Zodiac X-C: Niagara Westbound 2

Oh well, at least I know where I am. With a little luck I might find Wisconsin next. I will just follow the advice of Horace Greeley (or possibly the experts now say it was someone else who said): “Go West, Young Man!” Less than two hours after departure from Huronia, I land at Brantford, ON (CYFD), to purchase fuel and file a flight plan to cross the border into the Lower Forty Eight.

Another hour and I am clearing immigration at Port Huron, MI (PHN) at the southern tip of Lake Huron. By now I have had a long day and I am unsure how much farther I will proceed, but I decide to push on until nightfall. An hour later I am landing in central Michigan at Owosso where three pilots are guarding the local airport. (They tell me they are filling in for the overworked TSA.) Business being slow at the moment, one of them offers a ride to the motel just across the road from which I can walk back to my aircraft in the morning..

“Red low-wing, Number Two on final, maintain fifteen-hundred feet until across Runway 9, then land short on One-Eight Left.” (One-Eight Left is the taxiway with pink and blue dots painted on it for aiming points, and a hand-painted runway-end line at which I am now slipping.)

“Don’t land short on One-Eight Left, Red.”

I round out short of the numbers and put it on a few feet beyond the temporary lines.

“Nice job there. You can take the first taxiway, if able.”

As I turn off, the lady continues, “Nice job, Red! Cross One-Eight behind the landing aircraft.” (It is amazing how much we concentrate when several thousand other pilots are watching our performance.)

The following morning I am back to the aircraft by 6 a.m. and on my way. There are a few showers ahead and the weather briefer gives me the usual policy statement instead of a weather briefing, “VFR not recommended.”

Has the FAA ever recommended VFR? I do not remember that they ever did.

I push west in generally good weather dodging a few degrees north or south to avoid light showers until I cross the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan near Muskegon. Since no one else is on the frequency, and the scattered showers continue ahead of me, I contact the controller working the small aircraft across the lake. He has done a booming business since the airshow began at Oshkosh several days earlier, but this morning I am his only customer. With seventy-five miles of open water ahead, for some reason I feel somewhat better being in radio contact .

I look around for a ship or boat nearby as I remember the old joke about ditching, “How long do those things float?” “Oh, sometimes they go down in thirty seconds…other times they go down like a rock.”

I see nothing afloat as I cross the lake, but the trusty Lycoming has been trouble-free since installation, and it doesn’t change its tune for the next half hour.

As I cross the shoreline I listen to the chatter on the radio. I observe a lot of traffic arriving over Ripon for the second day of the largest airshow on earth. Another Zodiac turns inbound just ahead of me and I take the required spacing as I follow the railroad tracks towards Fisk where we are told to turn north, maintain eighteen-hundred feet, and turn base leg for Runway 18 on the north side of Runway 9. The controller talks to us. We do not answer but rock our wings in acknowledgement.