I hadn’t made it to the sun and fun since 2006. I had a couple of years where I was supposed to fly down with a student and either their equipment or the weather didn't cooperate so I said to Judy at Oshkosh that we would have to make the trip to Sun and Fun. We made plans to meet friends from Beaufort NC at the show and our planned departure was set for April 9th.
Sure enough the eighth rolls around -the weather is pristine and while I wanted to leave after work on Thursday Judy told me that her boss had requested that she work on Friday the 9th. We looked at the weather on the 9th and decided that with the front passing and high pressure building in behind it that we would have a horrible ride in clouds as the low pulled away so we scrubbed and planned a Saturday departure. I woke up at 5:30 on Saturday and checked the weather. There was an overcast layer over NYC that was at 5000 and the freezing level coincidentally was at 5 as well. Even though there wasn’t an airmet Z in place with the freezing level at 5 and visible moisture at the same altitude we would encounter icing. I checked for PIPREP’s and sure enough a few passenger jets were encountering moderate rime climbing out of JFK and LGA. The tops were reported at 7200 feet. I knew that if we were to file southwest bound out of Danbury the route of flight would be CMK JFK V16 Dixie at 6000. Armed with that PIREP I knew that we’d be flying through the middle of the overcast. I decided to take off VFR and head towards Sparta NJ (SAX) and once half way there attempt to get a Bravo clearance to Solberg NJ (SBJ). We took off at 8:02 and as soon as we broke ground we were experiencing turbulence of the both hands on the yoke severity. We climbed to 3000 where it smoothed a little and flew west bound towards SAX. I called NY Approach and informed him of my plan and asked for a bravo clearance direct to SBJ at 3000. He told me that wasn’t going to work and offered 2000 down the Hudson as an alternative routing. We headed straight for the tappan zee bridge and were cleared into the bravo and down the river. We were instructed to contact LGA tower and on checking in e cleared us down to 1500 for the trip across the GW Bridge. We were taking quite a beating in the turbulence and I realized that my arms were sore from maintaining altitude in all the bumps. The mooney was pulled back to 19” and 2300 RPM to lessen the severity of the jolts but it was either updrafts or downdrafts with continual pitch and power changes
We cleared the corridor south of the Verrazano bridge and being early the NY approach controller I spoke with arranged for flight following to Kinston NC. We stayed at 3000 from Robbinsville thru Cedar Lake and then on into Symrna crossing the Delaware bay at Dover. We joined V1 at Salisbury MD and Judy requested that I climb as the turbulence was making her queasy, We climbed VFR to 6500 and were on top of the scattered layer and rewarded with a 35Kt tailwind. This pushed our groundspeed up to 190 and the ride smoothed out completely. We landed at Kinston NC (ISO) and picked up 30 gallons of fuel, a quart of 15-50 Aeroshell ate our sandwiches and filed to LAL a mere 3.5 hours away. We encountered nothing but clear skies light winds and a smooth ride all the way into Lakeland where I asked for the GPS 9 approach. I figured why fly ifr in vfr weather without getting an approach in.
We arrived in LAL at 4:30 and our friends had saved us the #1 spot (Row 1 position 1) as close as you could get. Our mission complete, 8.5 hours elapsed and just under 7 hours of flying. We were in Florida at the sun and fun. Maybe it took an hour or two more than an airline trip and was definitely more expensive than Jet Blue or Airtran . But I’d venture that when you factor in the drive to the airport, car parking, getting there a hour early, TSA screening lines, the flight itself, deplaning, luggage retrieval, car rental and then driving to the show from Orlando or Tampa I bet you we broke pretty close to even.
We used a little under 75 gallons of 100LL so the trip cost us $350 in Fuel and that was for two people and an incredible amount of baggage. So it was $175 a man one way. All in all it was a good trip. I’ll write more about the show and our experiences there next so stand by.
