Building in the Basement and Moving to the Airport
E-mail:
bill (at) repucci (dot) com
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Oshkosh 2008! Caution - Man running (with) power tools
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Every homebuilder dreams of flying their
creation of Mecca, and I am no different. My good friend Doug Sytsma had flown down from Detroit where he works for an airline to help me during the construction of N941WR. This trip was payback time, a debt I was more than happy to repay. Doug and I had met and been roommates at Western Michigan University many years before. OSH, here we come! - July 25, 2008 through July 30, 2008 Friday morning, July 25th, dawned clear and bright. Dale Ensing and I had agreed to meet in the air over Goose Creek (28A) and head to our first fuel stop together. Right at 7:15 AM Dale called to let me know he was strapped in his plane and was about to start his engine. I waited five minutes, climbed in N941WR, started her up and taxied down to the end of 4 to warm the engine. With the temps in the green and pre-flight complete, I keyed the mic to see if Dale was in the vicinity. He promptly came back and said he was approaching the airport area, so full power and as quickly as you can imagine we had joined up in the skies east of Charlotte and started heading North. The first stop would be two hours later at KGQQ, where they had cheep fuel. From there Dale and I split up as he was meeting his brother North of Detroit and he wouldn't be out of work until later in the day. Departing KGQQ, I landed at 1D2 40 minutes later. Plymouth Mettetal airport was where I had learned to fly but that was over 20 years ago. It was cool to land there again after so much time. Doug and his 14 year-old son Colin met me when I landed. Shortly after landing another former collage roommate, Jim Redick, Jr and his father, Jim, Sr., joined us. Both Jim's used to fly out of Mettetal back when I got my licenses. Needless to say, we had a very nice reunion. After the reunion, Doug and I jumped in N941WR and departed for KJVL (Janesville, WI), again for cheep fuel. It was my desire to have close to full tanks when we reached OSH. Doug flew most of the way there, which we both enjoyed. He is a CFI but hadn't flown in a number of years and I was content to give him his first RV ride. There were scattered clouds between 3 and 6,000 feet, so we started out going up over them. Just as it became a solid undercast, you could see the outline of Lake Michigan, for some reason (probably temperature related) there were no clouds over the lake. Doug flew us out over the water, where we dropped to 2000' MSL and skirted the Chicago Class Brovo airspace by flying along the waterfront. Once to the North of the airspace we flew on to Janesville. After topping off the tanks and empting our bladders, we flew on to OSH. The cloud cover was low and as it turned out, had just changed from IFR to VFR. Because the RV-9 flies so well at slow speeds, I took the lower altitude and did the entire approach at 90 MPH. It was eerily quiet on the radio as we approached Fisk. The controllers were asking the planes to acknowledge them on the radio rather than just rock their wings. We were quickly cleared to land on the first dot at the end of 27. Someone has got to tell those controllers that an RV-9 can't turn base at the approach end of 27 and land on the first dot. The thing just doesn't come down that fast! Our only regret was that we ran out of room for beer. Not a big deal as it Wisconsin after all and that commodity was easy to come by. The plane was packed right to the top with stuff. I'm happy to report that the RV-9 at GW doesn't fly much different than when empty. As I'm not one to take a lot of pictures, the following are some of the few that I did take. |
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The red and silver RV-8, Borrowed Horse belongs to Jay Pratt from RV Central, one of the premiere RV completion centers in the country. It really is a very nice plane! On the other side was Dayton Murdock's BRIGHT red RV-4. |
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Here comes the RV formation guys with the usual precision. |
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