Into the Flatlands
Posted Thursday July 18, 2019
I awoke this morning in Miles City, Montana, in the Fairbridge Inn just outside the city limits. I found it amusing that the hotel was just across I-94 from the city line for no very good reason. The area was rife with hotels, though there were definitely the inside the city hotels and then the outside the city hotels.
Last night, the power went out twice, once briefly, and then again for a minute or so before coming back. I looked out the window to find rain streaking the window where previously there had been calm blue sky and puffy clouds, and an angry black overcast. The booms I'd heard must have been thunder, and suddenly I was quite glad to have paid extra to put Norbert into a hangar instead of letting it sit out and experience the full ferocity of nature's sense of humor.
The lauded continental breakfast included with my room rate was the typical low-end hotel fare. I was surprised to see that the TV was blaring NBC instead of Fox News as I sat eating my tiny yogurt and soft bread. A family came in as I was finishing, and one of the children half-boldly asked me and the couple sitting one table over if we were watching it, and when we asserted that we weren't diligently flipped channels until finding Spongebob Squarepants. More palatable than the news, really.
I got to the airport around 9:30 and retrieved the plane from the hangar, enjoying the chance to do my preflight in the shade. The sun was out and beating down from the sky, and the scattered clouds scudded slowly across the aperture of the giant hangar door. The engine came gently to life (Norbert does not roar to speak of) just before 10, and I launched into the empty skies.
I noticed as soon as I got into Montana that I wasn't sharing the sky with many other planes. I figure this has two explanations. One is that flying an airplane is a comparatively expensive hobby, and thus considered frivolous even among people who could afford it. The other is that I was now far from the airspace the FAA considers to require a transponder.
A transponder is the piece of equiment in an airplane that responds to air traffic control's radar, and returns some information about the plane. Simple transponders return an altitude and a 4-number code set by the pilot, and the more modern ADS-B transponders such as Norbert sports return a whole bunch of information, most importantly including GPS position and tail number.
My traffic display depends on ADS-B to see other planes, so it makes sense that if they're not equipped with the new transponders, they won't show up. Montana and the northern plains are already well-stocked with libertarian-inclined folks who are unexcited about the government knowing any more about them than they already do, and this seems to go double for pilots. Any pilot forum will include a vocal "never ADS-B" faction who see the new tech as nothing more than a raw power grab, and a shortcut to the kind of fee-for-use and big-brother air surveillance system many other countries have.
My next stop was the city of Minot (pronounced MAI-not, not mee-NOH), in North Dakota. I was to meet my new friend Bob from the Biplane Forum in Maddock, ND this evening, and he had recommended the Dakota Territories Air Museum in Minot as a worthwhile diversion on the way.
I climbed Norbert slowly up to 7500 feet. Ever since crossing the Rockies, I noticed that particularly on the initial climbout from takeoff, I was pitching the nose too high, so that the plane was struggling to climb. It climbs best at 60 MPH indicated airspeed, which is adjusted by pitching up or down, the engine's output being fixed. I'm so used to flying the plane lightly loaded and at sea level that my natural pitch angle is about 10° too high on these 2000-3000 foot high airstrips. Add in some hot weather, and the effective altitude can easily reach 5000 feet. It's easy to forget that the plane doesn't perform as well in these conditions, and it's actually a cause of numerous accidents each year, so I try to be vigilant about it.
The Yellowstone river just outside Miles City
I started out following the Yellowstone River, which runs in a sinuous brown-green ribbon between Miles City and its airport and to the northeast. The river valley quickly gave way to rolling hills, which gradually morphed into ragged low peaks of bare rock, looking like the serrated teeth of the earth bursting through gums. I started seeing little square patches of red earth, and when I trained my little monocular on them, found myself looking at an honest to goodness oil rig, complete with cartoon-style rocker arm and rounded hammer-head. If I've seen one of these in person before, I don't remember it.
I spotted more and more little square patches of raw earth. Some of them started to sprout bright orange flames where they were burning off what I can only assume is waste gas, possibly methane. It seems like a shocking waste of energy to me, but I'm sure there's a sound economic reason for it. I considered whether they would make good emergency landing spots, and decided that they might, but would not be my first choice. I'm sure the oil companies would be pretty unhappy with me if I chose that course in case of the engine stopping.
Oil rigs in western North Dakota
My course between Miles City and Minot was a straight line, mostly because there was no point zigzagging around. The ground is universally flat, and the centers of population, small though they were, were at least as concentrated on that straight-line path as they would be by flying from cluster to cluster of buildings or tiny airports. It was interesting to see for myself that the oil fields of North Dakota are not Ralph Bakshi-esque hellscapes of smoking ruin, but perfectly normal looking green and brown rolling hills punctuated by tidy little pumping rigs.
At some point, as I was starting to wonder at not having heard from my ATC contact on the radio for a while, I heard a voice calling my tail number, said hello, and she replied, "Center was trying to ask you to switch to Minneapolis Center on 127.6." I thanked her and switched frequencies, and once again felt like I was making tangible progress eastward. Minneapolis! An airplane flying closer to me than the ATC antenna had relayed the message, which has happened to me once or twice in the past.
I was keeping my view of the map zoomed far enough out that I could see the whole path between Miles City and Minot, and this was around the halfway point between the two. I started assembling myself for arrival as Minneapolis switched me off to Minot Approach, and I started descending from the pleasant coolness of 7500 feet down to the traffic pattern altitude of 2700 feet.
The screen now showed more than one airplane in the air, and the Minot tower directed me to land on runway 26. I had offered to take either when he asked if I wanted 31 or 26, but the wind was running at 240 degrees and 19 knots gusting to 30. I was glad he didn't take me up on an offer to land on 31, it would have been a dangerous landing in my little plane and it was foolish of me to suggest.
On the ground at Minot/Magic City Airport (why Magic City? I don't know), an attendant directed me to the right when transient parking was clearly to the left, and I ended up having a few minutes of confusion before we got it sorted out. The temperature went up above 30° C, and I was instantly sweating. However, the folks at the FBO office were pleasant and efficient, and I found myself on my way with a free loaner car in a very few minutes.
First stop was Qdoba, which I chose mostly because I knew it would be quick. To my surprise, they had a vegetarian option listed right there on the sign, I didn't even have to make furtive hand signals to see if I could get something without meat layered through it. One messy quesadilla down, I drove the few blocks to the Dakota Territories Air Museum, and wandered the halls looking at the displays.
Replica Wright Flyer at the Dakota Territories Air Museum
They had sizeable WWII displays, and a full-size Wright Flyer replica, modeled on the one in the Smithsonian. The sign described the community effort between Minot and Fargo to build a pair of Flyers, each destined for the other city. Apparently they had blueprints from the original Flyer, and the sign was careful to explain that the blueprints were as measured from the plane, not as produced by the Wright Brothers. They were too busy bodging the world's first powered airplane together to spend time on something as frivolous as blueprints.
One of the Monocoupe 110s at DTAM
Further into the museum, they had a variety of interesting planes, including a pair of Monocoupe 110 racers from the 30s, which immediately put me in mind of my brother's rapidly maturing YA novel, which involves a radical monoplane in an alternate-history WWI era timeline. They had a few biplanes, which naturally captured my interest, since the whole point of this trip is to learn more about building a biplane.
C-47. Docent for scale.
In the next hangar, they had a variety of WWII aircraft, most of which are regularly flown, including a C-47 (or DC-3 as I'm more used to thinking of it) that will be flown to Oshkosh this year, with badly-painted latex invasion stripes -- "period authentic; that's how they would have done it," explained the surprisingly young docent to me when I mentioned the crudeness of the painting. "Plus," she continued, "they'll wash right off, since it's water-soluble paint." It made sense when I thought about it: the orders would have come with the least possible lead-time to prevent them from leaking to the Nazis, so all available personnel would have been scrambling to deploy any bristled appliance that would carry paint and get their three white stripes and two black stripes onto all the planes that would be in the next sortie.
DTAM's Hawker SeaFury
Next I walked out to where I'd seen some WWII era fighters lined up in front of the big hangar, and the docent pointed out Warren Pietsch, who Bob had specifically mentioned I should talk to. We had a brief conversation about the planes and how they would be flying to Oshkosh as well, then he had to run off to fly a currency flight to satisfy the airshow officials.
I realized it was already 3:40 (having crossed from Mountain into Central time, I lost another hour without really realizing it), so I excused myself and got myself back to the FBO at Magic City -- a mere 3 minute drive away. Norbert was waiting patiently for me on its tiedowns in the twenty-gusting-to-thirty knot wind, and I fired it up and taxied out for my departure to the southeast. I texted Bob and let him know that it would be 6 before I got to Maddock, since I needed to stop for fuel at Harvey. It was obscurely pleasing to land at another Harvey so many miles from my own Harvey.
The landing at Harvey was actually pretty exciting. The same 20-30 knot wind that had been present straight down the runway at Minot was now 30° off the runway, making for a pretty substantial, and variable, crosswind. Even so, I managed to land in one try, and the airplane didn't even flip over despite the wind's best efforts. One thing I don't appreciate about the Champ is how the control stick cannot be moved to the full aft and full left or full right positions -- my legs are in the way, and there's no way to get them far enough out of the way to reach the stops. This makes crosswind landings more exciting than they need to be, since the ailerons (roll controls) are important for dealing with crosswinds. The upwind wing lifted as I was taxiing down the runway at Harvey, and had the gust been stronger, the plane might well have flipped. This is also a fine reminder that you really have to fly the plane until it's tied down. The flight controls were definitely all in play as I taxied to the fuel pump.
Norbert and Harvey's fuel shed, and the windsock that's seen better days
Harvey had an interesting contrivance: a little shed was built around the fuel pump so that it was fully enclosed. This serves double duty of protecting the pump and credit card terminal from the elements, as well as protecting the whole from miscreants. You have to enter the airport's radio frequency to gain entry. It's published, but the chance of a random hooligan having immediate access to it at the same time they feel like vandalizing a gas pump is slight.
Harvey also gave me my first really remarkable gas price: $4.14 per gallon. The previous best was $4.20 at Townsend in Montana. A slight difference to be sure, but the lowest I've seen advertised anywhere was $4.19.
I arrived at Maddock with Bob's text ringing in my ear (if that makes any sense): there's a farmer's grass field east-south-east of town if the crosswind is too much. Fortunately the crosswind was about the same as it had been at Harvey, and I was able to get Norbert on the ground with a minimum of hijinks. There were definitely hijinks, but they weren't extreme. I taxiied over to the large, recently-built open hangar and spotted Bob surveying his domain.
Bob is a softly-spoken, diffident man in his late 40s or early 50s, born and raised in Maddock. He built a stunningly good-looking Starduster Too biplane with a thumping great 540 cubic inch Lycoming engine, which proudly and justifiably sports a sticker declaring it an award winner at Oshkosh 2016. His build took 15 years, which is making me feel better about my general assumption that I'll be at this for 10-20 years myself.
We talked of many things, including aviation in general, building airplanes, careers in aviation, as well as introducing ourselves to each other. After an hour or two, we adjourned to Harrimans, the best restaurant in Maddock. It's also the only restaurant in Maddock, but don't let that give you a negative impression. Bob rightly praised it as a good restoration of a historic building, and the work Maddock residents put into it shows. It's a combination restaurant, coffee bar, library, bar, and mini community center. I was surprised when he told me that Maddock is a town of only about 500 people, yet it sports Harrimans, as well as a grocery store, car parts store, pharmacy, and a dedicated community center.
After dinner (my predicted "grilled cheese and side salad" streak starting officially now), we went back to his house, on the farm where he grew up, and I met his wife Sherry (names may not correspond with reality, I'm shaky on names in the best of circumstances) and a couple of her friends who were wrapping up from a charity run they'd organized last weekend. We had a lively and wide-ranging conversation encompassing a brief rundown of who I am, as well as the run they'd organized, flying, horses, the nature of war and veterans, upcoming concert plans at the state fair, and lots of good-natured ribbing of Bob, saying he should be flying to Oshkosh as well.
At the end of the night, Bob dropped me off at the Grand Prairie Inn, a converted dorm house for the nearby school, where I have a small room with an attached bathroom, and, blessing of blessings, access to laundry machines. My "one change of clothes" plan is running into the reality of warmer weather than I was really expecting, for all the lip service I gave it. When I get to Oshkosh I may have to acquire another t-shirt or two just so I don't feel sticky and stinky anew every day.
Of course, I couldn't get to bed immediately, as I had to deal with my own lack of memory as I realized I'd promised the use of my house while I was gone to more than one person: my brother would be in town for his highschool reunion, and I'd said he could use it the same weekend Annex would be using it for their retreat. It all worked out in the end, but by the time I finally got to bed, it was nearly 1 am. Of course, my body thinks that's only 11 pm, but the sun keeps rising far too early, so my body is officially confused by this slow-motion jetlag. Proplag? Pistonlag? Norbertlag? Something-lag in any case.
Copyright © 2019 by Ian Johnston.