This morning our web guru, Omar Filipovic, and I made the trek from our overnight stage in Madison to the Big Show in Oshkosh with 10 other Glastar and Sportsman aircraft. (In fact, we had one Thorpe T-18 and one Glasair II among us, but we’re the friendly types.) Weather was looking good overnight after a series of thunderstorms and strong winds pounded AirVenture. We got mainly heavy rain in Madison on Saturday night.
We’d all fired up and were ready to taxi as a group when our leader saw the METAR at KOSH had changed and the field was now IFR. We shut down and waited for weather to improve.
It did somewhat and we decided to launch, planning to follow the written procedure for getting into OSH. But by the time we’d arrived at the Endeavor Bridge, the field was actually still IFR. We were told as a group to hold, and we eventually made our way further east to circle Puckaway Lake. As we did, other aircraft appeared on the ADS-B and we both kept our eyes outside for new traffic. An RV managed to wedge into our group arrival, causing a bit of consternation and chatter on the air-to-air frequency, but we worked around it.
Controllers at Fisk told us the were sending one lucky pilot on toward the airport for an actual PIREP, which eventually came back that it was possible to stay VFR and find the field. All this time, we could see the field from our holding position. Soon enough, we got the command to start inbound toward Fisk. Because we were a group, only the lead and trail pilots actually talked to the controllers. The rest of us kept in line and our heads on a swivel.
After more than 90 minutes in flight—for a 70-mile flight, had we gone direct—we turned left base to Runway 36 Left. I landed just shy of the yellow dot but didn’t get yelled at, and after a brief taxi in to homebuilt parking, the journey was complete. Find a porta-potty, tie the airplane down (in that order) and then get this show started.
