Where I've been...

Posting's been light this week-end, because Murphy and I were traveling.

It was an early morning take-off, delayed a bit due to hazy weather over the field, but we launched and headed northwest because we had someplace to be.

Enroute, we overflew the usual neat stuff. (Click on the pics to enlarge them.) Here's the railroad roundhouse at Cumberland, MD, complete with it's turntable.

Built in 1919 by the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, it's apparently still in use today by CSX as a locomotive repair facility.

And here's a nifty little dam holding back a nice-looking mad-made lake above a town my map identifies as Confluence, PA.

This dam on the Yough river was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1948 to created a lake 16 miles long. They did it for flood control and water power applications but today it's used for recreation.
(You learn so much neat stuff flying over other stuff...)

Then it was onward, around Pittsburgh and past Cleveland to overfly that mecca of the shooting sports, Camp Perry outside of Port Clinton, Ohio. The matches run most of July and August, this year from July 9th through August 15th, with competitions firing every day. On this day at this time, I'm overflying the CMP Games Springfield/Vintage Rifle Match. This one's fired at 200 yards using original "as-issued" 1903 Springfield rifles. A second class fires at the same time using other vintage military rifles.

100 firing positions on this range means 100 people shooting at the same time. I've shot this match and I love that sound. I wish I were shooting it this year, but my hand still won't hold a rifle with it's soft cast on. Also, 95-degree heat makes for a long day sitting or lying in that field with no shade. But still...The Nationals. It's worth the suffering once a year.

Here you can see the whole operation. To the left are the pits where the targets are run down, marked and scored between strings or individual shots, depending on the match. There are three shooters assigned to each target to do this. Add in the other staff back there and you've got about 350 people downrange behind the concrete wall and earth berm. Every shooter gets a rotation down there too for half of the match. It's all part of the game. Moving to the right, or south, you can see the shooters and their support personnel. The firing points are all empty, suggesting that I flew over between match sets. Note that the only shade is one tent put up by and for range staff for their use. Everyone else just enjoys the weather. Bring sunscreen and much water. And there is easily another 600-700 people on this end of the range, or over a thousand people total involved in just this one match. And there will be matches every day, usually multiple matches each day firing on adjacent ranges, both morning and afternoon. Camp Perry is one busy place in the summer, and it's all shooters shooting. (Hey liberals...look! No one gets shot every year despite thousands and thousands of people all in one place with guns! Maybe guns aren't the problem, eh?)

Then it was out over Lake Erie, after first passing by the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant west of Perry.

Aircraft should not overfly this plant at low altitudes. That's bad and neither they nor the FAA appreciate it.

Crossing the lake, I climb to give myself more glide range should a problem occur over the water, and then on the other side I have to drop down to under 3500 feet (and then 2500 feet) to stay under Detroit Metropolitan Airport's controlled airspace. But this is cool, because there's nothing below me but river and I can boat-watch.

There's one!

An ore freighter up-bound passing Trenton, MI.

And a newer, larger one down-bound.

Personally I like the older ones, as they exemplified the glory days of Great Lakes shipping, but most of them are gone now, either scrapped outright or converted into
self-unloading barges like this one I spied:

Here you can see where they've removed the entire aft structure and engines and put in a notch for a large tug to fit in. It's degrading to do that to a proud ship like a Great Lakes freighter.

Blowing up this shot gives me it's name. She's the Sarah Spencer.

She didn't always look like this though. In 1959, she was laid down as Hull #424 in the Manitowoc, Wisconsin, shipyard and launched as the Adam E. Cornelius, a coal-fired self-unloader that was 666.3 feet long. For almost thirty years she sailed the Great Lakes, until declining lakes shipping and the rising costs of operating a coal power plant idled her along with so many others. Now she's this...an unpowered 611 foot barge pushed by a 137 foot tug named the Jane Ann IV, which is not here today.

Very sad.


Equally sad was my RC-172 discovery of the old Bob-lo boats, tied up at this downriver dock just north of the Spencer.

For those who are not from this area, or those who are too young to remember, Bob-Lo Island was an amusement park in Canadian waters that could only be reached by boat. On the American side, two steamers, the Columbia and the St. Claire, took people to the island every day for 89 years. With the closing of the park, the ships were idled and have sat, virtually abandoned and rotting into the river ever since despite attempts to preserve and renovate them by various groups and individuals over the years. I'd heard that they were still on the river someplace but didn't know where until this northbound flight when I overflew them and recognized them.

The Columbia is the larger one farthest inland in the slip (left ship in the pics below). The smaller one facing into the river channel is the St. Claire (right ship in these pics).

They really aren't as bad as they look. The St. Claire is being restored with the promise of local use, and the Columbia is being stabilized prior to being towed to New York, where it is intended to be restored and used on the Hudson River.

I remember taking these boats to Bob-lo back in the early 1980's...sigh. Getting there really was half the fun back then.

Then it was up past Zug Island again, taking pictures just because they've always prohibited it on their grounds.

Your mill is now my turn point and navigation aid, so get used to the red-and-white spy plane, steel people. If you're building Transformers or Battle-Bots down there, I will see you and provide proof to the world.

Turning inland, it was just a short hop to our destination airport. And Murphy cued in on it right away.

"I see 'em! It's my Grand-ma and my Spud!"

Yep. In for a short week-end to see family...and to take the Spud and my father to a very special event, which you'll see in the next post.


Oh, and just because the Bob-Lo boats have me nostalgic...here's a vintage Faygo Pop commercial featuring one of the smaller, Canadian-based Bob-lo boats.

That commercial ran for years every summer back in the 70's. I used to love it.

Flying back to see family

Sorry I've been absent for a few days, but one of the reasons that I bought the airplane was so that I could get back to see my family more than once or twice a year. They live up in Michigan and I live down here, 8-9 hours away by car. But now courtesy of the plane, that trip has just been cut markedly. This week-end was a test of that theory and it worked very well indeed.

Murphy has not yet been taught to fly (and his new dog hearing protectors have not arrived yet) so he stayed behind with his favorite dog-sitters while I was gone.

I started out Saturday morning with a thorough pre-flight check.

Plane checks out. Got my charts, got my new GPS with sectional map display. Tanks are full.

Got my coffee, got my Choiceasaurus. I was set.

Flying over eastern WV after climbing out. (click on any of these pics to enlarge them.)

I'd plotted a route from my airport to Mansfield, Ohio, and then a course change to Monroe, MI and from there into Plymouth Mettetal airport just west of Detroit. This course was intended to take me around the restricted airspace over the major airports at Pittsburgh and Cleveland, leaving me just Detroit's to deal with.

Cumberland, MD.

No controlled airspace here. Just staying high because this is mountainous terrain.

Hey look--windmills!

Farms.

Towns along the river. This is Greensboro and Masontown in Pennsylvania.

What looks to be a nuclear powerplant not in use on the Ohio side of the Ohio river just north of Wheeling, WV. Google's not helping me find it's name or story, though.

EDIT: Visitor Adam Smith pointed out that it's actually a coal-fired plant with a cooling tower. And it turns out that it's the Cardinal/Tidd coal-fired plant in Brilliant, Ohio. Thanks, Adam!

It was a nice flight all the way to Mansfield. The air was smooth and clear and Unicom traffic was light in my area. I wasn't going to land at Mansfield originally, but by the time I got there, that 24oz coffee that I'd had prior to takeoff convinced me otherwise. So I got clearance from their tower and in I went.

Bathroom notwithstanding, this turned out to be a poor choice on my part as the tower was letting us departing aircraft stack up at the hold-short line while they gave priority to no end of incoming planes. No fun sitting on the ground in a non-air-conditioned cockpit (and with an air-cooled motor) while the same Skylane makes TWO touch-and-go landings. But every time someone would call that they were downwind, tower would repeat his call of "aircraft holding short continue to hold". I easily spent ten minutes sitting there waiting when I could have gotten off in between any of those aircraft. Aargh!

But on the plus side, I got to see this cool vintage Ercoupe.

And then there was the Holy Grail for us Hi-Power shooters--Camp Perry! Run by the Ohio National Guard, Perry is home of the National Matches and it is also the world's largest outdoor rifle range.

All that open area by the lake that you see is rifle range, some reaching out to a thousand yards. This is also where the Civilian Marksmanship Program is run from. If they only had a runway, I'd have a new Garand today.

The Davis-Besse nuclear plant that savvy shooters at Perry use for wind doping.

Then it was out over the corner of Lake Erie. (And yes, the engine did seem to run rougher as soon as it got out over the water.) But the shoreline was always in sight and Monroe, MI was just a few minutes away. I came in over their field but was too busy complying with Detroit Metro Approach's instructions to take pictures. They kept me down low and just insisted that I stay clear of their Class B airspace as I headed up towards Canton. This brought me into Willow Run Airport's Class D airspace so I got to talk to them, too. Very nice people, those Willow Run controllers.

Here's the Detroit sectional, for those who might be curious. (Part of being a pilot is knowing how to read that and comply.)

Now Willow Run has always been a special place to me. It was built as Henry Ford's production plant for B-24 bombers in World War Two. They made 8,645 B-24 bombers at this plant, pushing them out at the remarkable rate of up to twenty-five a day with Ford's auto assembly-line processes adapted to aircraft production. Sadly, that plant is no more. Ford abandoned it after the war and the county turned it over to General Motors for a dollar. GM used it to make cars for decades and then it's greedy union priced themselves out of a job by demanding more when GM was seeking concessions to stay afloat.

I overflew Willow Run low to the east, and then I was practically on top of Mettetal and their little postage-stamp runway. (OK, it's 2300 feet. Admittedly I'm spoiled by my 7,000 foot runway back home.) I came around following the other traffic in the pattern and landed hot with a tailwind, and just like that I was down 4.5 hours after lifting off, and when you take away the half hour I spent at Mansfield, it was a pretty good trip and an excellent first try at what I expect to become a routine cross-country flight.

On the ground at Plymouth-Canton airport.

Tractor Guns

No, not guns made to shoot tractors, or shoot from tractors...guns made by a tractor company!I love M-1 Garands. I really do. And these two, just a couple of the Garands that I've acquired from the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) over the years, are among my favorites. As rifles go, Garands were some of the finest combat arms ever fielded by the US military. Winchester repeating Arms Corp. and the government-run Springfield Armory made a bit over four million of them for World War Two, but when the Korean War broke out five years later, we needed more, so the fine folks at the International Harvester Company made another 337,623 of them at their Evansville, Indiana plant between 1951 and early 1956. And out of that number, after decades of military service and storage, these two eventually became mine.IHC did not make the barrels for their rifles, however. That job was subcontracted out to the Line Material Company in Birmingham, Alabama. Their barrels had a reputation for being the most accurate of the M-1 barrels, and while many of the IHC rifles out there today now sport replacement barrels made by one of the other manufacturers, both of these rifles still have their original Line Material (LMR) barrels.(Click on the pictures for more detail.)This one shows the LMR stamp and the December, 1954 date of manufacture. Both of these rifles had relatively little wear on the barrels when I got them and this one in particular had almost no detectable muzzle wear or throat erosion.

Both of these rifles are fine shooters, fully capable of holding the nine-ring of the standard SR target at 200 meters even with forty-year-old military surplus ammunition, and one of these rifles--probably #5095202 here--will probably be accompanying me to one of the bigger Garand matches at Camp Butner or Camp Perry in 2010. I have a feeling that we'll be coming back with a medal or two, at least if I do my part. I have no doubts about either of these rifles.

Day #2. Camp Perry

Even though I wasn't registered to shoot this year, I still had to stop by Camp Perry, Ohio to take in a bit of the National Matches.



If nothing else, is was just good to listen to all of the shooting and see several hundred Americans walking around with military rifles, no doubt giving Sarah Brady nightmares but otherwise harming no one. For you see, these are some of the best people in America--the dedicated marksmen (and markschicks) who use these guns to compete while maintaining their readiness for military service should this nation ever need them. (Yes, that's what the old Department of Civilian Marksmanship was set up for in the first place--to train capable civilian shooters with military weapons should they ever be needed for military service.)

In past days I'd spent hundreds (or thousands) of dollars here buying guns and ammunition. But this year money being tight, I bought a coffee mug and went on my way. And I will be back in 2008 as a serious competitor again.