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AIRVENTURE TODAY
Shell Aviation
CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF AEROSHELL AEROBATIC TEAM For your chance to win a ride with the Aerobatic team, visit the AeroShell booth 3072, Hangar C. Don’t miss the celebrations, 5.40pm
PHOTO BY MARIANO ROSALES
at the beginning of tonight’s concert in Boeing Plaza. Winners will be announced at the concert. www.aeroshell.com Official rules apply.
Nonstop halfway across the country? Why not? By Randy Dufault
L
ots of interesting ideas get tossed around at any weekend hangar flying session. Some are good ideas, and most certainly, some are ridiculous. So an idea that came up just a few weeks ago might have easily been tossed into the ridiculous pile, except that it came up at one of the key centers of experimental aviation, Mojave, California. “The joke has always been that there is nothing to do in Mojave,” said Zack Reeder, current pilot and caretaker of Burt Rutan’s Catbird. “So everyone builds airplanes to go somewhere else.” And Mo’Venture was born. The plan? Seven amateur-built experimental airplanes from Mojave would travel from the Southern California desert to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2014 as a group, and more importantly, nonstop. “It [started out as] a joke,” Reeder said, “but everyone kind’ve stopped laughing since nobody could come up with a reason why we shouldn’t do it. “It was mostly an excuse for guys in our group that had talked about making their airplanes go real far actually buckle down and do it.” The first planes departed Mojave shortly after 4:00 a.m. Pacific time and arrived here at AirVenture as part of Monday’s air show. Despite holding for more than 30 minutes waiting for their slot in the show, all of the planes landed with great-
er-than-expected fuel reserves. An issue with the indicator on one plane was the only mechanical anomaly. The flight departed in two groups to account for speed differences. A slower group planned to be in the air about nine hours and the faster group eight hours. A planned 45-minute buffer in the schedule to allow for everyone to rendezvous before the arrival turned out to be unnecessary as everyone arrived at the gathering point within 15 minutes of each other. Reeder was amazed at the quick gathering since spotty weather along the route had all the planes taking different routes and altitudes to get there. All the planes had in-cockpit ADS-B weather, and Spot Tracker lent devices to each of the seven. A Web page allowed those who knew of the flight to follow the progress for all the airplanes in real time. Spot also provided a satellite phone that kept the group in continuous contact with folks here on the AirVenture grounds. The seven planes included the Catbird, a Lancair Legacy piloted by Brandon Cangiano, a Glasair II piloted by Doug Dodson, the TangoTimeMachine piloted by Justin Gillen, the Wasabi Special Formula One racer piloted by Elliot Seguin, a Long-EZ piloted by Ben Harvey, and Dick Rutan’s Long-EZ Ol’Blue, piloted by Dustin Riggs. All seven of the planes can be seen on the Southwest corner of Boeing Plaza.