DETAILS! MORE THAN JUST "Safe Arrival, Tucumcari NM "

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As Anne said, "They remembered to push the button on the GPS locator unit today!" Official location and note:

We've just landed and everything is okay. It's Miller time! ESN:0-7366219 Latitude:35.1815 Longitude:-103.6094
Time:05/09/2008 15:26:16 (US/Eastern)


Day began with happy early rising all around in Weatherford Oklahoma. Today's intention was to get as far as Page AZ.
Man Plans, God Laughs.

What happened? Oh, about 30 knots headwind. Groundspeed was, um, discouraging; some cars passed at least one of the planes, and everyone took a continuous beating from turbulence for about two hours before landing at what was our planned gas stop. Landing was a real challenge. After everyone was safely down, the pilots convened, and decided there was no way we were going to try to take off. The worsening AIRMET finally convinced us to call it a day. Larry Falls joined us during our deliberation, having flown his own RV-4, which sorta looks like a miniature P-51 Mustang, from the southeast. He agreed we weren't going anywhere for the rest of the day.

This was where we first discovered that one doesn't merely "tie down" an aircraft in this wind-swept part of the world. No more ropes; ropes are for sissies. These people use CHAINS to secure their aircraft. And they needed them. John Peake would have been pleased.

The hotel's own employees picked us up in their own cars (which wasn't immediately evident, and when we found out we reimbursed them!), and we ended up eating at the hotel restaurant. "Several of us tried OSTRICH, right off the menu, which was pretty good!" recalls Geoff. There was a nearby farm that provided the hotel with ostrich (indigenous to Africa), emu (indigenous to the Antipodes), and rhea (of South American fame) meat. If we'd wanted to buy eight-inch diameter hollow eggs from these creatures, the hotel sold them, so we could have...but despite the minimal effect that would have had on weight and balance, MASS was also an issue, and there wasn't much point in buying something lovely and fragile that had high odds of being reduced to organic shards by packing or turbulence.


Over dinner, we met a former military test pilot who was passing through on a recreational flight of his own and concurred with our decision to just cease and desist. We realized that, in general, we could expect daily weather and wind conditions to deteriorate as the day wore on, and thus resolved rather more seriously than in previous days to make a concerted effort for an earlier start than had seemed particularly worthwhile so far.

So we got to bed at a relatively decent hour.

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Comments

[den]

instead of MASS, the correct term is VOLUME