A big day

We headed to the Champaign airport early this morning, and left to continue our journey to the race start in Prescott AZ. First stop was a tiny airport about 20 miles south, Tuscola - it's one of the flyby stops and we wanted to see it. It is very tiny, and extremely hard to spot amid the fields! We then turned back on course southwest. Our intention was to stop at another one of the race stops, Skyhaven in Warrensburg Missouri. However, although there was no other weather for hundreds of miles, there was a large rainstorm with some convective activity just west of the airport, so we decided to overfly that too, and flew around the storm and made our first fuel stop in Pittsburg-Atkinson Kansas.

We got fuel there from the very friendly line manager, and were about to get ready to leave, when Alison noticed that one of the cowl flaps was retracted and the other wasn't. The cowl flaps are two hinged flaps on the belly of the airplane, controlled by a lever inside the cockpit, and you open them whenever you want to let outside air in to cool down the engine, for example during taxi, takeoff, climb, or just when the engine is hot. We met Mike, a mechanic on the field, who took a look at it for us. It was a poignant meeting, because today was actually Mike's last day at the field. He confirmed that the bracket that attaches the cowl flap cable to the airframe tubing on that side had snapped. Unfortunately this is not an easy repair, and either involves welding the bracket, or fashioning some other way to attach it to the airframe, neither of which can easily be done quickly and in transit. Alison called the mechanics at Prescott and Wichita, but no one could schedule a repair this complicated at short notice. So Mike tied off the dangling cable so it didn't hang loose, and we are going to have to fly with the flaps open all the time. This is perfectly safe - but they create drag as they hang down from the airframe, and this is going to hurt our race performance!

So we were delayed longer than we expected at Pittsburg. Linda flew the next leg to Liberal Kansas, which we knew would be still open for fuel even though it was getting late.

After a quick turnaround at Liberal, we flew the last leg of the day, to Albuquerque. On this leg, we flew out of the flatlands and up into rising high ground and the hills and mountains of NW Texas and New Mexico, climbing to 9500 feet to stay clear of the terrain. Stiff headwinds and high density altitude meant that our performance and ground speed were labored, but the plane soldiered on. There have been wild fires in NM, and a big TFR (Temporary Flight Restriction) was in effect to the southeast of Albuquerque to stop people flying into the smoke, except for tanker airplanes fighting the fires. As we got close to the pass through the mountains above Albuquerque, the bank of smoke parallel our path to our left. It was huge and looked very foreboding, but we didn't have to get into the smoke. We crossed the pass at 9500 feet, and then had to quickly descend and enter the pattern for the airport which is at about 5500 feet, landing into the setting sun on runway 30.

So, at the end of the day we did nearly 10 hours flying, crossed at least six states (Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico), discovered a new maintenance issue, and flew up into the mountains. All in all an eventful day.

Here are some photos from today.

Alison starting out the day.

Airport, mid-west style

Illinois river

It's the Mississippi, is it as mighty as the Susquehanna?

On the ramp at Pittsburg - Atkinson airport

Home of the Pittsburg State Gorillas!

Mike the mechanic

Great salt plain reservoir 

Changing terrain

Detour to Liberal, Kansas for some fuel

They had entertainment

You can see smoke on the horizon from the forest fires

More smoke on the way into Albuquerque 

Over the mountains outside Albuquerque 

On final approach, can you find the airport?