Airventure 2025 | Day 4

July 19 | Saturday broke with solid overcast and a green, yellow and red blob showing on the weather radar phone ap heading to Brodhead.

The sky continued darkening from the west as I had breakfast and listened to the other pilots sitting around the table tell flying stories and talk about their different airplanes. The thunder, lightning and rain started about 10.

I talked to a woman named Cinnamon who flies float planes in Alaska. She is a CFI and shared an emergency checklist that they use in their flight school. Called ALARMSS, it was the essence of simplicity. A= airspeed. Fly the airplane. L= landing. Locate your landing spot. A= air restart. Go through your restart procedure. R= radios. Tune your emergency frequency or stay where you are if already talking to ATC. Make your mayday call, after you fly the airplane, find your landing spot and try to restart. M= call mayday. S= squawk 7700. S= Secure checklist to get ready for the emergency landing. Simple, especially if your engine quits in Alaska.

I plan to share it with our pilots back home, new or old.

I also found out that Cinnamon was born in Occidental, California, about thirty miles from my home in Sonoma. She started flying lessons when she was fifteen and used to hang out at Schellville airport in Sonoma, where I had learned to fly a few years earlier. She knew the people I knew, and flew to some of the places I flew, wound up in Alaska as a bush pilot, and came to Brodhead the same weekend I did, all these years later. My wife Catherine and I go to Occidental every August to buy Gravenstein apples and have lunch. Small world.

The thunderstorm passed by 1 and the sky resumed its lovely blue with puffy white clouds. The airplanes, including the few Pietenpols here this year, started up and trundled out over the uneven grass to take to the air in that beautiful Wisconsin sky.

Because of the unsettled weather in the Midwest this year, there were only three or four Pietenpols that flew in. There are several that are based at Brodhead, so when they were brought out, there were six on the line, with one from Fargo, ND, having already departed to miss this latest thunderstorm.

My mission this year, in addition to bringing things to sell in an effort to clean out my hangar, was to take lots of detail photos of Pietenpols here for our build team leader, Michael Wray, back home. Our EAA Chapter 1268 is building a Pietenpol as an educational activity for local youth and Chapter members. Unfortunately, our last crew of young people graduated from high school, so we are slowly working on the project to keep it moving until we fill out a new team.

Michael sent me out with a pretty detailed list. Luckily, there were two Piets on display that were under construction, so they were still open enough to get some good detail shots of brake systems, control cable routing, rudder and tailwheel controls. One of them also uses a converted Corvair engine as a power plant, the same engine we will use.

It’s about four-thirty in the afternoon now. I’m sitting in the Kelch museum, having just finished a soft-serve ice cream cone, and finishing today’s entry before the barbecued pork chop dinner served by Chapter 431 at six. After dinner, I will start packing my things in the airplane so all I will need to do in the morning is take down and pack the tent and sleeping bag, preflight the airplane, and leave for Oshkosh.

I’ve already fueled the airplane, and will check the oil before dinner. A red Stearman biplane is hopping rides, and loading just outside the big open hangar door. He returns from each ride, taxiing up with a roar and spinning around before shutting off that barking radial engine. It’s a little muggy after that thunderstorm, but the sun is shining, beautiful old airplanes are flying, and everyone is enjoying the relaxed pace of this Wisconsin grassroots fly-in.

The weekend is over too quickly, before we all head up to the comparatively frantic pace at Oshkosh. It’s good to be here, but it will be great to be back home as well.