Bivouac to Cushing Field and Oshkosh

Wow, what a week. After being virtually "grounded" for months, I managed to put on more than fifteen hours of flying in a period of four days!

The adventure began last Friday morning. I picked up my friend Rob Caya in Chicago and we drove east towards my flying farm in SW Michigan, about eighty miles away. Rob is working on obtaining his Sport Pilot's license, and is going to soon be a Quantum 912 owner. He is a natural-born pilot, so we've had a great time together putting on some dual hours in my Quik.

Thankfully traffic was light, so we arrived at the field before eleven and packed some light gear into the machine.

We called ahead to Tony Castillo, who was with John Keith and their mutual friend Greg. Tony and John are the USA representatives for P&M Aviation USA and also run their own great site at Trikeflyers. Tony, John and Greg had been flying up towards Cushing Field in Newark, IL, when I called, so I asked them to detour over to Shawnee Field in Bloomfield, IN instead. Shawnee is at 1I3 here

Rob and I took off into warm and clear skies, with just a few puffy clouds in either direction. Our course was due South, and we had tailwinds from the N/NE at upwards of 20mph. This gave us a hands-off ground speed of around 95 to 105 mph in the Quik. We started out flying at 2500 agl, but found that we were getting a tiny bit of chop from the temperature inversion layer. When we climbed up to 4500 the air smoothed out nicely, though we were a touch on the cold side for what we were wearing.


I handed the bar over to Rob so that he could get a little back-seat bar time, and he seem to enjoy the opportunity. In the meantime, I played around a bit with getting my iPhone (yes, I'm a gadget freak) to work pumping music into the Lynx intercom system.


We eventually made our way down to Shawnee Field (1I3) where we were met with the site of three gorgeous new P&M Quik microlights on the ground. A phone call to Allistair Wilson and fifteen minutes later we were eating lunch with the gang of flyers in Spencer, IN, about five minutes from the field.

Lunch was short and tasty, but we needed to get Rob back to the airport so he could check-out Allistair's Quantum 912 that was for sale. I left those two for a bit and took a ride into town for some gas. When I returned, Rob was in the circuit making touch-and-goes with Allistair. It looked as if the deal was sealed and Rob was going to be the proud owner of a new 912!



We gathered the gang together and made a brief plan for some formation flying on the way back to the Chicago area.
Time was short and we didn't get off the ground until after 5:30pm EST, which meant that we had very little room for error on the return if we were going to get on the ground before dark. To our dismay, the tailwinds we enjoyed on the way down were still there...only now they were tailwinds, and still clipping along at 25mph plus!

On the way back we did an airshow formation takeoff, with the requisite lap around the pattern for good luck. We then proceeded due north in a missing-man "V" with Tony brining up the rear for photographs and video. Our chosen altitude was 1500 agl, but then we dropped down on the deck for some terrain mapping action. Greg and John slipped back and Tony took the lead with me on his high 4 o'clock, in the "Flying Freedom" video angle setup. I was able to get some decent video and stills of him from various angles and directions while he grazed the tree-tops at 100mph plus.
The thing that was unusual to me is that I had done the same type of flying with Rob Rollison back in 2000 on the White River, but we were flying at 40 to 50 mph back then. Now, Tony and I were doing more than twice that speed, and not at Sunset, so the bumps were still there. It was quite a challenge to keep my shot aligned for Rob on video and me on stills while I trailed Tony making his maneuvers below.

The result of our work seems pretty nice, however, and I'll be featuring that media here shortly. Here's a quick preview:

Around Eight Thirty we had made it to within thirty miles of my home airport in Sawyer Michigan. We were still fighting the winds, however, and everyone needed gas. At that time we decided it prudent to drop in to fill our gas tanks, and drain our other tanks.

More to come...