Flying for Fun and for Money

Ok folks, my first post to this blog and I’ll jump in with a quick update on how my cross country trip is going.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m flying my Cessna 140 from Hamburg, Pennsylvania to Walla Walla, Washington this week.

My dad flew out to Pennsylvania via airline last night because he wanted to come along for the ride.  We loaded up and got in the air at 8:45 EDT this morning.

Aside from being really hazy (4-5 miles visibility for the first few hours), it was a beautiful day to fly.  We only had 5 knot winds aloft and the ride was butter smooth.

We stopped in Latrobe, PA (KLBE) after flying for two hours because we wanted to stretch our legs and pick up fuel while we were at it.

We took off out of KLBE at about 11:30 and started heading toward Marion, Ohio, our next planned stopping point.  Forty miles to the east of Marion we ran in to a nasty line of unforecast thunderstorms.  Cleveland Flight Watch said the cells had come out of nowhere in the last 15 minutes.

After making a quick 180, I put it down at Millersburg, OH (10G) to sort things out.  The radar picture showed a whole line of cells stretching from north to south with no way through.  Since the Millersburg airport didn’t have a courtesy car and the town was three miles away from the airport, we couldn’t walk to get lunch, so we opted to hop back in the plane and fly south before the storms hit.

We ended up going to Newark, Ohio (KVTA) which is a nice little town on the east side of Columbus.  Great people, great service, all around nice place to wait out the storms.  We topped off our tanks, took the courtesy car to Applebees, then came back to the airport after the sky had cleared.

By then it was about 4:30 p.m.  I’m not very excited about flying my plane at night because it has a few minor electrical system issues (I’ll explain another time), and I knew there was no way we could make it to Iowa before dark, so my dad and I decided to get as far as we could and get a motel.

We decided to try for Kankakee, Illinois (KIKK).  And that’s what we did.  3.5 hours of flying and 18.9 gallons of gas later (5.4 gph…that little engine that normally sips 4.0 gph has to run hard when it’s pulling a max gross weight plane through the sky at 85 knots!) we landed in Kankakee.

Again, great service from the local FBO.  Had us fueled up and signed out in no time with a free courtesy car overnight.  So that’s where I’m at for now.

My dad took a bunch of pictures but forgot to bring the cable to download them to my laptop, so I don’t have any visuals for my tales yet.  I’ll get to that tomorrow.

What’s the plan for tomorrow?  Fly over to Cedar Rapids, Iowa (KCID), have lunch at my parents’ place, then get up to Brainerd, Minnesota (KBRD) so I can spend the night at my grandpa’s place.  Who knows what’ll actually happen!

Thanks for reading!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 12:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.