Posted Tuesday, July 30, 2019
The day dawned today earlier than expected. I'd set the alarm for 7 am, but was awake at 6:45. I actually awoke feeling ready to go, so I got up and started my preparations for the day. The weather looked generally acceptable, and I was off the ground at 8:30, on my way to 9Y1, which is variously called Weyland, Killdeer, and Dunn County field.
The flight was generally unremarkable except for the fact that I actually had a 10 knot tailwind, which was the exact opposite of what I'd expected on my return trip. I cruised along at 85 knots over the ground, feeling good about the forward progress. The sky was clear with the odd cloud forming and dissipating overhead. I found the Killdeer/Weyland/Dunn County airport without difficulty, near the Killdeer Mountains (the only obvious geological feature for many miles around), and landed for fuel. The field was surrounded by scattered oil rigs busily pumping oil and burning off waste gas.
For this leg of the flight, I'd planned initially to Beulah, ND (96D), but extended my plan to Killdeer when I realized it was going to be pretty short if I only went to Beulah. My planning method for these few days was to tell Avare to draw a line between wherever I was and Harvey Field (to show the great circle path), then choose a runway that was around 150-200 nm distant. Particularly through North Dakota and Montana, the airports can be kind of sparse on the ground, so the length of each leg was usually not my idea 2 hours.
I watched Beulah slide past underneath the plane with a little bit of regret: my bladder was full, and was making its unhappiness known. Killdeer was only another half an hour further, and I decided in favor of forward progress despite some discomfort.
Excited by the progress I was making, tanks full, bladder empty, I taxied the plane out to the runway, and called "Weyland traffic, Champ 4399C back-taxiing, runway 13." I'd heard someone making traffic calls for Kildare, and remarked to myself, "Where the heck is Kildare? Oh well, they're not here," and taxied out onto the runway. These small fields will frequently only have a runway, with no parallel taxiway for getting to the end of the runway. The way you get to the start of your chosen runway is to get on the runway going the "wrong" direction, and taxi down to end, where there's frequently a little paved area to do the run-up.
I got halfway down the runway when I spotted the incoming plane. The other pilot had been saying "Killdeer," not "Kildare." I had been saying "Weyland" or "Dunn County." Fortunately the side of the runway was short grass, so I was able to pull completely off the runway and let him past. I apologized over the radio, and he replied that it's easy to get names confused. "That's what you get when they name the field in someone's honor," was his comment.
For the next leg, I was bitten a bit in planning by a number of factors. There are not a lot of airports in Montana at the distance I needed them to be from Killdeer, that was one factor. Then, there is a big Military Operations Area (universally referred to as a MOA) right about where I wanted to go. The best-looking airport at the distance I wanted was Malta, MT (M75), which is near the northern edge of the state. From the perspective of where I was, and great circle paths, it was the right choice. From the perspective of my plans for tomorrow, maybe not the best choice: it was a two hour flight from I-90, and I realized once I was already committed that I actually wanted to end the day around the Billings area, which was south of my path, not the further north way I was going.
One of the problems I run into is that I have only limited information available to me in the air. I have the map, which has a pretty good set of data, and I have the Chart Supplement (formerly called the Airport/Facilities Directory, a more descriptive and useful name), which is like an abbreviated encyclopedia of airports. It lists each airport with a terse description of the airport, runways, services, communications, etc. It's published monthly online, and quarterly (or so, it actually varies) in paper. I'm using the online publication, so it's reasonably up-to-date, but it wouldn't note if, say, the airport were out of fuel right now, or what the current fuel price is.
This lack of information sometimes sets me on paths that I might not choose given more information. There's a website, AirNav, which lists current fuel prices, and has a number of handy planning features. I go there before each leg, and save a fuel report for my destination, trying to find cheap fuel -- at roughly 15 MPG and with gas at least $4/gallon, I can save $50-100 per day of travel by picking the cheaper airports, so it's a strong motivator.
However, with airports being so few and far between, generally the route I plan on the ground is the only one that makes any sense, and I have a sense that second-guessing myself when I'm in the air doesn't work out very well. So, I tend to fly where I told myself I'd fly, and accomplish the things I thought I'd accomplish about how I thought they would happen. Thus, I end up two hours north of I-90 because my mindset was aiming me the wrong direction.
In any case, I had planned a bit of an S-turn leg to Malta, which would allow me to overfly a few alternate airports in case strong winds slowed me down, and avoid the MOA which may or may not be active (ie, very fast military planes flying around shooting real bullets and missiles and dropping real bombs) at any time. I would overfly Circle Town, MT (4U6), then Glasgow (GGW) on my way to Malta.
My planning was fortuitous. I'd noticed the oil was getting low in Killdeer. Not dangerous, but I'd probably need to add some oil in the next maybe 5 hours of flying. On my way toward Circle Town, I noticed that the oil temperature was hotter than normal. Not dangerous, but it was a change in pattern that didn't seem to correspond with higher outside temperatures, so I made a precautionary landing at Circle Town to check the oil level and add more if needed.
The oil level was still ok (4.2 quarts, with a 4 quart minimum), but I added a quart anyway. The engine can take up to 6 quarts, but anything over 5 quarts tends to get blown out the breather tube, so it's wasteful and messy to go much over 5. I continued on to Malta without further incident.
At Malta, I was greeted by someone who'd seen me fly over, "So I finished my beer, and told my friend I was gonna go see that Aeronca." We had a conversation about how the Malta field used to be further south, in town, and how when he was a kid it was a busy place. Everyone was flying after WWII, and airports must have been busy places indeed compared to now. Every airport I flew over that wasn't next to a metropolitan center seemed to be deserted. Aviation is clearly on the decline at the moment, for a lack of pilots.
Malta is where I realized how close I was to my Rockies crossing. I'm still paranoid about crossing the Rockies, so I wanted to be basically at the base of the mountains tonight so that I could launch at the crack of dawn tomorrow and be in the mountains. I looked at the map, and decided that Billings would make a good destination. What I didn't look too hard at was that the area I'd be flying over, although flat, was almost entirely devoid of airports.
I planned the route, entered my flight plan, and looked up at the sky. There were towering cumulus clouds (precursors to thunderstorms) far to the east, but only regular clouds south and west, in my direction of travel. I was glad the thunderstorms were in the wrong direction (and going away, since the wind was from the west), and took off for Billings.
When I opened my flight plan in the air, the briefer rattled off a series of Convective SIGMETS (SIGnificant METerological warnings for Convective activity, aka thunderstorms) that were near but not directly on my route of flight. My experience with SIGMETs has been that they're pretty conservative, and will for instance warn about IFR conditions, where I could not legally fly due to clouds or fog, where there are no such conditions in reality. They're just covering their bases, because conditions could develop, not because they are currently doing the thing they warn about.
So I decided to press on, which is more or less when I should have made the exact opposite choice and returned to Malta.
I was cruising at 6500 feet to stay a healthy distance above the landscape, but not so high that the really strong headwind further up would slow me down. Suddenly, I noticed that I was at 6000 feet and going down. I didn't point the plane down, the engine wasn't doing anything weird -- I must just be in a downdraft. I spent about 5 nerve-wracking minutes at full power, at best climb speed, and slowly losing altitude. This should have been a clear clue to turn around, and I considered it, but I was already an hour into the two-hour flight. I resolved that if conditions continued with the turbulence and now this downdraft, I'd turn around. Then the downdraft went away, and things still looked ok ahead, so I kept going.
I am able to see some radar returns in the cockpit, thanks to the ADS-B weather broadcasts, and I was looking now at some spots that might indicate thunderstorms ahead. However, when I looked out the window, I didn't see them. I know that ADS-B weather can be delayed, sometimes by as much as 20 or 30 minutes, and I figured that's what I was seeing. Just in case, I called the weather briefer on the radio again, and asked him. The briefer has a real-time display they can look at, and the briefer I spoke with said that there were indeed thunderstorms ahead along my intended route of flight to Billings.
With this advice in hand, I decided I'd had enough of turbulence, enough of nature tossing me around, and I needed to just get down on the ground and call it a day. Forward progress be damned. I was tired and my butt was starting to hurt from sitting in the same position all day. I looked at the map, and Lewistown (LWT) was the nearest airport by a long shot. Not even the nearest with forward progress, the nearest in any direction. Malta was now over an hour and a half behind me, and Lewistown was only about 30 minutes further.
There was only one problem: there was a solid shaft of rain dumping on Lewistown, or where I thought Lewistown should be. A thunderstorm had camped out over my safe place to land. The briefer suggested I just dally in the area for 30-40 minutes, and the storm should pass on, as it was moving east at 20 knots. He also suggested, with what I took to be a certain amount of home-town pride that Great Falls airport was clear (I was talking with Great Falls Radio at the time, so there's a chance he was based at the airport). I looked at the chart: a giant green blob indicating a fairly sizeable thunderstorm was parked over Great Falls. The delay was real.
I aimed for Great Falls, increasingly frustrated that Lewistown was inaccessible. Great Falls was another hour-plus west into a headwind, and Lewistown was nicely downwind and only about 15 minutes away, if only the storm would pass on. My path on the screen was starting to look like a zigzag as I made turns toward different airports as I learned new information.
Finally, the storm appeared to have passed over, and it looked to me like Lewistown had sun shining on it, so I turned back to the southeast, giving up on fighting about 30 knots of headwind toward Great Falls. The briefer agreed that the storm had passed on, and Lewistown looked like a good place to stop.
I landed on runway 21, since the wind was at 200°. Another plane went in before me and landed on runway 26, which seemed like a weird choice. In my state, tired and frustrated and ready to be on the ground, I figured I'd better take the runway that was most into the wind. It would be silly to land in a crosswind and screw up the plane because I was over-tired. When I landed, I saw why the other plane picked 26: 21 was asphalt that looked like someone had gone over it with a giant rake, turning it into asphalt gravel. I stayed on less torn-up areas, and I don't think the plane was any worse for wear.
I am now safely ensconced in what I think is a WWII barracks building. Apparently Lewistown was a big airbase during the second World War, with a bunker for a Norden bomb-site off to one side, a giant hangar, and numerous WWII-era looking buildings. Not to mention having multiple runways pointed all directions of the compass.
I put Norbert into the giant hangar (for only $15 a night, I couldn't imagine not doing so -- a tiedown outside costs that much at some airports), and borrowed the very janky old Chevy Suburban crew car to drive into town to get dinner. The attendant who gave me the keys had a moment of, "Wait, I can't remember if that one has insurance or not," which fortunately didn't come up. Dinner was a perfectly acceptable bean tostada at the one Mexican restaurant in town (which I inhaled, apparently quite hungry), and now it's off to bed. The alarm is set for 3:45 to get me up in time to be in the plane and ready to take off at the 5:01 am sunrise time. I won't be into bed and attempting to sleep in this hot hot room (I discovered the AC controls too late for the thing to make much difference) until 10:30 or 11, so it's going to be a loooong day tomorrow.
Copyright © 2019 by Ian Johnston.