Vacation is over, but we’re really enjoying our fall flying season. The crisp morning departure to Urbana Grimes, home of the aircraft lighting test bed being one example. The weather was gorgeous so we invited our winged friends to meet us at I74 for breakfast. Potential builder’s Reiff and Melissa Lorenz popped down to our airport in an Archer, then headed to breakfast while we fueled up, and Chuck less flew his pretty classic top loader Velocity from Hamilton to meet us there. We ate and talked Velocitys for about an hour and a half till we needed to depart towards Moraine (I73) for hot dogs and Chili. This is one of my favorite pieces of audio ever, when ATC from Dayton informs us that we have a 40 knot overtake on the Archer the Lorenz’s are in. Quite funny.
Enroute to Moraine, I grabbed a few frames of air-to-air video of Chuck’s airplane before we turned south towards Dayton. We both checked in for flight following and they wondered if we were both going to Hamilton. I bet that doesn’t happen to every pair of Warriors that call in within a couple of minutes of each other.
If you check our tracking page for last night you’ll see that Elizabeth practiced with Pete, her instructor, last night at Moraine. It’s a challenging airport, being only 3,500′ and surrounded by a dike that’s maybe 30′ tall, with the surrounding terrain above the airport’s elevation and the Dayton ‘antenna farm’ pinning the downwind leg a bit tight to the airport when the wind favors runway 8. But Beth shot a serviceable, if not stellar, approach and we got to enjoy chili and dogs as well as some nice chocolate cake with Velocity drivers Bill and Terry Stockman and Vaughn Pleasant, as well as Lebanoner’s Ken Ross and Al Wolfson. Another hour and a half or so, and we needed to head home, having an event at King’s Island to hit for the afternoon.
Once back home, Beth decided to give Ken his first ride in the Velocity, and took him out over Cesar’s Creek State Park and back. Ken flew the chase plane for our air-to-air pictures, so we’d been wanting to give him a ride for awhile. All and all it was a great day of flying, putting about 2.5 hours on the Fox, and getting Beth some comfort with flying her.
Flying to Urbana
Flying to Moraine
Air-to-Air
Flying Home from Moraine
Posted By: Brett FerrellSaturday September 18th, 2010 at 9:11 PM