Wrapping up

Just to bring our blog to a close (in case anyone is still reading it), we left Norfolk around 7pm last night and got home to Doylestown PA around 9pm, Linda flying the final leg through a lovely pink evening sunset with the lights coming out on the ships in the Chesapeake below, and the clouds dissipating around us as the sky darkened. Russell and Linda's Mum and Dad met us in the dark on the ramp when we landed, and we unpacked, tied down and went home. We came home with three new exhaust gaskets, a new spinner, and medals that we didn't have when we left! We also came home with a new understanding of and trust for our plane, which is still less than a year old to us but we now know it much better and respect what it can do. And we're still great friends and a great team! That's all till next year, unless Linda posts a final set of pictures tonight.

Spoke too soon!

Gigantic thunderstorm right over Norfolk airport. Just as we were looking at the dark clouds to the south and debating whether we could get out from under them and head off northeast to our destination, the time interval between the thunder and lightening went down to zero, and torrential rain came down so hard that they shut the ramp, which you can now barely see across anyway. So we are stuck here till it lifts.

Working our way back to PA

Set off early this morning once the new spinner was fitted, and set off over the top of the clouds to our first stop which was Milledgeville GA. We originally intended to fly via Chattanooga but a more easterly route seemed like a better way to stay ahead of the weather. There were some nasty thunderstorms to our East, and since I was flying this leg, Linda called ATC and we got vectors around them. However it was cloudy, hazy and bumpy, and we saw lightening off our wing... By the time we landed there was a heavy rain shower over the airport. Milledgeville was a quiet but pretty stop on a lake, but there was no food. We refueled and set off again.

The next leg was over three hours to Norfolk VA, where we are now sitting in Dennys having borrowed the crew car because we are ravenous. Again, a nice leg but some nasty storms just off our right wing to the East.

Our next and final leg ends in Doylestown, and our long journey of over 3000 nm will be over. It has been awesome - team Cool Beans has been awesome, the flying was outstanding, and we brought home medals! Now thats what I call a vacation.

Yessss! Top ten!

We went down to the banquet this evening full of nerves and excitement. Marilyn Wilson (the president of the ARC) gave out the awards after dinner. Minnetta and Charissa got the Ambassador award for being the only team to fly the entire race route including the cancelled legs (in IFR). The collegiate challenge trophy was given out also. Then, they start on the leg prizes. There are four leg prizes for each leg of the race. The only racers who are eligible for leg prizes are teams who did not make the top ten - we already knew that we were one of the few teams to get a positive score on leg 2 - so therefore, we knew that we'd be highly likely to win a leg prize for that leg - unless we were top ten. Marolyn read out the leg prizes in race number order, and team 21 wasn't called at all! So at this point we knew we'd either won nothing at all, or were top ten.

As it turned out, we got 9th place!!! We were thrilled and delighted. Linda, Barbara and I were called up to receive beautiful and huge medals on red ribbons, and have our photos taken. We're tired and a bit overwhelmed right now, this is a better result than we could ever have hoped for (although from the beginning Barbara did say that we'd come in at number 9!).

So, to summarize the results, 50 teams registered for the race. 2 scratched before the start, and another 4 withdrew during the race due to weather and other issues. One team didn't complete due to maintenance issues which was such a shame. This left 43 teams jn the running. The top two places were taken by collegiate teams (Jacksonville and Illinois respectively), and third place was Joyce Wilson and Rebecca Hempel. Our friend Camelia Smith from Arkansas and her partner Julia Matthews came fourth. Debi Dreyfuss team from the MidAtlantic section were sixth. Mother-daughter team Susan and Marie Carastro came seventh. We were ninth (yay!!!), and our friend Ljn Caywood and her partner Susan Beall also from the MidAtlantic section we're tenth.

Now we have to sleep (we'll probably wear our medals over our pjs!), and tomorrow we plan to fly back to Doylestown via Chattanooga and Blacksburg. Before we leave, we have to get the spinner replaced on the airplane because ours is cracked. Fortunately our home mechanic Kent Heller worked all morning on Friday to locate a replacement spinner somewhere in Wichita that was shipped to the mechanic here on Saturday. Should only take twenty minutes to install.

Here are some thank yous from team Cool Beans:
Our mechanic Kent Heller for his work on the plane, including finding us a replacement spinner at short notice.
Steve Graves and Karen Wunch for the wonderful and unique breast cancer decals as well as our number decals.
Vern Conly for being such an awesome source of advice on the paperwork and maintenance of the plane both before and after the race.
The staff at Bose for going out of their way to get me a replacement headset in time for the race start.
Michael Norris and Josh at El Dorado for all their help with our spinner issue.
Josh and Kelly at Iowa City airport for all their help with our battery and alternator noise filter issues.

I'm sure there are many more, but that's it for now. Good night from #9!!

Scenes from the awards banquet

Some beautiful southern belles joined us for the banquet.
With some interesting under garments!

A shot of the banquet hall

Alison, Linda, Megan, Nicole and Barbara at the banquet

Charissa and Minetta display their ambassador awards for traveling to all the airport thzat were cut out of the race due to weather.....and they still got to Mobile in time to finish the race. Awesome job guys!

The racers from the mid-Atlantic section of the Ninety-Nines. Three teams from the Mid-Atlantic section finished in the top 10!

Linda, Barbara and Alison proudly display their 9th place medals at the awards banquet.

Barbara wearing Linda's and Alison's medals and looking at the weather vane Alison won in the silent auction. Barbara's medal will be shipped to her at home in Florida.

Down To The Wire

Barbara writes

We have busied ourselves this day to make the hours pass till it is time for the banquet and the results to be announced. We have at various times seen ourselves with no prize not even a leg prize and then at moments of sheer wishful thinking we see ourselves in the top three. This evening after dinner the leg prizes will be announced one by one and there are four for each leg and there were six legs. If we win one of these we know we are not in the top ten. If we don,t we will wait for the top ten to be announced and if we are not among those we will not win at all. All the while we will sit with smiles on our faces clapping for each winner. It will be a long evening. In spite of this we have enjoyed ourselves immensely often having great laughs at and with each other. The trip has been a wonderful experience all around and prize or no prize I will go home happy.

The big day is here!

The last official race day started with a final debrief that was mandatory for all racers. The judges reported that this was a good clean race with only 18 potential rule violations that had to be investigated, of which 5 were eliminated after investigation. This might seem like a lot, but when you multiply almost 50 race teams by 6 stops by the number of rules, it's really quite small. As I reported yesterday, team Cool Beans had zero penalties so none of the 18 were ours.

Then we went upstairs to receive our handicap from Marvin, and sign off our completed score sheet. Our final handicap is 139.82 knots for our Cessna Skylane C182S, which seems about right. We are getting very excited to hear the results which will be announced at the banquet tonight! In the meantime, Linda and Barbara have gone to church with instructions to pray, and I went to the gym, then we'll have a few free hours this afternoon to explore Mobile before the big reveal tonight.

Pictures from June 25th

We met in the hotel lobby at 6AM to go to the airport for our handi-cap flights
Briefing the handi-cap flights before we leave

Rebecca and Joyce - team #1 and two handi-cap flight pilots

Alison checks the oil before our handi-cap flight

An island in Mobile Bay on the climb out dring the handi-cap flight

Mobile under the clouds

Mobile Downtown airport - terminus for the race. Looks different from 4000 feet vs 300 feet!

An airforce plane taxis off our left wing

Barbara's in love - a husky sea plane in one of the hangars at Mobile

Inspectors open the cowling for our inspection as a potential top 14 finisher

All the paperwork must be accurate - see the log books sitting on the wing

The first Presbyterian church of Mobile - it's quite beautiful

Fried pickles on the menu!

Spent the afternoon at the battleship Alabama memorial parl and aviation museum

The Air Race CLassic partnered with the Boys & Girls clubs of South Alabama. Here are our baby birds with the two young ladies who followed their team

Rose Brown, Mary Wunder and their adopted young lady

Group photo of all the young ladies who attended the event today

The paparazzi

USS Battleship Alabama

One of the young ladies shows off her magnificently decorated t-shirt

Ended the day with dinner at Wintzell's oyster bar

June 24 - The melt down party

Here are some pictures from the "Melt Down" party on Firday night.It was held in the "Sky View" restaurant on the 17th floor of the Holiday Inn where we are staying.

The team from Indiana State doesn't need to clean underneath their plane anymore. They can finally sit and relax.

A viewof theMobileskyline.
Linda and Barbara

Team #23 (Barbara Goodwin, Maureen Kenney) - on the outside. Team #22 (Carolyn Van Newkirk, Carol Church) - on the inside.

Us and our baby birds.

Be still my beating heart

So we have an update, and some potentially exciting news....!

Linda and Barbara completed the handicap run this morning (while I completed my massage!), and all went well. They were able to fly the four sides of the square at the correct density altitude at full throttle, not much turbulence, and get good speed readings. The judges will take all this data and compute our handicap. We don't know what it is yet, but we have a pretty good idea just from our own observations during the race and during the handicap run itself. The handicap is important because the race is scored based on the average of how much you beat your own handicap by on each leg.

Now for the potentially exciting news... At the end of every race, the judges compute all the scores, and pull the top 12-14 planes or so for inspection. This is to make sure that the competition winners haven't tinkered with their airplane en route, or somehow put in a bigger engine or something! The call to these lucky few pilots from one of the judges comes late on Friday night. As the news gradually percolates out that one or other person has got "the call", and you haven't, it's difficult not to be somewhat crushed even if you aren't super competitive(and let's face it, we're all competitive!). I have never had "the call" in four races, and neither have Linda or Barbara in their two. Well, late last night Linda knocked on our door and told us she'd received "the call", and we were one of 14 aircraft that needed to be re-inspected. We were so excited, we couldn't believe it. Now, it's important to remember that the decision to potentially include us in the top 14 was made without even knowing our handicap yet. Furthermore, its made without everyone having signed their score sheets yet, and there could be some disputes that would make people's scores better if resolved in their favor. So we could still end up anywhere in the ranking, maybe not even in the top 14 at all. But you know what, it's really nice to have the feeling that you got the call and that placing is even a possibility! So we are enjoying the feeling while it lasts.

So, after the handicap run, the plane went straight into inspection, and did fine. The last thing that happened this morning was that we went to see the chief judge Marvin to review our leg times, which will be used to compute our scores once the handicap is available. We did great, zero penalties (yay!!), and our timing data agreed almost exactly with his. This is a result of the excellent job that Barbara did recording all of our time and elapsed time data from the back of the plane, with Linda duplicating it as a back up. So we signed off on our score sheets.

Only time will tell now. Remember, we are by no means guaranteed to end up with a top 10 or top 14 place because of the variables I mentioned above. But we are enjoying the feeling right now, and that's what counts! Go team Cool Beans!!

Will we finally get our handicap this morning?

Woke up at the crack of dawn this morning to go to the Mobile airport to try to get our handicap flight done before the mid morning cumulus starts to build. It's about 8am and it's already extremely hot and humid. Our check pilot is still busy with another flight, so we are waiting in the cool terminus building. Since I'm not needed for the flight (they try to get the same weight distribution as the race configuration, so the check pilot stands in for me), I have helped preflight the plane and prepare for the trip, but then I am going to be disloyal and go for a massage while the rest of the team is flying.... Then I will return to pick them up, and we'll go on to the rest of the day which is a tour of Continental (aviation engine manufacturer, although our engine is a Lycoming!), followed by an event on a battleship, and at some point we have to get our final scoresheet signed off.

Barbara writes:

I'm in the same cool terminal waiting for our check pilot to return. This handicap flight is truly the final lap in our journey. We feel we have done the very best we could with only minor things we might have changed thinking back over the six legs of the race. Now we wait on the results and the judges decisions. For the time being we still dream of finishing at the top of the pack. Although I sat in the back for every flight Linda and Alison have made me feel very much a part of the team all the time. I love them both for it.

We made it!!

Linda flew the last leg from El Dorado to Mobile today. Some racers were worried about forecast IFR conditions on route, and thunderstorms arriving in Mobile by 2pm, but it seemed to us that the en route conditions were just a little ground fog that would burn off by 10am. We left around 1030am, just ahead of the single scheduled flight that leaves El Dorado for Memphis every day. It was already very hot. We did the flyby to runway 17 then zoomed off to the east heading for Mobile. This was one of the longer legs at 280nm (about 2 hours at race speed), but was very pretty country that we got to see in some detail from our relatively low altitude. We called some of the uncontrolled airports we passed over en route to position report and monitor traffic. Again, drinking a lot of water was really important with all the air vents closed! The end of the route was through Mobile controlled airspace, but just as in Oklahoma city the controllers knew we were coming and were ready for us, and very accommodating. So about 30 miles out we called Mobile approach, who gave us a transponder code and we entered their airspace; then there was some switching back and forth with Mobile downtown Tower to make our 20, 10 and 5nm position reports, then about 10 miles out Approach cleared us to switch over to Mobile Tower. The Tower controller was magnificent! He had women pilots shooting all over the place in different directions at full speed, some doing their flybys, others vectoring to cool off their engines or come around to land, and even though he was working flat out and at double speed, he never lost his cool and managed to keep the whole situation under control. In fact he did better than me - I was trying to run two radio frequencies simultaneously, ignore the continual warning beep indicating that the right tank was running low on fuel, watch for traffic, and hear above the rising level of happy excitement from the rest of our crew in the airplane, and allegedly at one point I may have punched Linda (the pilot!) in the arm a little too hard as I tried to get everyone to shut up...! Sorry Linda! The controller cleared us for our flyby, which went very well, then we shot up and over the Mobile Bay to cool down. It was very pretty flying over the bay and looking back over the city. We came back around and were cleared to land on 18. Wheels down, and another race accomplished!!

We taxied to the Mobile ramp, tied down, removed all our belongings from the plane per race rules, patted it, and thanked it for being such a good race plane. Our rental car was driven right up to the plane, so all we had to do was pack it up and we were ready to go to the hotel downtown. Checked in to our two rooms, hooked up with Mary and Rose, and went out for a late lunch (we were starving!). Then back to the hotel for the meltdown party and to hang out with the other racers and exchange stories.

Each race is different, and for all of us this will be distinguished as a very difficult weather race. For team Cool Beans, this will also be memorable for the amount of en route maintenance we had to do - it was like a very expensive maintenance trip really! But always there's the beautiful scenery, meeting up again with old friends, and of course awesome flying day in and day out. The race isn't over yet. We still have a handicap flight to do; scores to add up; and we find out how we did at the banquet on Sunday night; and then finally we have to fly all the way back to PA on Monday! Stay tuned.

June 24 pictures - El Dorado, AR & Mobile,AL

Two thirds of team #18 (Sonia Bortolin & Tamra Sheffman) at breakfast at the Country Inn & Suites in El Dorado, AR. They are flying for breast cancer awareness (flyingforawareness.org). Sonia is a breast cancer survivor.

Two thirds of team #2 (Gene Nora Jessen & Brenda carter) at breakfast in El Dorado, AR

The airport dog in El Dorado, AR.

Crop fires on the way to Mobile

Crossing the mighty Mississippi river

Our first glimpse of Mobile, AL peeking upon the horizon

Approaching the final flyby in Mobile, AL.

After flyby, heading out over the gulf to cool down

Turning back toward Mobile to land

Lots of race planes on the ground in Mobile

A happy team #21 on the ground in Mobile after a successful race

Heading to the hotel

Team #17 and team #21 joined forces for lunch at "A Spot of Tea"

The hospitality room on the 17th floor of the Holiday Inn is a buzz with activity

Children from Mobile adopted race teams and made posters

Friday morning

Hanging out in the highly air conditioned terminal building at El Dorado Arkansas, almost ready to leave. The plane is preflighted, the paperwork is done, and we are ready for the last leg to Mobile. The weather should basically be nice the whole way so long as we arrive before the 2pm thunderstorms, except for a little low IFR which is probably just ground fog on the route. Once again we are among the last to leave - it's been our MO for this race! The folks here have been wonderful, especially Josh the stop chair (and his entire family who have been helping out with rides and other things) and Michael.

Barbara writes:

Another hot day on the ramp as we prepare the plane to leave for our final stop on our journey. It seems over too soon. We have established an easy routine of who does what and when and it flows well. It will be a challenge to get back to doing it all myself for future flights without my partners.

June 23rd pictures - Norman, OK & El Dorado, AR

The approach into Norman, OK
Alison gets a ride in the "follow me" cart

We were surrounded by "Boomer Sooners". They have a big aviation program at University of Oklahoma who did a great job hosting us in Norman.

Welcome display in Norman.

They have their own airport

The "follow me" cart. We got quite a few rides in the follow-me cart as we sorted out some issues with the airplane.

University of Oklahoma footbal stadium (on its side)

An almost dry riverbed on the way to El Dorado, AR

There are about 30 race teams in El Dorado tonight. We ran into some of them at "Mel's Seafood" so I crashed their picture.

The sun sets on the planes parked at El Dorado airport. Ready for the last leg of the race tomorrow to Mobile, AL.