Oh Wait, Arrival Delays?
Posted Sunday July 21, 2019
As I type this, I'm on the ground at Wautoma (Y50), sitting in the cockpit with my little keyboard in my lap. The tablet computer that normally hosts my aviation map and traffic display is twisted to the landscape orientation in its holder, and I'm answering the occasional question as attendees at the Wautoma EAA chapter's pancake breakfast pass by.
This morning was another ridiculously early one. I got to bed around 11:30, and set the alarm for 4:45. Sleep was fitful, though I was better off than my co-inhabitants: I have a fairly thick air mattress, and they were sleeping on the thin foam self-inflating mattresses. I think I got my mattress for the Europe trip, which I definitely did not regret. In any case, I woke up with the alarm, rousing out of a vivid but now forgotten dream, and leapt into action. Stuff packed, drink of water, out to the airplane to preflight. I was unwilling to preflight last night, as I'd noticed lots of bugs flying around. I didn't want to presume my preflight check was done, only to have one of the fuel vents plugged up by some enterprising insect.
Despite waking up an hour before sunrise was supposed to happen, I didn't start the engine until about 5 minutes after sunrise, wasting precious time. Gary and Dave had mentioned that grass parking was closed, but I hadn't given it much thought. Getting to Oshkosh was the important thing, and I was being pretty single-minded about it.
However, I was off the ground with my precious six gallons of fuel only about 10 minutes after sunrise, and quickly reached the Marshfield airport (MFI) to tank up on their $4.49 gas. I was so relieved to be on the ground with a working fuel pump that I would have paid $6 without grumbling overmuch.
While I was there, a gent in a converted Cessna 172 taildragger came over and told me that grass parking was still closed, and it finally penetrated my monomaniacal little skull: no matter whether I made the 7:00-7:30 window or not, I wasn't going to be allowed to stay at Oshkosh this morning.
Tanks full, I launched to the southeast, intending to land at Wautoma (Y50) to wait out the parking closure. An hour later (thanking the weather again for forcing me down at Niellsville), I landed at Wautoma, coming in too fast on 31, and circling around to land on runway 8, which is a grass runway. I was too fast on that too, but not dangerously so. I have to get this too-fast habit in check or landing at Oshkosh is going to be a real challenge. It'll already be stressful enough. Between the fuel miscalculation and my too-fast landings, I'm a trifle concerned that I'm deluding myself about my skill in the plane.
Norbert on the ground at Wautoma
On the advice of a pilot from Minnesota (the same one who warned me about the grass parking areas being closed when I was at Marshfield), I signed up for the Oshkosh arrival texts. I've only gotten one message so far, which was that airplanes with tundra tires are allowed in. "Non-compliant aircraft will be taxied for departure," read the second half of that message.
There was a flurry of activity at five past nine, with four or five airplanes starting their engines almost simultaneously. I figured they'd just opened grass parking, but walked over to the pilots' lounge (where they're playing the feed of one of the Oshkosh cameras, and the tower audio) to confirm. Nope, no change. I found out later that the automated weather recording had updated, and they all assumed it would include the message that parking was open. Alas, no.
So now it's a waiting game. I'm thinking that spending today at Wautoma may be the right idea, just so that I can do the 7 am arrival I had planned to do this morning. It'll be the first day of the fly-in, so arrivals will be even busier, but if I'm there right at 7 the crowd shouldn't be too bad.
Later: 7:20 pm
I did indeed decide to stay at Wautoma tonight, aided by Oshkosh's decision not to open the vintage grass parking. So I'll camp here, and break camp bright and early, but fortunately not quite as bright and early as I had to do this morning. I need to be at Ripon at 7 am, which means I need to be taking off here right around 6:35, which means waking up around 5. Better than 4:45, but not by a whole lot. At least this time I should be able to get to bed earlier.
The waiting today was interesting. There were gaggles of disconsolate looking men standing around, uncomfortably not talking with each other in the pilots' lounge. Elsewhere little groups had formed, and a variety of aviatory tall tales were being told. I heard a few more mansplainers going to town, one of them explaining in a loud, declaratory voice that the Reason. We had Giant. Cockroaches (3 feet across) in. Prehistory? CARBON DIOXIDE! And trees. 300 feet. Tall! CARBON DIOXIDE! What do trees EAT? CARBON DIOXIDE? I wandered out of earshot for a minute or two, and when I came back into hearing, he was explaining how he didn't have anything against conservationists, of course, BUT... I didn't stick around to listen to the end. Pretty sure the giant bugs were due to an excess of oxygen, but I wouldn't DECLARE it as TRUTH.
I ended up falling in with a variety of pilots who'd come from the Okanogan valley in British Columbia. Some of them were flying RVs (a very popular type of kit-built airplane, all metal, with a cruise speed around 160 knots), and a few were flying a variety of certified planes. There was a lot of fairly random conversation to pass the time.
The Oshkosh ground controllers were stingy with information, but a few announcements came out. After the tundra tire announcement, which was mid-morning, there was a long information drought until 4:40, when unexpectedly the General Aviation parking was opened, but regretfully not the Homebuilt or Vintage areas. Following that message after a minute or two was effectively an "OMG we were wrong!" saying the Homebuilt area was open. No mention of Vintage, which is of course where I'm going.
It happened that about 20 minutes before that message came out, I'd decided to go up and do a tour of some local airstrips to try to improve my approach and landing technique before the stressful environment of Oshkosh arrival tommorow. I was finishing up my preflight when R2D2 warbled forth from my phone: all GA parking was open! The timing was ideal/terrible, and I ended up departing amidst a cloud of about 20 other planes all heading for the insane mess this announcement was sure to generate. Fortunately I was heading a different direction, and quickly left them to their madness.
I ended up heading to each of three different airports, situated about 20 miles from each other. The thing I wanted to work on was entering the traffic pattern, and getting myself down on the runway gracefully and not too fast. Honestly, too fast is much preferrable to too slow (too slow causes fatal accidents), but way too fast means I can't hit the spot I want to, and end up running much farther down the runway than I prefer.
One of the things about Oshkosh is that they have long runways that have been divided into a series of shorter consecutive runways by the addition of giant colored dots. So you might receive an instruction to land on (say) the yellow dot. With operations this close-packed, they don't mean "kind of near the yellow dot," they mean right on the dot, then slow down quickly and get off the runway as fast as possible so the next plane can land. If you land substantially far from your mark, you can screw up at least one other landing, and the carefully choreographed dance falls apart, delaying everyone.
So I wanted to make sure that I was able to land exactly where I expected to, and do it consistently, on my first approach to the airport. There's this weird mental thing that happens to me when I land, take off, circle the pattern, and land again. Suddenly my landings get way better, as if I've gotten myself into a landing mindset vs. an approaching-the-airport mindset. It's most vexing.
The first airport I went to, I screwed up the first two landings. The first, I was so fast that I gave up before I even touched the ground, and went around. The next was too fast, but bearable, and finally on the third I got it exactly how I wanted it. However, it was cheating, since going around the pattern had done its mental trick. So I moved on to the next one.
This time, I did better. It wasn't ideal, but it was much better. I seem to be turning back toward the runway too soon (the base leg of the pattern), so that I'm too high on final, and have to lose altitude too quickly. Like on a bicycle, when you go down a hill, you speed up. The plane has only a limited ability to put on the brakes, so it's much better to come down at the right rate to start with.
For the third runway, I slightly undershot my speed, and had to add some power to avoid getting too low on the final approach. Not ideal, but in this situation it was probably the better way to do it -- I was able to hit my intended spot, and wasn't going too fast as I started rolling. A little bump in the grass runway I was landing on bounced me up into the air as I applied power and took off again. I ended up running a bit over 2 hours for that practice run, but it was well worth it.
Upon my return to Wautoma (with a slightly too-fast approach, but not bad), I tanked up on their cheap fuel (a mere $4.16), and parked the plane on the grass so I could pitch my tent next to it. There are enough folks still here that sleeping in the lounge will probably not work, though I'll check. If it looks like most people are getting into their tents, I may sneak into the lounge for some hot hot overnight phone charging action.
And now, just shy of 8 pm, I feel a need for a meal, followed by a bit of a clean-up and doing what prep work I can for my departure tomorrow. At least the plane is already fueled, and most of what I'll need to do is a quick preflight check, light the fires, and launch. As I said yesterday, "hopefully in 12 hours I'll be on the ground in Oshkosh." This time it's looking more like it might be true.
Copyright © 2019 by Ian Johnston.