Earlier this week I said to Steven “I don’t think I’ve ever flown with you when it’s raining!”
Now I can check that off the list!
He was telling me how (non-heavy?) rain isn’t an issue—the prop blows it off the windshield. It does! The bigger issue is visibility, and maybe wind shear? Which we didn’t have any issues with yesterday.
But let’s back up.
We’ve had this STOL (short takeoff and landing) event on our calendar for over a month. We were both excited to see the STOL action in person! It’s extremely geeky and niche, but it’s very cool to see these planes takeoff and land in such a small amount of runway.
I didn’t think we were going to be able to go though. We’ve had a lot of storms this month, and OF COURSE, there was a high chance of one on Saturday.
Steven analyzed the weather though, and said we could get there (HXF, Hartford, WI) before the storm, then we’d be there all day and miss the storms at our home airport, then fly back.
And that’s exactly what happened!
We had a few alternatives in mind if we needed to change course or land due to the weather, but we were able to mostly stick to our original plan, just changing our pattern entry due to a cloud near the runway.
We landed and it wasn’t raining there. In fact, we had some nasty clouds there in the morning and it only ever sprinkled a bit.
The event started at 10:30, and we landed at 9:26, giving us plenty of time to get our tickets, set up our chairs, and get coffee and donuts from a food truck.
For the first few hours we still had some clouds covering us and making it very tolerable for sitting outside without shade. It was almost—dare I say—pleasant? For real, when we got there and I was wearing a tank I wondered if I was underdressed (as in, needed a hoodie). I was not.
We enjoyed watching the different classes compete, listening to the funny announcers, and hearing the advice of the competitors. My favorite was “don’t do anything dumb, different, or dangerous, just fly how you’ve been practicing”—good aviation advice in general.
I didn’t take many videos, and the ones I did are garbage. If you’re interested I recommend checking out their Facebook or Instagram (here’s a short montage of one class on Facebook).
We ate the lunch and snacks we brought, and continued enjoying the event until… dun dun dun, the clouds went away, and the sun started to peek through.
Whoa.
That sun was intense.
And this has somehow become a post all about weather and not about how cool this competition was and how talented these pilots are. Ha.
I slathered sunscreen on. We got up and walked around to air out. We put our umbrella over our legs. But we didn’t last that long! Just after 2:00 we packed up and went to sit under the shade of the airplane. It felt about 10 degrees cooler there. Maybe we’ll invest in a tent for events like this in the future!
We could still see and hear the competition, just not as well. But we stayed there, under the wing, for 2+ hours because we were waiting out weather back home. There was a SIGMET (Significant Meteorological Information) for a storm over our home airport, just as we predicted.
Interestingly (only to us and AvGeeks), because this airport is so close to Oshkosh, WI, where the biggest airshow in the world, AirVenture, starts TOMORROW, there were some well known pilots and social media personalities at this event. I am proud to say I am not nerdy enough to recognize them, but Steven was.
This morning, I saw that some of the people I follow were there, and kind of wish I’d realized it yesterday, but I really haven’t been spending enough time on socials to actually approach and talk to someone about the plane they just built or a recent flight or what they’ve been up to or whatever. Next time?!
Eventually the weather looked good enough back home (note, only 60.2 nautical miles away), and we took off at 4:43. The event had ended just before so we didn’t have to worry about any event traffic, just the general aviation traffic at the airport (which I need to look into, but it seems like there were a ton of aerobatic planes at this airport, or something—we saw sets of matching planes take off several times during the day, and we even saw four planes take off together—very cool!).
The clouds were around 4,600 where we took off,
then dropped lower and lower as we got closer to home, which we knew would happen.
Tower told us to fly direct to the numbers to land, which means skip the typical left downwind midfield entry, and be as efficient and quick as possible (in this case, because someone else was doing touch-and-gos), so Steven did just that, which was pretty fun. We flew in and did a really short final, and came down fast a little farther down the runway than we normally would have.
Steven completely buttered the landing (I rated it 15/10), which I found really impressive based on how fast we were coming in and the nonstandard entry. And I had to tease him about how much better it was than his morning landing in HXF (5/10) where we just plopped down muah ha ha.
All the airflow stops once you land and taxi and we were roasting. Typical summer flying. I love flying in the summer, and all seasons, but whoa, that heat gets to you! I opened the window and door as soon as I could and got my sweaty butt off that seat and asked Steven to start the AC in his car when we were still on the ramp.
We had a really fun day. I’m glad we got to go! And as always, can’t wait for our next flying adventure, which isn’t until mid August CRY.
