Oshkosh 2007 - Half way home

It's Saturday.. we spent the morning working the X-Plane booth. We made our way back to the campsite, which we tore down in the morning, where our plane was waiting. We crammed in the last few items and checked on weather. We were going to make our way to Moline to visit Sandi's family and her grand-baby. Skies were clear at Osh but OVC @ 2300 in Moline. With no tent or campsite to go back to, we departed 27 at Osh and headed south. We had to descend to 2000 feet about 40 miles out to stay under the cloud deck (love that obstacle clearance on the 496 even though the controller called out a big tower on our right) and then an uneventful landing at MLI. Hope to make it home tomorrow afternoon.

Oshkosh 2007 - Post #3

Wednesday, our 5th day here at Osh. Morning was spent in the X-Planes booth followed by an afternoon nap. We were woke up from our nap by rain. About 5:40ish we headed toward Camp Schoeller for the RV Family Reunion BBQ put on by Bob Collins. We ate well and then got rained on again. Fortunately it stopped after 15 mins and we were all able to come out from underneath the tent. We bumped into Carla Meyette and finally tracked down Brian at which point we talked for quite a bit until Bob made his closing speech and Darwin gave out a bunch of prizes. We bussed it half way back to homebuilt camping (HBC) and then had to walk the rest of the way. Our air mattress has a small leak and the fill motor is electric, so we have to haul the mattress down to the showers and air it up. :-)

Oshkosh 2007 - Post #2

Sunday - We walked down the flight line in the morning and watched arrivals most of the morning, listening to ATC. Things flowed pretty well, quite a few go around issued by the controllers. RV arrivals were clearly much better than the rest of the guys. Sandi was amazed at the number of pilots who come to Osh obviously unaware of the patterns, NOTAM's, etc. Sunday evening we met up with the X-Plane crew and had dinner at a pizza joint while we got educated on X-Plane. We'll be working the booth tomorrow morning.

Monday - After an $18 breakfast we vowed not to eat on the field again. We have a large cooler(which we used to ship our air mattress up in) and stocked it up with some food from Target across the street. The morning was spent in the X-Plane booth. This afternoon we napped, which would become our regular routine. After a nap, we walked down and watched the airshow for a couple of hours.

Tuesday - It is a cloudy Tuesday morning here on the grounds of Airventure. We spent the first half of yesterday helping out in the X-Planes booth. In the afternoon we watched the airshow and rested a bit. Today we'll spend the day walking around the flight line, flymart and exhibit halls.

Oshkosh 2007 - Day 1

We are here! Mike Schipper (AirGizmos) and his son Tim flew up in their RV-9A, along with Todd in his Sonex and stayed with us Friday night. We were wheels up 7am Saturday morning headed northbound but quickly ran into a very large cloud bank. We had to climb to 12.7k to get over the top. Todd went under in his Sonex at 2k. Northeast of KC, we were finally able to get down to some air and cruise the rest of the way up. Arrival was pretty good... not a lot of traffic but Mike and I did get caught up in some other traffic who merged in on us rather unpolitely. We are parked on row 303 towards the back. The day was spent getting camp setup. (We bought an Telluride Cabin Tent and it was the worst tent I've ever owned... so bad we threw it away when we left.) Doug Reeves and some of the TX contingent arrived and parked on the row behind us. Lots of RV's over in the homebuilt parking area, more than in homebuilt camping. The weather is great and looking good for the week!

EAA 88 Flyin

The Wichita chapter of EAA has an annual event at the El Dorado, KS airport each year. We have not been before and it was a 40min flight, so Ray and I had decided to fly down. We departed Ottawa at 7:40am right after Ray had called saying he was departing Gardner with Nathan in tow. Even with a 10min head start, we still managed to be ahead of them and I just couldn't stand throttling back any further to let them catch up. (Nathan has a Subie powered RV-9A that is a bit slow.) The trip down was great, smooth air, pretty scenery even with a bit of haze. The flyin was pretty good... probably a dozen RV's showed up and lots of other experimentals. The bummer of the deal is they charged $5/person just to park/be there... then another $5 for breakfast. We did get a 'plaque' for attending but big deal. Won't be back next year if they charge again. We departed and flew home as a 3-ship, doing all sorts of photo taking. (Photo's)

Looking forward to Oshkosh!

Ottawa Flood

I don't know what our official rainfall is yet but it was well over 10" in the last 4 days. The city of Ottawa had some major flooding. We went up for a short flight tonight to check it out from above.

Flooding pictures