Oshkosh-Finally There!

We left BKL in great weather, clear skies but the visibility was restricted to 4 miles in fog and mist. We filed to Rockford ILL and made a STMP reservation from RFD to OSH leaving at 1300 Local.

My strategy for filing to RFD rather than OSH was I didn’t want to get the tour of southwestern Illinois that Chicago Center gives to IFR AirVenture inbounds. We had done this once a few years back where we filed to Gary Indiana which put us at the bottom of Lake Michigan so they couldn’t dick us around too much with a routing because GYY is inside the Chicago Bravo.

Well as typical we get cleared as filed only to have Fort Wayne approach give us the '58V we have new full route clearance advise when ready to copy' routine.

Sure enough we get the approved routing south to Peotone Kankakee around the bottom of the airspace and 50 miles west of Chicago before we could head on up into RFD.

We had been looking at the weather up by OSH and saw that there was a 300 mile long area of heavy rain that was moving southeastward and looked like it was going to cross the field. I called Flight Watch and they confirmed what we were seeing and also told us that there was a convective sigmet associated with the system we were looking at.

I had Judy program direct Oshkosh into the Garmin 396 to determine how long it would take to get there and whether, from our present position, would we have enough fuel to make it there with legal IFR reserves. Our thoughts were that if we stopped in RFD we would probably be spending the night there as the storm we were watching was expected to linger on for the balance of the day.

My strategy at that point was to see first if we had the fuel, then if we did, see if we could cajole ATC into changing our destination to OSH. We appeared to have the fuel and reserves if we were cleared direct but the preferred IFR routing during the show has you go to Janesville WI, Madison then V9 into Wittman Regional.

That would probably be too much out of the way to have legal reserves and with the XM showing light green returns already encroaching on the edge of the OSH delta airspace my thinking was see if we could keep the IFR but if the clearance was onerous cancel and go VFR where there were numerous other airports on the way in there we could duck into if the weather turned bad.

We were told to contact Rockford Approach and on the initial call up the controller told us to descend to 4000 and expect the visual for RWY 29 at RFD. I started down and a few minutes later called him back. ‘Rockford approach Mooney 58 Victor question?’ is how I started the dialog. On my next transmission I told him that we were bound to OSH and believed that if we landed at RFD we would be stuck there for the balance of the day. I said we’d like to continue IFR but if we couldn’t-we were prepared to go VFR. But since we had come all the way from Connecticut, and were unfamiliar, we’d appreciate staying IFR.

The controller comes back and asks if we had a STMP slot and I tell him we did but it was out of RFD rather than BKL and,  oh by the way, it was for an hour later than the present time. He asks for the number and then tells me to stand by.

Meanwhile I have Judy pull the notam out and program the Garmin 396 to direct  RIPON FISKE for the VFR arrival. Judy starts briefing me on the VFR arrival when Rockford calls us back with a Cleared Direct Oshkosh maintain 4000.

Unbelieving our good fortune we set direct OSH into the KLN89B and start watching the time remaining on the FS450 Fuel Flow computer and comparing it with the GPS ETE information. Sure enough we had 30 minutes left to the airport and an hour and 40 minutes of fuel left. All we had to worry about was beating the storm to the airport.

Minny center tells us to expect the GPS Rwy 36 approach and we spot the field from 10 out and are cleared to land on the ‘Orange dot’

We taxi around the airport and go to the north 40 where we are sent to row 502 which is the second row in the campground. The sky opened up as we set up camp but in our relief of getting there we hardly notice. Oshkosh year 9 starts right now.