most of his attention. The winds weren’t forecasted to be any better at fifty-five than thirty-five, but I was hoping I might get out of the turbulence that was bouncing us. It was a vain hope. Nothing improved.

To be continued…