Donna and I's 1st Cross Country Flight

Together

February 29th 2004

Donna didn't take many pictures so aside from our memory of it this is all we have from our first trip.

Wow! what a great day for flying, 60 degrees, clear skies and 4 to 6 knot southerly winds.  That's too good a day to pass up flying on so rather than spend the day bouncing around the airpark working on things we decided to kill two birds with one stone and take a trip to Morristown Airport(MOR) and finally meet a one of a kind woman we've heard about for several years.  Her name is Evelyn Johnson. She is the oldest living active female Pilot on this planet with over 56,600 logged flight hours in 1999 according to this article on AVweb and she's still working at the Morristown flight school here in Tennessee.  All you have to do it type in ( Evelyn Johnson +pilot ) into your browser search engine box and you can read all kinds of articles about her, she's quite a lady and well worth the time it takes.

 We had a few things to finish up and a few visitors that morning so we didn't get going until about 1pm.  We, well Donna, decided that we wanted to fly with the doors off.  I tried to tell her at 3000 feet MSL it wouldn't be quite as warm as it was on the ground.  But, well you know women, once they've made up our mind lol.  We took off on runway 6 and just about the time we hit 2000 feet MSL I could see she was sitting over there shivering from the cold, well maybe it was fright lol.  I asked her if she wanted to turn around and get the doors but she said Naaa  she'd be fine.   Truth be told she wasn't going to cave in and be a sissy so I couldn't either lol.  We kept on ascending to our target altitude of 3000 feet MSL and then set up for a cruising speed of 70 mph on a GPS track toward our destination.  GPS's are just super but I still can't help but keep my eye on that compass heading.  This just happened to be a day when the rest of the world was thinking what a good day for flying too.  The skies were littered with air traffic according to the (TYS) McGhee Tyson airports tower.  Their channel was lit up the whole day.  They were constantly noting aircraft positions to pilots of non participating aircraft of which we were also one of.   That part is kinda scary when your out there in the middle of about 7 airports.  It was pretty hard to keep up with the radio channel changes as we went along our flight path changing channels to which ever airport was closest to us all along our route.   Even with everything we heard on the com we never did see another aircraft along our whole route and with all the chatter on the com that was definitely kinda scary.

   As you can see on the chart we had lots of things for check points. We were so busy looking at everything we just kept going from one interesting site to another the whole way there and back.

Personally I like to fly at around 500 feet agl but with so many towers in our path we chose to fly it at 2000 agl/3000 msl to avoid playing dodge a tower all the way there.  When your flying low,  it's very easy to get focused on something on the ground and before you know it there's something in your flight path and wham it's upon you in an instant. The reason for that is towers like just about everything else blend into the background and get lost in your site picture. Just about everything thats lower then the horizon gets lost very easily.   This chart is an old one but you can get an idea of how many towers we had to dodge.  Our current chart has about 5 more in our area than it did when this one was new in 2001.  

Yours truly
trying to get warm after landing at Morristown. 

Left is a shot of the people watching the planes come and go at the Morristown Airport and the taxiway looking northeast.   Right is a train that runs inline beside the runway here.

Morristown Airport. (MOR)

We landed and shut our ship down and took a break before wandering the grounds of the airport.  When we got warmed up and stopped shaking we went into the flight school and chatted with a fellow that worked there.   He and everyone else we spoke to were really nice folks.   Donna asked about Evelyn Johnson and the fellow said she's right back there in her office, just walk in down the hall and walk right in.  Ms. Johnson's desk was covered in papers from working on her income tax return.   She stopped what she was doing and began chatting with Donna and I just like we'd known her for years.  What a pleasant person we thought.  After about 20 or 30 minutes we said our good byes to her and headed back for our helicopter.   Outside we met more interesting people, one of which told us proudly that he was Ms. Johnson's 3rd student way back when she began it all.   There was another fellow there to that got his first ride in an airplane.  He was somewhere around the age of 6 or so and he had a blast lol.   When his plane landed his mama was at the gate gasping I'm glad that over lol.   The little guy was pumped from his ride boasting of what a good job he did while he had the controls lol.   We could have stayed there all day but it was getting late and it was time to head back so we loaded up and took off southwest toward home.  The trip home was great and uneventful until about 2/3 of the way home where the skies were full of haze.  It turned out not to be haze, it was smoke from a ground fire.  It was a small brush/grass fire most likely purposely set.  You can see by the jog on our return leg where we veered off to go have a lookie see at it.   From our view from 2000 feet agl  it appeared to be an area about 1/2 acre in size.   The smoke from it produced a haze about 5 miles long and from the surface to about 3000 feet agl.  It really surprised us how much smoke this small fire put up into the air and we could only imagine what the airborne firefighters of the world go through trying to navigate through fighting large forest fires.

This is the only air shot Donna took along the way.

If you zoom up on it you can see the Smokey's Baseball Stadium and the I-40 Interstate.  That intersection is the Dolly Parton Parkway exit you take when you go to Gatlinburg or good ole DollyWood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Well we landed the ship and put her back in the barn and headed our bus over to a friends house to have dinner.  The plan was to split a pizza with them but we ended up suffering and having BBQ ribs instead.  How's that for a perfect ending for a perfect day lol.

Happy Leap day to ya's!

Clell n Donna