[No, I didn’t actually “fly with the Blue Angels.” You can freely accuse me of false advertising. And, yet… we were flying at the same time, and I could see them (and, if they had the desire, they could have seen me), so… yeah, sometimes hangar flying stories do get embellished a bit. Ahem. More about the Blue Angels at the bottom of this blog entry!]
October 19, 2018
This was the weekend of the Lone Star Rotorcraft Club annual fly-in! Unfortunately, the weather was very uncooperative. It looked like Saturday, the 20th, might be a solid rain day, so we showed up on Friday to take a look around. Because of the weather forecasts, we didn’t expect many people or aircraft, and we were mostly correct. But the club pulled out all of their rotorcraft, and a few hardy souls did show up — I’m looking at you, Christine Toevs! — so it actually looked pretty good.
After hanging out a bit, we decided to just take a short flight around the area, so we saddled up and headed east for a while. We were back inside of 40 minutes, I think. Nothing to report other than, like always, it’s great to be able to fly, even if you’re going nowhere. Here are a few shots from the air, including two of all the aircraft around the hangar at the fly-in…
I uploaded a few of my shots to the LSRC Facebook group, and there were other shots from Becky O’Brien. That’s how I found out that there was some flying going on, on Saturday, but the video’s showed pretty low ceilings and dark skies, so I doubt those flights were anything but around the pattern. I’m glad it was still an active day for the fly-in, but it’s a shame they couldn’t have had a bigger turn-out.
October 21, 2018
Sunday, the weather did a 180, and was fabulous. Typically, most fly-in’s that include a Sunday are mostly bereft of participants on the last day because everyone has to fly home. By the time we got there — around noon — just about everyone was gone and all the club gyro’s were back in the hangars. Only Christine was there, winching her TAG autogyro into her custom trailer. She spent a few minute explaining to me how the trailer works, and what needs to be improved (everything, apparently!).
Our intention for the day was to take advantage of the blue skies and moderate winds by accepting an invitation from a fellow who lives in an airport community near New Waverly, Texas. Officially, the airport is “Estates Airpark,” designated XS09, but the subdivision is Waverly Acres. Some people call it Waverly Estates and even Waverly Acres Airpark. But, whichever it is, we were headed that way.
This was territory we had covered before — most recently, on our trip to Rockwell, Texas and back — so the number of pictures we took were small.
Just a bit more than an hour after we left Anahuac, we could see Waverly Acres Airpark coming up. We stayed up high as we approached and made a pass along the southern end of the community so that we could get a few good shots.
You can see from our CloudAhoy track, we can land pretty darn short. We then taxied around and pulled up on to the concrete apron at Kenny’s hangar. (The Google satellite photo is about a year out of date… it shows his hangar still being built, but it is quite complete!)
Just moments after we arrived, we had other visitors — Gregg and Mo (and his wife) — walk over to greet us. I’m always amazed at how friendly the people in the aviation community are…. truly! They all had complimentary things to say about the Cavalon, and lots of pixels were recorded.
Mo and his wife had to mosey on, but Gregg hung around while Kenny gave us a tour of his hangar. Although the hangar been finished for a while, he decided to add heavy-duty insulation and install a/c and heating. He has a really sweet set up… something I hope to have some day. Gregg then had to leave, and Kenny then gave us a tour of his house… it’s not just pretty but it’s finished quite nicely and is well insulated too. We sat on the back porch, admiring the view and the quiet… it was amazingly quiet. And, of course, when a plane does land or take-off, we enjoy that sound, too, but then it again becomes real quiet. Very, very nice.
Kenny had to leave at 3pm, so we expressed our thanks for the invitation and tour, then saddled up. Most of the time, the wind in this part of the country is from the south. The runway at Waverly Acres Airpark is sloped a bit downhill on the south side, so taking off to the north — as we had to, today — meant that we were not only “fighting” the soft, turf runway and a north wind, but we were also going uphill! Yikes.
Not helping was the person who was standing in the middle of the runway… she moved to the side by the time I got to her spot — she was apparently taking pictures or a video — but it was a bit unsettling. The Cavalon overcame all those challenges, but it did make me wonder about taking off with a higher weight, on a day with a higher density altitude. (In the summer, though, it will be rare that the wind will be from the north, so, probably nothing for me to worry about.)
Our next destination is to see and take aerial shots of a new house that my son and his wife are building. Here are a few photos:
At this point, we’re on the west side of the Intercontinental Airport’s airspace, so we’ll have to fly through “the corridor” to get home. We’ve actually flown to take aerial photos of the property before, and had to fly both ways through the corridor so this is not new territory for us. Yet, today there was a “stadium TFR” and it fills up about 90% of the space available to me in the corridor. Consequently, I had to really hug the north edge of the corridor while making sure I didn’t bust the Class Bravo airspace above me (at 2,000 feet) or to my left. This is something I hadn’t done before.
Arrow 1 points to our actual track. Arrow 2 points to the edge of the Class Bravo airspace (and our ceiling was 2,000…. around 500 feet above us). And Arrow 3 points to the (barely visible) edge of the circular stadium TFR. Whew. It was close.
As it turns out, I’ve learned something: I usually fly right over the I-610 North freeway. But as you can see, today I flew even further north. In the future — because I’ve now looked at this closely — I’ll know that I can still fly over the freeway and be outside the stadium TFR. (Just barely.) That’s good to know!
As usual, I take advantage of a flight through the corridor to get some good shots of downtown Houston. I didn’t take as many, today, as I was nervous about the narrow space I had to fly through, but I did manage a couple. And, again as usual, there were other things to see and take pictures of:
Right now, you might be saying, “Well, when are you going to get to the part about flying with the Blue Angels?” Now is that time!
As we left the corridor we noticed smoke trails to the south. Today — in addition to technically being the last day of the Lone Star Rotorcraft Fly-in — it was also the last day of “Wings Over Houston”, a very popular annual airshow that is held at Ellington Airbase. At this point, we were approximately 12 miles north of Ellington. It didn’t take much effort to see the Blue Angels flying in formation, the cause of the smoke trails. I tried to grab a few shots. In one of them, you can even see the runway at Ellington!
I was less than 12 miles away from them so I’m going to go ahead and say that I was flying with them, okay? If you have a problem with that, just take it up with them.
By this time, they are mostly behind us and we continue on toward Anahuac. I grab a nice shot of the San Jacinto Monument, with the Battleship Texas in the right foreground….
…and we see the airport from 9 miles out, and come in on the turf runway. A great day of flying!
2.77 hours on the Hobbs, 2:44 in the air, and 191 miles covered.
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Small world. My parents are currently building a hangar home at waverly acres at the moment. Right now they are based at Liberty in a small trailer (official title is night watchman). If you ever get fuel there he always chit chats whoever lands there.