On November 4, 2011 I was flying my Jabiru J250SP light sport airplane to Tyler, TX with my childhood friend Bill Berger to visit our friends John and Becky Davis. I’ve known John since second grade (1967); Bill and Becky since seventh grade. John and I roomed together in college, and I was best man at his wedding. When Bill suggested we fly down to visit, I immediately said yes.
We stopped in Springfield, MO for lunch and fuel. The Jabiru has been using a little more than the normal amount of oil lately, so I was careful to check it. I added about a half quart and we took off for Tyler.
A couple hours later, about 45 minutes from Tyler, the engine started running rough. My first reaction was to simultaneously pull up on the controls to slow to our best glide speed and look outside for a place to land. A quick glance revealed we were over the west end of a rough-looking pasture carved out of heavy woods. Assured that we had options for landing should it be necessary, I turned my attention back to the engine.
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There’s not a lot to do in our little airplane when the engine is running rough. There is only a throttle control, no mixture or prop levers to play with. I pulled the carb heat lever in case the problem was carburetor ice. There was no change in RPM. About then a warning light came on, indicating low oil pressure. I looked at the engine monitor and noted that cylinder 3 was significantly colder than the other five cylinders.
About then the prop came to a sudden stop and the cabin went quiet. I have often heard the stories of the sudden quiet when the engine quits, but frankly it wasn’t that startling. Our Bose noise-canceling headsets minimize engine noise to begin with, and there was still the sound of air rushing past the airplane. And frankly, I wasn’t really thinking about how noisy it was or wasn’t.
The interesting thing about the engine stopping was what it did to my state of mind. I had been somewhat panicked, trying to find a solution to a problem that I couldn’t really identify and for which I had few options even if I did know what was happening under the cowling. Once the engine stopped, the problem of fixing it was solved. I no longer was trying to solve a rough-running engine using only the throttle, carb heat, and mag switch. Instead, I was landing an airplane — something I’ve done thousands of times (successfully, no less).
I said to Bill, “OK, now we’re going to land.”
Now a lot of people are confused about what happens to an airplane when its engine quits. “Did you just dive into the ground?” No. When the engine quits, the plane becomes a glider. It flies just like it did before, but there’s no power so you can’t climb. “So you float to the ground like a parachute?” No. You just keep flying, but you can’t maintain your altitude or go up. You can only go down. It’s like your car when you run out of gas. You can still steer, and if you’re going downhill you might be able to travel quite a while before the car stops on its own. An airplane without power from the engine goes “downhill” until it hits something or you land. You can still steer right and left. You can descend faster or slower by changing the pitch (point the nose up or down) but you can’t fly level or climb (well, you can climb a little but you’ll slow down and quickly lose whatever you gained).
An airplane has an ideal glide speed. You pull back on the stick (pitch up) to slow down or push forward (pitch down) to speed up. If you slow down too much the wings won’t be able to hold the airplane up, the nose will suddenly drop, and you’ll descend quickly until you pick up enough speed for the wings to fly. If you speed up too much by pushing forward on the stick, you’ll descend faster and give up altitude, which reduces your options for a landing site. In our airplane, when you are at the ideal glide speed you’ll go about two nautical miles (2.3 statute miles) for every thousand feet you lose in altitude. This limits how far you can glide. Of course these are ideal numbers; in reality you won’t hit that perfect speed all the time and every time you turn right or left you descend faster.
I had been pressing buttons on the multifunction display to locate the nearest airport. There wasn’t much nearby. I found Mt Pleasant, TX, which was 19.2 nautical miles south. We were at 4500′ MSL over terrain that was probably 500′ MSL. That gave me only about 3-5 minutes of glide time at best, which would be about 5-8 miles (again, at best) of range. I quickly eliminated gliding to an airport as an option, without bothering to do the math. And the field you’re over is better than the one a couple miles away, so this one was going to have to do.
We were over a gravel road. It was not a gravel road like we might think of back home in Iowa, but a private road that was probably used by the ranch to reach their herds. The piece of road we were over ran south then turned east. It was surrounded by open fields covered by some kind of scattered brush and a few small trees. I turned left to go back to the north end of the road as we glided down. I punched “7700” into the transponder to indicate an emergency and made a call on 121.5 MHz, which is an emergency frequency.
“Any station monitoring, this is N57CE, 19.2 miles north northeast of Mt Pleasant, TX, 3800 feet descending, engine is out, declaring an emergency.”
No response. I continue my turn to the north to come back around to line up with the farm road. I repeated my call and heard a response from ATC, who was talking to another aircraft: “… tell that aircraft to contact Center on 130.2 if possible”. Without waiting for the call I tuned to 130.2 and contacted the local Air Traffic Control Center.
Listen to a recording of the ATC audio from Fort Worth Center
I gave the controller our position. He asked the ominous question, “How many souls on board?” I responded, “Two” and tried not to think about the grim “heaven’s census taker” feel that question has. Center offered to find us a nearby airport, but by this time I had eliminated the road and we had turned east to land in the open field. I said something like, “We’re only about 500 feet off the ground. We’re in a single-engine airplane and our only engine is out. We will be landing here very shortly.” He asked if there were any roads or towns nearby. I glanced at ForeFlight running on my iPad. There were three small towns in our vicinity. The biggest of these appeared to be Talco, TX. I estimated we were about five miles east-northeast of Talco. Center asked us to call them from the ground if possible and let them know the outcome.
As we got closer to the ground I noticed a row of trees and brush running perpendicular to our path. It reminded me of how vegetation might grow along a fence row. It was sparse, but it formed a straight line across the field. Even though I couldn’t see a fence there, it was reasonable to believe one might be there. I pulled up to slow us down and to hold us off the ground as long as possible, while at the same time hoping it would be enough to clear the fence. I tried to imagine what hitting a fence might feel like and decided we could probably survive it; in fact it might slow us down and keep us from running into something more solid further along our path.
I aimed for a gap in the fence-line vegetation. As we got closer it was clear there was no fence, and shortly after we cleared that line we touched down.
The sound of the wheels on the rough ground was pretty loud. Shortly after touching down we apparently struck a thorn bush with the left wing tip. It stripped the lens off our position/strobe light. We wouldn’t actually realize we did this until three days later when we noticed the missing lens while disassembling the airplane to load it on a truck. Immediately after hitting the bush, we went over a small rise and all was quiet as we were airborne again for a second or two. Then back on the ground and rolling. I thought about applying the brakes but wasn’t sure how effective they’d be and didn’t want to risk any loss of control. We fairly quickly rolled to a stop.
I looked at Bill and said something like “That was interesting!” We gave each other a high five and expressed thanks to God for a safe landing.
I tried to contact Center but apparently they couldn’t hear me due to our being on the ground. But another aircraft responded and I reported we were safe on the ground, no damage to the airplane, and no injuries. He relayed that information to Center, who asked about our position. I located the GPS coordinates on the multifunction display and reported those to the aircraft to be relayed to ATC.
We secured the airplane and got out. We were in a large pasture surrounded by trees. The ground was uneven with clumps of grass and scattered small mounds like the one we had gone over that lifted us back in the air during our landing. Some 25-30 yards beyond where we stopped, the ground became very uneven. We certainly would’ve collapsed the nose gear had we gotten into that area. We could see cows in the distance. Fortunately none of those were along our path.
We walked around the airplane and found no damage. We wouldn’t discover the missing strobe light lens until three days later. Funny how you can look at something and not see it.
I called my wife and let her know the situation. Bill called John and Becky.
Within a few minutes a Beech King Air flew over at low altitude just west of us. We assumed they were looking for us. I turned the radio back on and made a call to the “aircraft overhead” and let them know they had flown past us. He started a turn to the right and asked me to tell him when to roll out of his turn. I let him know when he was pointing right at us and then called again when he was right overhead. He said he had confirmed our GPS coordinates and was going to relay them to ATC. I gave them my cell phone number to give to authorities so they could call us if needed. ATC asked him to confirm that nobody was hurt, which he did.
John called and asked what our plans were. We discussed having him drive up to pick us up. Since nobody had arrived to “rescue” us yet, we weren’t sure where to have him meet us. Our conversation was interrupted by a call from the sheriff’s department. She asked about the location of the airplane and I tried to describe it on a map by drawing lines between nearby cities. She confirmed that they had the GPS coordinates — the trick was getting the trucks to that location. “We know where you are; we just don’t know how to get there.”
I returned to John and suggested he drive to Talco to meet us. It would take him an hour and a half to get there. We had touched down around 4:20; now it was about 4:45.
For some reason, we thought it might help if we walked to a farm house we had seen during our maneuvering to land. I left a note in the plane and we set out. After walking about 20 minutes we figured out that the house was much further away than we thought. We turned around and headed back to the plane.
During this walk I called my dad to tell him about the situation. He and I own the airplane together. We assumed the plane would have to be trucked out. I couldn’t imagine trying to explain to some guy whose only qualification was that he has a commercial drivers license how to remove the wings and load this thing on his flatbed truck. Especially since I’ve never done it and have no idea how to do it. Dad said he’d call the Jabiru factory in Shelbyville, TN and see if they had any suggestions.
At 5:25 on our way back to the airplane we saw a helicopter circling the site. It had been just over an hour since we landed. They dropped down to a few feet off the ground and apparently determined we weren’t there. I regretted leaving the plane. (Rule #1 of survival: Stay where you are and let help come to you!) He departed to the east but then came back and went west. We later learned he was trying to figure out where the rescue vehicles were and how to direct them to us.
The sheriff’s office called again and asked about our location and if we knew of any roads that would get them close to us. It occurred to me that I had my iPad with me, so I brought up the Maps application, asked it to locate us, then sent a link to that location to the sheriff at his personal email address. I don’t know if that helped any, but it sure was handy to have such devices available — and for once in my life to have an AT&T signal when I needed it.
One of the interesting things we noticed was how easy it was to know if a passing aircraft or vehicle was looking for us. Our location was so remote that anytime you heard a noise that wasn’t a cow mooing you could assume it was someone coming to find us. We heard the helicopter coming back. They landed a hundred feet or so away. It was a medical evac unit sent out to find us. Bill went over and talked to them while I finished my email.
The chopper pilot told us they had been flying back and forth trying to find a way for the fire department and sheriff deputies to find us. They told us to sit tight and wait.
As the chopper was leaving a woman drove up on an ATV. She was Joyce Wilson. Joyce’s husband Bill owns Wilson Combat (www.wilsoncombat.com) and she is the Executive Director of the International Defensive Pistol Association (www.idpa.com). She and her husband operate a ranch just northeast of our landing site. Joyce is an instrument rated pilot and owns a Cessna 182.
Joyce had received a call from someone who had heard the GPS coordinates the sheriffs department was looking for and determined they were near Joyce’s ranch. She and her ranch manager Jeffery had set out on ATVs to look for us. We later learned there was a small army of locals on ATVs scouring the area to find us. After locating us, Joyce made some calls and soon many of them had found their way to us.
At 5:59, about an hour and forty minutes after we landed, I heard a sound on the road. I looked and saw a squad car, then two, then three, then saw the fire department truck leading the way. Trailing those four vehicles were several other pickup trucks and ATVs. We told our story to each of the deputies so they could fill out their paper work. Everyone expressed their amazement that we could survive such a harrowing event.
The lead deputy insisted on calling the FAA, which Joyce and I both felt was unnecessary. This tied them up for quite a while, and nothing else was really happening. I remember saying at one point, “We either need to order up a keg and some pizzas or we need to leave.” Given how hard it was for everyone to find us, we opted for leaving. Bill and I unpacked the airplane and transferred everything to two of the sheriff’s vehicles.
As we were leaving, the FAA called and had some questions, which I answered briefly and factually. I’m still not convinced it was necessary, and was disappointed the deputy had chose to involve the federal government. He told me I couldn’t move the plane until they visited the site and said it was OK.
I told him that the locals had trouble finding us even when they knew the area. There was no way a bureaucrat from Dallas was going to be able to locate the airplane. Furthermore, there was no damage and nobody was hurt. We weren’t obligated to report what was essentially just an off-field landing. We settled on me sending him some pictures, which I said I would do after consulting my attorney. (He never asked again, so I never sent the pictures.)
Bill and I each got into a deputy’s vehicle and we drove to Talco — about five miles as the crow flies but two or three times that on the ranch roads we had to follow to get to the main road. It took 30 minutes to get to the Exxon station that is Talco, TX, where John was waiting to drive us to Tyler.
Lessons Learned
There are two psychological surprises for me. First was the sense of relief and calm that came when the engine died. The rough-running engine was more stressful than the sight of the stopped prop. Once the engine stopped, my options were narrowed to one: Landing.
The second unexpected response was the disappearance of confidence I have in the Jabiru engine. This was actually the second engine failure we’ve had. The first engine lasted about 60 hours before a piston failed. My dad discovered that problem while taking off one day. The engine just didn’t seem right, so he aborted his take-off just before lifting off. The replacement engine they sent us had experienced the same problem during its initial testing after being mounted on a new airplane. They replaced the engine on that airplane, then replaced the failed piston in the bad engine and sent it to us. They assured us the replacement was like new, but then our last “new engine” (which really was new) had failed after only 60 hours. So we’ve owned two Jabiru engines: One that failed catastrophically after 60 hours, and one that failed catastrophically after 2.5 hours and again after 480 hours. That’s an average of 180 hours between catastrophic failures. At that rate we can expect a forced landing in a cow pasture every 18 months. It’s difficult to imagine what they can do to turn what appears to be a problem engine into one in which I can have confidence.
Additionally, I have come to some resolutions with respect to flying. First is to remember to pull the checklist even though it doesn’t seem necessary. While it wouldn’t have helped me restart the engine in this case, it would’ve reminded me to turn off the fuel, mags and maybe open the doors before landing. While neither of these proved necessary (we didn’t catch fire and we didn’t bend any metal causing the doors to become jammed shut), there might have been something on there that would’ve either solved the initial problem or prevented a problem on the ground.
Second, I want to add some suggestions to the engine-out landing checklist, such as looking for civilization and landing somewhere near it. It would’ve been a little easier had I turned toward Talco so we could’ve walked to the Exxon station instead of requiring helicopters, local residents, and deputies from two counties to spend an hour looking for us. (In retrospect, however, landing options were not as plentiful to our west, toward Talco.)
Finally, I want to develop an “after a forced landing” checklist that includes instructions on how to locate your GPS coordinates (not straightforward on our system), a suggestion to do a complete “pre-flight” inspection after landing to check for damage, and a reminder to stay with the airplane no matter what your shell-shocked brain tells you about how close you are to that house you flew over.
Read about the retrieval of the airplane from the field and its trip to the repair shop.
We’ve been mentioned on the interwebz: Listen to the guys at www.uncontrolledairspace.com chat about our off-field landing: MP3 of podcast #263. Fast-forward to around 58 minutes if you’re in a hurry.
Very interesting, Craig…and well written.
I liked the pix…but wanted to see Joyce Wilson’s .45!=)
Maybe time to sell the Jabiru?
Thanks for sharing this adventure with me.
Brenda
Brenda,
The next article will include a picture of Joyce with her sidearm. In the meantime here’s some information about it.
What an amazing story, you are obviously a smart and experienced pilot:) So glad you and Bill are safe and eventually made it to your original destination. I bet you are glad you had a change of clothes with you, I certainly would have needed to change something! What a miraculous landing. You certainly have an interesting way of meeting new people. I enjoyed the pictures, too. I am sure you will be the talk of the neighboring towns for quite a while. Happy flying! Sharon
Craig
I was glad you called, not the sherrif.
Dad
Craig,
You are an AMAZING writer! I feel like I was in the cockpit with you. I’m so glad that the flight ended with your safe and great landing. I only hope that I could do half as well. Just a couple minor technical notes. Wilson Combat is my husband Bill’s company and he actually founded IDPA. I am fortunate to have access to some really fine weapons and I am blessed to be able to run IDPA for him. The funniest thing (now) is that the initial call I got was to check and see if it was me that had made the off field landing :-). I’m just so glad I could help in at least some small way. I was so glad to see that Craig and Bill were fine when I got there.
We just need to live to fly another day 🙂
joyce
I’ve updated the article to give Wilson Combat back to Bill and make you Executive Director of IDPA. Thanks for the clarification. 🙂
Hi Craig,
I enjoyed the fascinating description of your whole forced landing experience. I was particularly interested in the number of things you accomplished in the rather short time you had to glide. Have you decided what to do with the Jabiru? It certainly has had more than its share of issues…
Regards,
Steve
We’re going to repair the airplane and go from there. I don’t believe our experience with the Jabiru engine are typical, and if that’s the case it would be nice to have a typical experience for a change. 🙂
Hi Craig,
Wow, a bit disconcerting since I also own a J250. I have scanned the FAA database and don’t see anything similar, but then I am not sure about experimental ac using the 3300 engine. I think there are quite a few out in use there. Glad all worked out well and hope that it is not a common problem..
Craig’s story may be bad luck. I know a guy, Eric Jensen, who has a Jabiru (either 170 or 250) and flies the wings out off it. It seems like holding up fine. The best course of action for pilots is to monitor the overall record for Jabiru engines and airplanes.
Any time you pick one data point and try to build a case around it, you’re going to be wrong. Our experience is no less valid than Eric’s. He may be the lucky one. Of course you have to look at more data. But I can only report our experience: 180 hours MTBF. And that’s not just one bad engine, it’s two. Again, our experience isn’t statistically significant, but it’s our experience, and that’s significant to me. I’d like to see Jabiru step up to take responsibility for their product.
Mine is an 2009 J230. Craig, you have a great attitude. I too would be leery of an engine that failed twice. It will be interesting to hear what they find in the engine. I’ve been reading the Yahoo Jabiru engine group(world wide members). There have been some failures but no greater then you see with Lyc or Cont. Although as you point out there are fewer data points and many engines are in experimental planes.
I was on with Center on 132.02 when they started asking about if anyone was squawking emergency on the frequency. I was heading back from KGGG Longview to Dallas and was about 60 miles to your south.
I was unable to provide any assistance in as much as so many others were closer by, but it is very interesting to read what was happening on your end. I remarked to my wife that evening how amazingly cool and collected you were in your radio communications.
I said a prayer when we lost radio contact, but when we heard the relay message back that no damage and no injuries you could hear the applause from all the others that were listening.
I’ve never had an event such as this my Bonanza, but I hope to remain as cool calm and collected as you were.
BRAVO!
I was amazed that the last trasmission I heard from you was something like, “We’re 100 feet AGL, we will be landing in this field…”
I thought how I probably might not have taken the time and care to communicate at that point in my forced landing, but the still, quiet, and calm came through your voice, and across the radio and made me feel confident you were ok.
Just two weeks before I was the first one on the radio after departure when the SR-22 had a fatal wreck just 3 miles from me… I’m so happy that this emergency I “ear-witnessed” turned out so much better.
I hope you know that listening from the other end was a very educational expereince, and although there wasn’t much more anyone could do it was amazing how helpless the ATC guys sounded. It was also interesting that they had noone monitoring the Guard Frequency. The plane that relayed the message to you to change the center frequency said they heard you on guard… I just wonder why ATC could not transmit to you on 121.5 them selves.
Thanks for your write up.
Chester Jurskis
F69 Dallas Air Park
N729T S35 Bonanza
Keep flying!
Gotta love the internet. How cool to hear from someone who was an “ear-witness” to the events!
Three things regarding the transmission at 100′ AGL: First, remember that every landing you make is a power-off landing for all practical purposes. By the time you are on short final you should have the power all the way out (though as I recall in my Bonanza we kept a little power in to make the landing a little smoother — I know we did on the Baron). So at 100′ AGL the only difference between this landing and the thousands of landings I’d done before was the view out the front window.
Second, my dad made a comment to me once during his training that sometimes he didn’t have time to self-announce his position when on final because there was “so much going on”. I found this amusing because I don’t consider myself to be “busy” on final. If you think about it, it’s probably the same for you. Landings become routine. And in my case, I need my right hand to press the push-to-talk button. Normally it would be on the throttle, but no need for that on this trip. So my hand was free and I wasn’t doing anything else; might as well chat with ATC.
Finally, as I recall ATC was trying to tell me where the nearest airport was. I was trying to convey the fact that I was in a single engine airplane and my one and only engine was not functioning. I was going to land right here and nowhere else. 🙂
It’s cool that they noticed me squawking 7700. I was thinking “Here’s something you don’t get to do often” as I punched that into the transponder. And then there was the momentary pause as I tried to remember if that was the right code or if I had just told them I was being hijacked. 🙂
Thanks so much for posting a comment. It really adds to the experience to hear from one of the “spectators” who were on frequency at the time. Very cool.
Craig
Hi Craig,
In the near future I hope to be a student pilot. While reading the AOPA forum, I came accross your link to this article in which you’ve detailed your off-site landing. Thank you for the detailed, moment-by-moment writeup; it is informative and I felt as if I was the one behind the controls. I tried to stay one step ahead of your recount of the events and ask myself “what would I do now?”. Then continued on, read what you did and was happy to know you’ve made the right decisions. Also veer usefuf were your list of updates the emergency checklist.
I live in Southern California in a region that is largely urban with few areas where an off-site landing is possible. The freeways are most often packed parking lots, so freeway are not the best option either. Something I’ll have to speak to my future instructor.
Thanks again for the write up (P.S. could add to your checklist instructions on how to milk a cow – just in case you need to 😉 ).
-Tib.
This article just got posted on Facebook group, are you still flying your Jabiru I noticed your blogging about flying ends pretty abruptly.
How did you go getting the plane repaired?
Phil
Hi, Phil.
I have another article that I started to write about the repair process but I never finished it. It took several months to make the repairs. Coincidentally, the incident happened on the weekend that Daylight Saving Time started (Nov 4, 2011) and I flew it home from the shop in Denton, TX on the weekend that Daylight Saving Time ended (March 13, 2012). 🙂
As I recall, an exhaust valve broke and fell into the cylinder, so the piston just destroyed itself. There was pretty much nothing salvageable on the engine. Jabiru gave us a good deal on a new one.
After we got it home, we had a lot of trouble starting it. The carburetor had not been adjusted correctly and our local mechanic was incapable of figuring it out. This went on for quite a while and in the midst of that we got a notice that Jabiru had recalled certain engines for some kind of problem with a circlip. Out of all the engines recalled, ours was the only one installed in a Jabiru LSA. All the rest were in home-builts.
Jabiru paid to have the engine removed and shipped back to the factory. We took that opportunity to also ship them the carburetor. So when we got it back it would actually start. 🙂 This whole process somehow ended up taking until July 2013.
By this time I needed a BFR so I went up with an instructor in July 2013 — my first flight since flying the airplane back from Texas. As we were departing we noticed the fuel flow indicated 0 GPH, which I knew couldn’t be right since the engine was running. I figured it must be an instrumentation error and the result of all the work we had done. So I just made a note of it and we continued. After doing some slow flight, the engine started running rough and we immediately turned back toward the airport. We were able to land with the engine alternately running rough and running fine. We discovered that a SCAT hose had been incorrectly routed when the engine was re-installed, and had rubbed the insulation off the wire in two places, which shorted the distributor to ground, hence the rough-running. My instructor wrote “slow flight, emergency procedures for BFR” in my log. 🙂
Two months later we completed the BFR, but I didn’t fly again until May 2014, which is another story…
In May 2014, our airport informed us they would be paving the floor of our hangar and the apron in front of it. We asked if we needed to move our airplane and they said that the first phase would be nowhere near our airplane. The morning the work started, the line personnel moved aircraft from where they were going to be paving. They asked the paving supervisor if they needed to move our airplane and he said he’d be nowhere near that plane. As the airport personnel was driving away, the supervisor got back in his Bobcat and drove it across the ramp and directly into our airplane.
The bucket on the Bobcat was lifted and struck the right wingtip, cutting into the wingtip and light. We were able to do a temporary repair with speed tape and get a ferry permit to shuttle the airplane to a shop about 2 hours away for fiberglass repair. The insurance company required me to do another BFR before making this flight, which I did in a C-150. I had to fly solo to the repair facility under the requirements of the insurance company and ferry permit. So consider the fact that my last four flights in the Jabiru had been (1) engine failure with forced landing, (2) flying home four months later, (3) BFR with precautionary landing due to rough-running engine 16 months after that, and (4) finishing my BFR two months later. So virtually every time I had gotten in the airplane in the last two and a half years, it had tried to kill me. Now I had to fly by myself 2 hours for the fiberglass repair. Then two weeks later I had to drive to that airport and fly the airplane 3 hours to a better shop than ours to do an annual, and a week after that fly 3 hours home. I did all those flights flying as high as I could with the GPS showing a list of nearest airports, so that I could maximize my glide time in the event the airplane once again decided to kill me.
Those flights were successful and the airplane has been running well since. We flew to OSH for Airventure after getting the plane back last summer, but I’ve only flown a few times since then. We flew back to the shop in southern Illinois for our annual this year without incident. I’m finding that I’m feeling more comfortable in the air now that some time has passed, and plan to fly up to OSH tomorrow for a day at Airventure.