This is exactly what we love about being able to fly—a quick day trip to Iowa. What normally would have been 8 hours total of driving was under 3 hours total of flying.
All week (and the day before!) the weather looked perfect for a flight to Guttenberg to practice landing and taking off on the grass runway on Abel Island. When we did our weather briefing Saturday morning though, it showed IFR (instrument flight rules) conditions near Guttenberg. We were all “huh?” We even had my snis and Dad sent us pics of the clear blue sky with wispy clouds. Odd. We played it safe and delayed our takeoff a bit to make sure we flew through official VFR (visual flight rules) conditions.
You just can’t write about flying VFR without talking about the weather! Which leads me to…
THE WILDFIRE SMOKE. Holy cow. We’ve flown in hazy, smoky conditions before, but this was something else!
There is still visibility (it was VFR, after all), but you can barely see the sky. Eerie.
We flew up to 8,500’ MSL to get above the smoke line.
That’s the highest we’ve flown in the Cessna 172!
It was a cool, in the mid 40s up there. It was already a pleasant day, and we both commented on how nice it was to be flying in August and not be sweating like crazy. We also commented on how the cold made us both feel like we had to pee. Ha.
It was an smooth and easy flight, and Steven took the time to teach me a few things about adjusting the fuel mixture in flight, as well as checking a few other gauges, like exhaust temperature, etc., etc. He also quizzed me on the best way to descend to get to pattern altitude when you’re not in a hurry (hint: it’s not put the nose down like I said LOL. It’s to decrease power.).
Usually you can see the Mississippi River from miles away, but because of the smoke we didn’t see it until we were right over it.
Because we were up so high at 8,500’, we had a lot of altitude to drop to get to pattern around 1,600’.
We came in a bit fast and high, and did a go-around—that’s when you start to land and decide not to and ascend and get back in the pattern.
The second attempt was a textbook perfect soft field landing (you have to adjust how you land and takeoff on soft fields to reduce stress on the landing gear), just a bit long.
Why’d we even make this trip if we were just there the Sunday before? We hadn’t flown to this airport in almost a year and wanted to re-familiarize. And I thought I might clean a bit. I had brought some cleaning supplies in case I had time to tidy up a bit before we are back in 12 days with guests, but I only did a bit of cleaning before my snis asked if we wanted to go on a boat ride to get lunch in a town north of us, and we were like “hells yeah!”
We drove back after lunch and as we approached the house my older brother and his wife had just arrived. So they hopped on the boat and we went to the beach to hang out for a bit.
It was such a lovely day! The weather was perfect, and it was nice to visit with everyone. I had just seen most of them six days prior but we didn’t really have a lot of time to chat with there being 15 of us there.
We went back to the house late afternoon and Steven finished a project he’d stated before we left, then we went to the runway.
Mom and Dad hung out with us while we pre-flighted and loaded the plane and waited to watch us leave.
Which means I got some cool shots! Thanks so much, Mom!
Taking off from Abel Island and flying over Esmann Island, where my family has property is so cool.
I love going over the water and seeing the sandbars we visit!
It wasn’t long after we took off (like 2 mins?!) that it started to get smoky and hazy.
Sigh.
We went up to 7,500 MSL, which was a bit clearer. It was a smooth flight and we mostly chatted the whole time.
We started our descent earlier than we usually would on the way back and were glad we did and could get through the worst of the smoke before it was time to get into the pattern at our home airport.
Landing on a long-ass paved runway feels different after landing and taking off in the grass! Steven completely buttered the landing, 10/10!
OH MY GAWD. I almost forgot. Ha ha ha ha. So, there is this weird thing where pilots “meow” on the emergency communications frequency, 121.5. We were listening on the way back and heard someone say “grow up.” And Steven was like “why would they say that?” And I told him “because people meow on this frequency.” And he was all 🙀🙀🙀 then sure enough, we heard someone meowing a Billie Eilish song. Imagine you’re having an actual reason to use that frequency and hear meowing. It makes me laugh and roll my eyes at the same time.
