One thing I notice this forum doesn't have that many type-specific forums do is a section to compile trip/flight reports! So, rather than start a new thread, I'll add mine here - I apologize if it doesn't belong!
After several failed attempts to get the time/logistics/weather curves to line up, I finally was able to enact a plan to fly 5TM from the previous owner's communal hangar to her new home south of Pittsburgh. The proposal was a bold one: rent a car at Pittsburgh Int'l, and convoy it and my own car to the new hangar at 22D, leave my car in the hangar so I had a ride home from the airport. Then, the following morning drive from Pittsburgh where I live up to 5TM in Geneva-On-The-Lake, OH, where I'd drop the car off in town, whereafter the previous owner graciously offered to give me a ride to the plane, make sure I was all squared away, and send me on my way. The big ask: I wanted to be back in Pittsburgh in enough time to catch the only commercial flight of the day out to Boston so that I could start 4 days of work the next afternoon, which by my calculations meant that I needed to be landing at 22D no later than 2:30PM. Gulp. If I missed my afternoon flight, I had several contingency plans for the following day, but none were as good as making that flight!
8/4: The car rental went smoothly, and despite a frog-strangler of a rainstorm as we pulled out of PIT, my fiancé and I got my car tucked away in the hangar at 22D. The weather forecast for the following day remained good, with a high pressure system moving into the area, and light winds. The plan is to fly from 7D9, where the plane has been living, south-west, threading between the Youngstown TRSA and the edge of the Cleveland Class Bravo, then turn south, stopping in Carroll County (KTSO) for fuel and a socially distanced piece of pie at the airport restaurant, before heading south-east towards 22D. A last minute check of the NOTAMs, however, showed that a VIP TFR had popped up, stretching from Cleveland almost to Youngstown. Time for a re-route. The new plan took me east of Youngstown, then on towards a fuel stop at Butler Regional (KBTP), northeast of Pittsburgh. No pie for me, but fuel for 5TM and a field I know fairly well. From there, I'd keep going south-east to stay well clear of the PIT arrival/departure corridor and out where the floor of the Bravo was plenty high, before turning back west for 22D. When all was said and done, both routes came out to 152nm. I'll have to go for pie another day. So far, so good!
8/5: Alarms that go off at 5:30am on my off-days are a mixed bag for me. Usually it means adventure is afoot, but it's also 5:30am, and that feels a lot like work. A look out the window over the day's first cup of coffee shows fog to the ground, and every airport in the region reporting LIFR. Huh. The TAFs are still optimistic though, and I have a flight to catch, so I grab my stuff, get a nervous kiss goodbye from a fiancé who is much better at early mornings than I am, and point the rental Nissan towards Ohio. Thanks to COVID, the roads are clear, but the fog is full-on soup, and there isn't a breath of wind. Every now and again, I'll drive into a pocket that is patchily lifting. Putting my trust high pressure systems and the encouraging TAFs I drive on, and by the time I near Lake Erie, the visibility and ceilings have risen. In their place is a very dark bank of clouds moving in from the west. A rest-stop radar-check shows a loose pack of green blobs moving along the lake shore. They're localized, but moving fast. There is no yellow in the returns, but I remind myself that 5TM isn't the A320 I go to work in, and hope that they don't connect. Worst case scenario, I reason, I happen to know of a local rental car place that will have a car! 5TM's previous owner and I meet up and head to the rental car place in the streaming rain, but it lets up just as we pull in. Fingers crossed, I hand over the keys, climb into the car next to the PO's boisterous german shepard, Jake, and we head to the airport. There are puddles on the taxiway, but no new ones forming as we open the hangar door. 5TM is tucked snugly away, and after a pre-flight and some careful arranging and re-arranging of my flying kit, we pull her over to the fuel tanks. One last weather check shows the next green blob is still twenty minutes out, and all the weather is right along the lake shore. I should be south of the whole thing in fifteen miles and the morning's fog has completely lifted - all the reports along my route are CAVU. Out of excuses, Jake is banished to sit in the car, I buckle in, and the previous owner flips the prop for me. The C65 is a touch cold-blooded, but warms up nicely and the mag checks are good - we're off. It’s 11:40AM… I’m behind schedule but there is plenty of day left to go!
The longer I spend driving jets around, the harder I find I have to work to remember and trust that I can fly at airspeeds that wouldn’t even register on the Airbus speed-tape. Rolling down the runway, I push the nose over and hold 5TM’s mains on until the ASI shows 60mph… 65mph, then sheepishly realize she was ready to fly ages ago, and we leap off the ground. As we climb shallowly towards my lofty 2500’ cruising altitude, I look down to check the vertical speed, then laugh at myself. There isn’t one, and that’s the point - so long as the altimeter is waffling along in the right direction, I’ll get there when I get there. As soon as it’s evident that we’re above Ohio’s rolling terrain, 5TM and I bend off to the southeast. My headset isn’t clamped down as well as I’d like, and begins a slow, slipstream-induced migration towards the back of my head. 5TM is in pretty good trim at full fuel, however, and I find that I can let the stick go for a minute or so while I fiddle with things. After a few moments, I reach a stalemate with the headset that is good enough to be getting on with - some sort of flying cap/helmet that holds it in place is going to be an important addition to my flying kit going forward. Attention back fully on flying, I note that even in the relatively smooth air, the old whiskey compass in 5TM’s panel does an awful lot of seesawing back and forth. The average between swings is roughly the heading I want, however, and ForeFlight agrees that I’m tracking on course. Maybe in time, I’ll track down a better compass solution. With a handheld radio, a cellphone, and a portable GPS receiver all within 2’ of the compass, I can’t be doing its accuracy any favors.
As we make our way southeast, the ceilings continue to rise, with occasional shafts of rain to keep things interesting. I manage to slalom around most of them, but learn quickly that hunching down in the cockpit gets me below the drops that splatter the windscreens and sting my cheeks. On the ground I was comfortable in a button-down fishing shirt and shorts. Up here, I wish I’d donned to puffer I have stuffed into the backpack that’s belted into the front cockpit. Another few minutes, however, and the patchy rain and rising ceilings give way to clear skies as forecast, and the sun raises the temperature back to comfortable levels. I find myself, elbow over the cockpit rail, admiring the fields as we loaf along. 5TM has a thin green band painted on her tach, and not knowing the motor, I set the power at the bottom of it - about 2000 RPM - and we rumble along at about 75mph indicated. Before long, I’m crossing the shoreline of the Pymatuning Reservoir - my first turn point comes shortly after, over Greenville airport, and we bend further south for the long leg down to Butler.
As the day wears on, and the thermals pick up, I’m reminded just how much of a kite this little airplane is. We’ll cross over a parking lot or dark field, and I find myself having to kick the tail back in line, or correct for several hundred feet of altitude. The updrafts are easily dealt with, but I notice that it takes a bit more time to regain feet lost. I’m reminded of a miserable day flying on Nelson Island, Alaska, when pitched for a Vx climb, with the motor and prop redlined, I found myself continuing to be sucked down into a valley at 1000 feet per minute. I resolve to be more alert on my altitude monitoring, and to be a bit more aggressive in my willingness to pitch 5TM’s nose skyward. She definitely climbs more smartly at 50mph than at 60.
Twenty five miles or so from KBTP the AWOS comes in clear as a bell. It only took an hour and a half, but I finally have the squelch on my battery-powered intercom tuned so that I no longer hear the prop and slipstream roaring through the headset. The wind is right down runway 26, and switching over to CTAF reveals that it is a busy day in the pattern. I find that my radio calls sound much clearer if I adopt my rain-dodging pose to make them, so I hunch down several inches to make sure I give the local traffic the best chance of understanding me. Cognizant that my best forward speed is many trainers’ approach speed, I let the gaggle go by, and sequence behind a Cherokee doing it’s best B-52 traffic pattern impression. I’m amazed by the sound and vibration change in the airframe when I pull the power back to idle. I’m also reminded of just how draggy a Piet is, when I have to add the power back in to make the runway! All told, the landing is uneventful, and far smoother than my second Pietenpol landing ever has any right to be. I chalk it up to beginners luck, and hustle to the next taxiway, feeling very small and like my butt is very close to the ground. The self-serve pump is over by the flight school’s corner of the ramp, so I taxi that way, careful to S-turn so as not to find myself sneaking up on any Cessnas or their students, then spin around (5TM has Grove brakes that work beautifully) and shut down. I’m suddenly very glad that I got here when I did. It’s time to pay the rent on the morning’s coffee.
Back at the plane, I’m struck by how wind-blown I feel and by just how petite 5TM is, parked next to one of the flight school’s 172’s. The clock says it took 1:27 to fly 85nm, and the tank takes 6.7 gallons to top off. Napkin math says about 4.5GPH, which sounds right. With the airplane’s care and feeding taken care of, I dig out an energy bar and my water bottle, and chat with a few folks who have wandered over to the airplane. (I hadn’t considered the possibility that 5TM would attract a crowd, but looking around the ramp, I realize how silly that was.) The evening flight to Boston is still within reach though, so I pack away my things, check the oil, chock the plane with a borrowed set of chocks (gonna have to solve that in a better way going forward), and give the prop a swing. I’d been nervous about hot-starting problems, but the little Continental caught on the second pull, and idled away smoothly while I pulled the chocks, climbed into the cockpit and got my harness belts assembled. Post-start checks are refreshingly simple - oil pressure: good, oil temperature: good, all set! Wait… did I tighten the oil cap? I sat there trying to remember, then stopped. If you have to ask, then you have to check. I’d rather be the idiot trying to prop a hot engine than the idiot that deadsticked into a field because I couldn’t be bothered to double check the dipstick. Mags off, harness unbuckled, unfold myself out of the plane, check the oil cap… it was screwed down snug. (Of course!) Chocks back in, mags hot, and 5TM repays my abundance of caution by starting up on the first blade. This airplane and I might just get along!
I get settled back into the cockpit, get my kit re-situated, and taxi out to 26. The pattern is filling back up again, so after a run-up and a radio call, I bug out and keep my head on a swivel as I peel away southbound. As I climb, I feel something slap my shoulder. A check around the cockpit doesn’t show anything loose, and my stomach sinks as I start to catalog what could have flown out of my backpack if I’d forgotten to secure it closed. I’m considering turning back to Butler to check when I get slapped again! This time, I catch the offender - I’d forgotten to tuck the tag end of my shoulder harness in properly, and every now and again the slipstream is lifting it up and whipping me. Mystery solved.
The second leg of the flight is more challenging. The terrain around the Pittsburgh area, while not high, is much more rugged, and the orographic lifting and thermal activity results in a much more difficult ride. Add to that the increased air traffic in the area and the sprinkling of very tall towers set on the tallest hills in the area, and I have my work cut out for me. It begins to feel that the air is waiting until the exact moment that I go to check the chart to send another whoop or dip my way. It’s frustrating flying, and by the time I have gotten to the point where I can turn west and head for 22D, I’m more cranky than I am enjoying the ride. Still, a bad day flying… well, sorta. Turning west, I glance down at the ForeFlight groundspeed read out, and have to laugh - I’m below 40knts! I wave at a few trucks zipping by below me on the highway, and ponder which road I’d land on if the Continental chose now to have a bad day. I definitely prefer open fields to fly over rather than shopping malls. The stakes are lower and the likelihood of making the news is diminished.
Even hampered by the light headwind, Pittsburgh proper began to give way to rural western PA again, as I edged nearer to my destination. Eventually, the hangars at 22D hove into view. No weather reporting here, but there are two windsocks, which, naturally, were pointing different directions - both full. The runway here is 2300’ long and over 100’ wide, but one end has trees and a hill off the end, and the other end drops off into a tumbling pasture. Figuring I’d rather not have to add rising terrain to a go-around attempt should I need one, I spiraled down over the hill, and lined up for the approach. Despite the shifty breeze, which helpfully swung around to a tailwind over the hill before dropping off before the trees, we hushed down into the grass. I probably should have logged a couple more landings than I did, based on the touchdown… Things to practice going forward! Five minutes later, I was swapping the Volkswagen for the Pietenpol, and 5TM was tucked away in her new home. All told, we covered 150nm in 2.7hrs of flying time. I got started getting to know my airplane, and wouldn’t you know it, but I made my commute to Boston too!
Remarkable!