Two Pilots & an LSW: NOshkosh Day Two: Sheridan & BOB

The problem with waiting a week to write about a day is that you'll miss stuff. But here's the bottom line, anyway.

We got out to Kokomo pretty early, and today was to be my first "solo" in BOB. For my first solo, we filled the plane full of fuel and people, so it was good and at gross weight. I'd never flown it at gross before, so it was interesting to see that in that plane, it doesn't seem to matter. I honestly couldn't tell. Nathan and I sat up front, and four others were in the back. We were headed to Sheridan, so it was also my first shorter runway. I could choose between 3300' and grass or 3700' and 50' wide concrete. I chose the grass. In theory that's a good thing in a taildragger. In reality, I think the 50' wide concrete would've been better. I didn't realize how bumpy and hilly that runway had gotten, and doing a heavy wheel landing on grass that launched you up and down a bit was interesting, and I used up a fair amount of the 3300' getting it down and whoa'd. It was fine, but it was more challenging than I expected a grass strip landing to be. lol Oh--Jordan Brown flew over to Kokomo in the C-47, and we flew down to Sheridan in an illegal formation. Illegal because I didn't have a FAST card for the CAF. Got some good footage of the planes together in the air, and did two passes at Sheridan together, before I landed first, and they came in behind me. At Sheridan, Mark Van Zant put a big blue and green dot(s) on the runway, with NOSHKOSH written on it. I loved it. I thought that was so clever.

They had a big circus tent up and served powdered eggs and spam and biscuits with honey for breakfast, WWII style. I was eating, when Doug came up and asked if I was ready to do my CFI check flight. I wasn't. I hadn't slept the night before, I was stressed out about some things on the first flight and oral, and I honestly felt a little...beaten, defeated almost. Not totally, but definitely down and embarrassed. I didn't feel ready to do it again, I was hot, and tired, and not confident, and I couldn't think of much worse than having another bad showing on something two days in a row. But I didn't have a choice, so I joked about being born ready, and headed with him to the plane to do it all from the right seat. Except it was way more relaxed than yesterday. He did some of the flying. We went up, and he asked if I wanted to do it there or go somewhere else, and I said Indy Exec, which has a longer runway, and not in front of everybody we know, and he looked at me and said "Chicken", and I said "Yes". We did a few maneuvers, drilled the engine out, did some takeoffs and landings, he gave me pointers on taxiing smoothly and such, and it was so much more relaxed. He didn't ask me questions, and everything went well. He complimented me on several things, gave me pointers, and signed me off right then and there to be a C-45 Instructor. Then he and Kim left, without even really saying goodbye, and left it up to me to check out JP.

We needed gas. So JP and I took the Beech over to Indy Exec for fuel, which took awhile. My first flight in the thing as an instructor, and I wasn't really looking to be an instructor yet, but JP had previous experience and I'd flown in it with him and Jordan. So that made it an easy first check flight, which was a good thing, because weather moved in. We got in steep turns, slow flight, power off stall, engine out, and about two takeoffs and landings, before we had to land and get out of there because of the weather. He landed on the 50' runway, and hit the brakes to try to get off at the taxiway. Before I could say "just let it roll", the nose swung right and we ended up on the grass off to the side. Nothing there but grass, but a good learning experience for him and for me on speaking up faster next time someone gets on the crappy brakes on a C-45. There's not time to see if they fix it.

Next came the run. Jordan took off in the C-47 as fast as he could. I loaded up the C-45 and we headed for Kokomo. On the way there, I could see the weather off to the west, but instead of getting past it, I noticed it was getting closer. And closer. And ugly. I didn't mess around, I came right in and landed, and by then the sky was that deep sick blue. We hopped out of that plane and ran for the hangars, got it open, pulled out the T-6, pulled out the Cheyenne, tugged in Bob, put away the Cheyenne, put away the T-6, started lowering the door, got it most of the way down, and Bam, the power went out. And then the storm hit. The winds were so bad, they cracked a hinge on the big door that wasn't shut all the way. Those winds shoved Nathan's trailer, which was CHOCKED, several feet back, and made it jump the chocks, unplugged it from the hangar. We hung on and watched the weather go by, and it was raining completely sideways, in sheets. It was amazing. If we'd have delayed by 5-10 minutes, if the planes had been stuck outside or the hangar door stuck open when the power went out, we'd have had so much more damage. It was a really scary thought.

Once the storm went by, we pulled out a fire pit, and we watched the stars, the satellites, the International Space Station, and I even saw a little meteor shower with 5 shooting stars. We listened to music, and we watched a running of the Oshkosh fireworks display from 2019 complete with nuclear bomb at the end. It was a good end to a good day. We were out until almost midnight, even with an early wake-up possible. It was still worth it.