Preparing for the Flyout

One of the fun things that happens at Timmerman (KMWC), our local airport are the flyouts organized by the flight school, Gran Aire. This coming saturday we are planning to fly down to northern Illinois to the Poplar Grove airport (C77) for their pancake breakfast held in conjunction with the Army Wings and Wheels weekend.

I’ve include a screenshot of the planned route, below. Essentially we’ll take off and head west to Badger VOR (BAE) then turn southwest and head direct to C77. This route takes us clear of Waukesha’s Class D and makes life a little easier than threading the needle between the Class D and Class C that you have to do if you go direct from KMWC.

I’m going to be taking one of the venerable Cessna 152′s and will be bringing up the rear of the flight. We like to have the faster planes take off first so that spacing is always increasing, rather than everyone coming in on top of each other. Personally I have never visited C77 before but you hear a lot of people on the unicom flying out of there so I knew it was pretty popular. On closer examination, Poplar Grove has a lot of interesting aviation things going on. C77 was featured in the AOPA’s ‘A day in the life of….’ series and there they mention the fly-in community and the Wings and Wheels museum amongst other things.

The A/FD entry is shown below (courtesy of the NACO online AFD), one main runway 12-30 and two grass strips, 17-35 and 9-27 so we should have plenty of landing options, assuming the sod runways are open when we get there.

Using the ever useful Google maps, here’s what it looks like from above, this image was taken in 2009 so hopefully is about right. I did a practice flight the other night using X-plane and that was pretty handy, though the generic scenery wasnt very life-like as it showed the airport in the middle of fields, no roads, hangers, buildings, etc. to be seen. That would be a good project for a scenery designer…

Later this week it will be time to start paying some attention to the weather and the forecasts to see what we’re likely to be facing on Saturday morning. For now I’ll just review the sectional and get familiar with the route and the things we’re likely to see along the way. If anyone wants to have a look at this part of the world, and the airports we’re going to be using you can them on the Chicago sectional via SkyVector: KMWC (Timmerman), C77 (Poplar Grove) If you go looking, you get extra points for correctly identifying the type of airspace overlying Rockford (KRFD) to the south west of C77 – answers in the comments please!

Simon.