On the way out to the airport, I saw a sign that said "Rock Falls" (Illinois), the name of the town we stopped at last night. When you're on the road for a long time, it's real easy for everything to blend together and completely lose track of where you are. Hopefully this happens on the ground, and not in the air.
The newspaper man met us for breakfast and interviewed us for the feature story in his paper coming out next week. You do subscribe to the Rock Falls Bugle, don't you? Watch for it!
The heavy overcast had moved east overnight and the morning was absolutely perfectly clear. The flight to Lansing Michigan was only 2.8 hours, non stop, and we dipped south of Chicago to stay out of their airspace and then headed up the eastern shore of Lake Michigan for some low level flying until we veered east to Lansing. The territory here looks completely different than the fields of Iowa and Illinois. In Michigan it is mostly trees (orchards).
As we approached within 100 miles of Lansing, we caught up to the weather front which passed us last night, and the turbulence increased, the ceilings descended, and the temperature went cold again. We contacted Lansing's Class B airspace controller and were cleared to land at Capital Cities airport, home of the Classic Aircraft Corporation, builders of the Waco YMF-5, the plane I have come to love. As fate would have it, I made a perfect landing on runway 24, and the people at the factory actually noticed it. This was in sharp contrast to 3 years ago, when I first arrived here to buy my Waco, and I had only about a dozen hours of flying time. Then, my landings were HORRIBLE, bouncing and skidding and veering all over the runways. It must have provided many days of amusement to the people in the tower. For me it was pure torture (for the plane too, I'm sure), and there were times when I seriously doubted if I would ever get the knack of landing this beauty of a beast.
As Art and I pulled onto the ramp at Classic Aircraft, the huge hangar doors opened and our plane were welcomed in and immediately fawned over by technicians and managers and worker-bees who had been primed for days to prepare for our arrival, and the work we would need. First order of business was an oil change for each plane. Then for mine, special attention to the cause of excessive oil consumption (replace a crankcase check valve), also replace the carpet in the cockpit (oil stains)..... well, you know, a whole bunch of stuff that costs an arm and a leg, but it really doesn't matter because when you're up there flying you don't want to think that you were cutting corners on price.
These guys are really first class here at the Waco factory, and this is the first time this plane has been at the factory in two years. We took Carl Dye, the test pilot and the guy who gave me my first 20 hours of Waco time, to dinner and a few beers, and he says that I am the first person to fly a Waco solo from California back to the factory. I'm not sure that this is much of a distinction, especially there was one guy who flew his Waco from Vancouver to India (going east) in an attempt to go round the world. India was as far as he got, then he got food poisoning.
Art is learning Morse code from his Uncle Les on this trip, and I am going slightly bonkers listening to them doing "dit, dit, dah, dit, dah...." most of the day. I can hear them now through the walls in this motel room, and I yearn to be back in the cockpit where the only sounds are the great rumblings of the big radial Jacobs 7 cylinder, 275hp engine.
Tomorrow morning it is back to the factory to keep tabs on the progress of the work, then drive south to Auburn Indiana to check out the Auburn/Cord/Dusenburg Museum, a place where some of the finest automobiles ever built were created, in the middle of the Great Depression, the same years they were originally making the Waco biplane, and shares the same Art-Deco style.
If the planes are working well on Saturday, and the weather is clear, we plan a trip to the northern tip of Michigan, and a place called Mackinaw Island, and the Grand Hotel thereon, a great landmark if ever there was one. We can land on the island, but cars are prohibited. Looking forward to a real treat.