Fly 'n Things

Monday Morning Musings

Oh the joys of winter weather flying!

This past week, Snovember descended on Buffalo dumping almost 7feet of snow.

7 feet! And it is still fall and only November.

In the mid Atlantic, we are fortunate that we only experienced some cold temperatures. The Arctic vortex is expected to play havoc with us again this winter.

The weekend was forecast to be sunny. Lately, night temperatures have been dipping into the 20’s. Arriving at the airport for our next stamp collecting flight, we found the aircraft with a fine layer of frost. This brought back memories of my Edwards Air Force Base Flyout when Anne and I, spent an hour or so, frantically scraping frost from the airplane surfaces using credit cards, paper towels and rags.

This time we did not have the same urgency as the Edwards AFB flight, but Linda and I spent a good hour, positioning the airplane tail into the sun, clearing the frost with paper towels and preheating the engine. The trip south was squirrely and bumpy, but we made it in good time to Hanover airport.

Stamp collected, our next destination was Richmond International Airport(RIC), a mere 10nm from Hanover, where we picked our rental car to visit two museums: Virginia Aviation Museum and Virginia Science Museum.The Virginia Aviation museum, is a short walk from the Richmond Jet Center. It has an SR-71, an F-14 Tomcat and 38 vintage aircraft on display along with hands-on exhibits, airplane engines, and World War II diorama.

Six people, with four pilots, two passengers and two aircraft had comfortably made it to Richmond to collect stamps and some hanger flying,

There is no restaurant at Richmond airport, but there is a Periodic Table, cafe and deli at the Virginia Science Museum.  There are also many restaurants on the same street as the science museum that might offer other alternatives if you have the time. After a tour of the Virginia Aviation museum, we headed out to the Science museum for lunch and stamp.

The last stop of our day was at Kent County Airport, a short hop from RIC.  As the afternoon progressed the winds had started to die down and the return was a smooth ride and we made it back just as the sun was getting ready to set.

3 Airports + 2 Museums: 5 more stamps in the bag 🙂