Some pictures from 6-19

Team Cool Beans at the mandatory all racers briefing!

Our baby birds Nicole and Megan at their first all racers briefing.

Here's the fly-by procedure for Mobile, Alabama.

Racers taking pictures of the fly-by procedures so they can mark their approach plates.

Linda and Marlene, a fellow colleague from Pfizer, at the kick-off banquet.

Team Zippy Chicks (Laurie Zelinski and Barbara Parra) at the kick-off banquet.
Team Cool Beans at the kick-off banquet

The racers in the process of disbanding after the all racers photo.

June 18th (part 2)

Here is the weight and balance calculation I prepared for the handicap flight - back of the envelope in appearance, but numerically accurate!

This is a picture of Linda delightedly giving the thumbs up after restarting the plane, testing the mic, and realizing that our new alternate noise filter installed is working!!

Barbara gets tired of schlepping everywhere and commandeers the golf cart - Kelly gets a ride.

After spending most of the day working on our airplane, Kelly and team Cool Beans start to feel like family, so Kelly brings his wife Liesl and beautiful 8 month old daughter Aurora to meet us!

We finish installing our breast cancer decals. We have to give a huge thank you to Steve Graves and Karen Wunch of Higher Graphics. Steve has done our race number decals for the last four years, and they are awesome. Sometimes we see other racers having difficulties with numbers peeling off, but we never have any trouble like that. This year, we asked him if we could do something to remember Theresa Dellaquila, our friend who died of breast cancer, and who we memorialize in our team name. Steve and Karen took this project to heart, and produced these beautiful decals. Karen designed them. They are pink and white and silver; they say "for Theresa"; and at the top is a little wing with the letters FGF in it, which Karen came up with and stands for  Fly Girls Forever. All of us teared up when we first saw the design. The last few decals had to be shipped to us direct at the hotel. Karen and Steve, we really appreciate what you have done for us, for Theresa's memory!

The view from our hotel window - a rooftop wedding!

The evening event was held in the very same hangar where our plane spent the afternoon! But this time there was a swing band and great barbecue, and lots of old friends to catch up with, including some (Charissa Dyer-Kendler!) who we hadn't seen in at least 7 years!

Barbara finds her second baby of the day to hang out with! This one is Skyla, daughter of Amanda, a corporate pilot for John Deere and a lovely person that we got to know a bit. Skyla was very taken with Barbara (and everyone else who she met), and particularly enjoyed the dancing.

Didn't get to do our handicap flight today due to morning fog, afternoon low clouds and evening thunderstorms. But the evening was for the most part calm, and here is the flight line with our plane (#21) in the middle.

There are eleven collegiate teams this race, and here are a big group of them during the barbecue.

Joyce Wells finds an obliging partner to dance to the band music with!

June 18th (part 1)

(This post actually made byAlison on Linda's computer). Linda, Barbara and I are in adjoining rooms at the Sheraton with a connecting door, which is fun. We got to lie in till 7am or so today, and after a very lovely breakfast we went for a walk around Iowa City downtown to wake us up. The University of Iowa campus dominates the town. We crashed a writers' conference to take a look at the museum in the old capitol building (below). I have decided that I want a golden dome on my house, it looks so pretty!There is som interesting outdoor art, including this large book containing an extract from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo!

Linda and Barbara pretending to be faculty.

Alison and Barbara are swept away by a tornado statue (entitled "Dorothy").

Then, it was time to head off back to the Iowa City airport (which is only 5 minutes drive away from downtown!) to take care of the race business for the day. Two major items still remained - the airplane inspection, and the handicapping flight. The latter was supposed to occur last night with Linda flying left seat and Gretchen Jahn as check pilot, but after 7 hours flying our hot little airplane didn't want to start, and we had to give up. This sometimes happens with our C182, and is a bit embarrassing when it happens, but Vern explained to us that the starter in the later C182s is not a good brand and that we probably should replace it at some point. So we tried regular start, hot start, and flooded start techniques last night but although the prop turned it wouldn't catch. So... our first order of the day was to start the plane up and get it over to the hangars for inspection. We cranked it a couple more times, but still, no success! By now, the battery was basically dead after all the failed attempts. We found Vern who took a look and advised us to get the Jet Air shop mechanics to give us a jump start and then recharge the battery. Well, this turned out to be the best thing that happened to us all day, as you will shortly see! I walked over and introduced myself to Josh, who shortly sent over the 24V power cart, plugged it into the cowling, and we were able to get it going!! Linda taxied it over where Josh and the staff did the inspection. Here is one of them looking at our Lycoming IO360 engine.

By the way, here is a picture of our baby birds Nicole and Meghan from University of Kansas, during their inspection! We have been emailing back and forth a bit, so it was great to finally meet them in person.

Here Josh is going over all the log books with me, checking off all the items on his checklist. One of the things we have to provide is all the FAA form 337s and STCs for any major work performed on the airplane. The last plane we raced was basically factory stock and had none of these, but our plane has had some major modifications, upgrades and repairs in the past, so we had a whole slew of them. You should have copies of all of them, but some of ours were missing, even from the FAA disc record that I bought, so it was a major exercise in detective work to track some of them down, but I did it (or so I thought...). Our excellent home mechanic Kent at Pottstown PA also helped us complete the record. During the inspection Josh did find one STC that I missed (darn it!!), but owing to the miracle of technology we were able to locate it in the FAA database, download and print it immediately. Inspection passed!!

So now, we restart (phew!) and taxi the plane back over to Josh's maintenance hangar, and meet Kelly, who removes the battery in the tailcone of the airplane and puts it on trickle charge for a couple hours. In the meantime, we tell him how on the way out, the pilot side mic became unusable because every time you pressed the push to talk switch an unholy screaming noise occurred - we had to have the copilot make all the radio transmissions. Josh immediately identified the likely culprit as the alternator noise filter (something I never previously knew existed, but I now know is a small cylindrical object towards the front firewall..). Kelly located one in inventory, and switched it out, and a couple hours later when we restarted the plane complete with newly charged battery, the noise was gone!!! Josh and Kelly, you were awesome and helped us out so much - you guys rock!!!

Here is Linda standing by another sign... the airport flightline is in the background.

During the day a very successful girl scout event was held at the terminus, with several hundred participants taking airplane rides, looking at static displays and meeting the racers. (we didn't take part, but passed it several times on our many trips to and from the maintenance hangar!) .

Next post will follow shortly...

Some pictures from June 17th

We received a singing send-off of "When Irish Eyes are smiling" from Russell and my parents.

Crossing "the mighty Susquehanna" river. There were quite a few clouds in PA.

We ran into Denise Waters at the airport in Youngstown, Ohio.

We ran into Barbara Parra from the "Zippy Chicks" in Lafayette, Indiana (home of Purdue University).

Here it is.....Iowa City airport....the start of the race!

We're here!

Our day started at 7am when we met at the airplane, along with Russell and Linda's Mum and Dad to wave us off. Although the weather looked murky and grey, the overcast was low but relatively thin, and we knew we'd get up to blue skies. Also by starting early, we wanted to avoid the inevitable cumulus and thunderstorm build up over the Appalachians on the way west. Linda started the plane and flew the first leg. My headset broke before we got going, but fortunately Linda had a spare.

The first leg we flew in and out and over clouds, catching glimpses of the Susquehanna and the ridges around Williamsport as we did. Once we passed the mountains and entered the Ohio plains, the clouds flattened right out and although Linda flew the ILS approach into our first stop (Youngstown), we were clear of clouds by a couple miles out. The folks at Youngstown were very helpful, including the aviation shop looking at our pilot side mike jacks for us. Also thanks very much to Bose - I called them from Youngstown to tell them about the broken headset and the race, and they're going to drop ship a loaner to Iowa City for me tomorrow.

The second leg to Purdue Indiana was flown by Alison, pretty much in visual flight conditions. We had a terrible headwind so this leg took almost three hours, but it was smooth and cool up at 8000 feet and we had plenty of time, so we didn't complain.

Alison also flew the third leg into Iowa City. The climb out of Purdue was through bumpy towers of cumulus, and even at 8000 feet this late into the afternoon we were skimming the tops and clipping the sides of bright white clouds with plenty of updrafts. Unlike the first two stops, Iowa has no control tower so we cancelled our IFR flight plan and landed, then taxied to our tiedown spot for number 21.

Spent the next few hours checking in, doing credential checks, meeting old friends who are herer for the race. There are 50 teams again this year, which is a very good size field of racers. It's fun to see everyone again.

Writing this entry on the ground at Iowa City airport while Linda and Barbara go up with Gretchen to do our timing run, so we'll add photos later tonight!

Numbers on the plane; we leave tomorrow morning

Tonight we put the numbers on the plane and finished our flight planning. We leave early tomorrow morning for Iowa City. Looks like we'll be dealing with some weather but hopefully nothing that will disrupt our plans too much. Below are some pictures from tonight.

Here's Alison in the early stages of the process.

Barbara and Alison with the job complete.

Here's the team celebrating a job well done by posing with some beautiful mugs that my brother bought the team as gifts. Thanks Tom!

Here's a special decal for the plane honoring the memory of our friend and fellow pilot Theresa who passed away from breast cancer a few years ago. More to come on that later.

Washed, waxed and ready to go!

The team spent spent last Sunday washing and waxing the plane and now it's all ready to go! Well, at least from a cleanliness standpoint it's ready to go. We are not happy with the way the attitude indicator is working so we left the plane with our mechanic for the weekend. Hopefully tomorrow he will have some good news for us and it will be something he can easily diagnose and fix. We'll keep our fingers crossed!

In the mean time, we're in full planning mode. We have all the charts and have marked them with the race course and are planning our approach. With each passing day I'm getting more and more excited!

Here's Barbara carefully plotting the race course on our charts.

Here we are looking a bit like drowned rats after washing and waxing the plane.