This year we departed for Oshkosh on Wednesday July 20th.. We give ourselves a window of four days to travel and hope to arrive by Saturday at the latest. That said, we plan our departure for the best weather day starting the Wednesday prior to the show. This year that day was Wednesday and our only concern was the heat wave that had been gripping the middle of the country and forecasted to move east.
We woke up Wednesday morning and the weather was pristine for a good portion of both of the routes we typically take. I decided on taking the southerly route around the bottom of the lakes as there was a disturbance across the northerly route which was bringing thunderstorms and rain to the Rochester, Buffalo, London, and Saginaw areas.
I prefer not crossing the Great Lakes for all of the normal reasons, single engine, cold water, no ditching experience, poor swimmer. We planned on a 7 am departure and filed for that. Somehow that got delayed to a more reasonable hour.
In reviewing Judy’s impeccable flight logs for the first leg, we started the engine at 10:13 AM, ATIS Bravo was current departure runway 26 and the pressure was 29.93. Liftoff was at 10:25 am and our climb was staggered from three to six, seven and finally eight thousand feet approaching Sparta (SAX) VOR. Nine different controllers handled the flight which finished with the localizer 25 approach into Akron Fulton Airport in Akron Ohio. Landing was at 1:23 and shutdown at 1:26 where the outside air temperature was 35 degrees Celsius versus 32 degrees at altitude. Tach time in was 1946.2 which totaled a 3.3 hour leg. We took on fuel at Summit Air where the manager was working the line. He provided fantastic service and charged $5.57 a gallon for avgas on their Oshkosh special. The special was kind of deceptive though, as they advertised $4.94 a gallon conveniently leaving the three different state and local taxes off the airnav.com website.
We started at AKR at 2:35 and lifted off at 2:47 filed for Rockford Illinois. Chicago approach controllers are as brusque as their New York associates and they let the smaller city guys deliver their bad news for them. We filed a simple Slant Golf flight plan via READS MFD JOT. I lifted this flight plan from fltplan.com as the last ATC clearance for a piston airplane between these two locations. But like New York the Chicago controllers won’t allow piston single IFR aircraft inside their Bravo airspace unless they’re specifically filed to a location within that airspace. As we were filed to Rockford they directed us “around the Horn” (their term). We were advised of a change to our clearance by Fort Wayne then South Bend approach. There was a 20 knot on the nose headwind and it was hotter than hell in the airplane. We opened the roof vents which blew 90 degree air on our heads and necks but because it was moving we left it open.
Approaching Rockford, the temperature increased another degree. The oil temperature was elevated and the prospect of a hot start on Rockford’s one hundred degree ramp was not too appealing. Likely we would have to spend more than an hour there. I checked the XM winds and noticed that when we turned north east we would be the beneficiary of a tailwind for the first time on the trip. Checking with the FS450 fuel flow computer showed we had 2:30 of fuel left. I was running rich to keep the oil temperature below 230 (red line is 245) so when we were clear “of the horn” I asked Chicago if it would be too much of a hardship to change our destination to Oshkosh. We received vectors until we were fifteen miles northeast of Rockford and were cleared direct to Oshkosh. As we turned north and east the groundspeed jumped to 175 so I pulled the power back to 55% and opened the cowl flaps as the airspeed decreased. We were blessed with 168 knot ground speed and oil temperatures back at 210. The FS450 showed we would land with 1.5 hours of fuel remaining as we entered the left base for runway 27 and landed.
EAA wasn’t fully staffed when we arrived so we exited the runway to the left into the grass. A minute or so went by when a lineman arrived on a scooter and led us into the north 40. He asked me where we wanted to go and I requested row 505 runway side. He marshaled us up and we counted ourselves as the 6th plane to tie down in the north 40. Three days later the entire section would be filled with aircraft tied up tail to tail. Judy had the tent set up before I got the airplane tied down and squared away. The heat was oppressive in the mid 90’s and we were blessed that the wind was blowing steady at 17 with gusts to 29.
Dinner the first night was at the Hilton Garden Inn and I begged Judy for a reprieve from camping while the hotel was still $99 a night. Reprieve denied, we ate at the bar and started walking back to our tent around 10pm CDT. It was still over 80 with the sun down but the breeze was our saving grace. Sleeping with the tent door wide open was remarkably bug free.
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