Hello again. Hope everyone is enjoying what is left of this summer. I don’t know about everyone else but mine has been flying by. No pun intended, sorry. Things are starting to pick up around the hangar. We’ve been flying a bit more but the big thing for me is a trip up to Oshkosh, WI for the EAA fly-in.

One of the pilots is a partner in a 1965 Beech Bonanza. I went flying with him a couple weeks ago up into Oklahoma so I could become familiar with the aircraft. Even though the aircraft is 43 years old, the thing can cover some ground. We left out of Addison Airport (KADS) and landed on a little grass strip in southern Oklahoma about 15 minutes after takeoff. With its 300 hp engine we were cruising at 165 kts without even pushing the engine. This is the aircraft we are going to be flying all the way from Addison, just outside of Dallas, to Oshkosh, WI. The trip should take a little over 4 hours but the trick isn’t the flying all the way across the country, the challenge begins when we get about 70 nautical miles outside of Oshkosh. The EAA fly-in is the largest fly-in in the world and there are special, very specific instructions for the approach into the field. For example, the NOTAM states that aircraft approaching from the south will pass over a town called Fisk, and there will be controllers on the ground at that location to identify aircraft and give them the runway assignment. The only thing is, you tune in to listen, no talking back to the controller. They identify you by the type and color of your aircraft and then to acknowledge that you received the info you are to “rock your wings” Oshkosh will have three active runways with three aircraft landing on each runway at a time. There are three different colored dots painted on the runway and ATC will assign an aircraft one of the dots to land on. You can imagine that someone with minimal hours should not fly in there by him or herself. The pilot that I am traveling with has flown in there a multiple times so I’m pretty confident it’ll be an interesting trip.