Every year, my brother in law Mike hosts a midweek fly-in and barbecue at his private airstrip near Utica in central NY, but weather or other commitments always prevented me from attending, so although I’d visited by car numerous times I’d never flown in. This year, it looked good, and the plan was to leave after lunch on Wednesday, stay overnight, and return home on Thursday morning, so I’d only have to take Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning off from work… until I retire in a few years I need to ration my vacation time. But by Wednesday morning, Thursday morning’s forecast was looking like IFR at home due to a coastal front, maybe improving by late afternoon. Oh well, I told my boss, “I’m going to try to get back for Thursday afternoon, but there’s a good chance I might not get back until Friday, and maybe not even then.” Friday’s forecast was good everywhere, but if I couldn’t get home Thursday, no point in flying home Friday morning just to work Friday afternoon and then leave for the weekend, right? Fortunately, my job lets me be flexible. My weekend plan was to drive to our cabin in southern upstate NY.
The Wednesday afternoon flight was beautiful. There’s no airspace requiring talking to anybody anywhere along the route, so I just puttered along at around 1500’ AGL. From Chester Airport in south central CT, I made a fuel stop in South Albany, NY before proceeding to Mike’s strip. Along the way, I saw an R/C field with several people and models on the ground, so naturally I had to do some impromptu acro for them before proceeding on my way. There are a lot of private airports along the way.
Mike has two runways, both best as one way strips. The shorter (900’) is uphill to land, downhill to take off regardless of wind (if not favorable you use the other strip), with no obstructions on the downhill side, while the longer (1200’) strip, while more level, has tall trees on one end. I landed on the short strip and was stopped before the halfway point. I had 10kt tailwinds the whole way, so I made good time and arrived early.
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Friday and Saturday contained nothing aviation related, other than [needlessly, as it turned out] worrying about my plane getting rained on tied down on the grass and the cockpit filling up with water. Before returning home on Sunday, though, I had the great pleasure of taking one of my oldest friends—actually he IS my oldest friend at 91 years old and the oldest passenger I’ve ever flown—for a ride in the Hatz. I’ve been trying to get him for a flight ever since I bought the Hatz but something always came up.
Skip started learning to fly with the USAF flying T-6’s in 1950, soloing but washing out later, eventually getting his Private in 1979 flying C-150s with the base aero club. I don’t know how long it’d been since he’d flown but it was a long time, 30 years at least. As spry as he is (he’s still climbing on roofs when neighbors need help fixing them until his wife yells at him to get back down) it was still a struggle squeezing his old bones into the front cockpit, as anybody who’s ever been in the front pit of a Hatz will understand. Of course he flew the plane for awhile and was 30 years rusty (and 91 years old!) with no experience with the sight picture of an open cockpit biplane, but he had fun and kept the greasy side down. A Hatz on a hot humid day with a heavy passenger is not a high performance airplane! A circle over the lake where our cabins are, a wave at friends on the dock, and it was back to the beautiful grass runway at Warwick to get Skip back home. My only regret is that I forgot to take pictures.
Once I finally managed to connect to Flight Service online (marginal cell service at the cabin), I couldn’t make sense of the forecast; airports along the way were forecasting VFR with good ceilings and visibility despite rain, but the whole area had an airmet sierra for IFR conditions. A call to a human briefer cleared things up, the weather was shaping up better than forecast and despite scattered rain I had a good chance of making it home, so my son in law drove me back to the airport and I was off. This flight, around 80NM, requires threading through the NYC class B and several class Ds. To the south along the coast it looked pretty icky (that’s a technical meteorological term), but I had good visibility to the north and plenty of fuel, so I had outs. I flew through several rain showers but was able to dodge others (no, you don’t get wet flying through rain in an open cockpit plane but it cleaned a lot of the accumulated bugs off the leading edges). I was worried about the rain taking the varnish off the wood prop but it held up pretty good. At one point there was a nice rainbow but the picture didn’t come out. One thing that gave confidence was using Avia Weather, an Android app, to look at the latest METARs from airports along the way.
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