After failing to get off the ground on Friday due to IFR conditions pretending to be marginal VFR, I was determined to make it down to Hondo on Saturday.
The weather on Saturday morning was a lot better - scattered low clouds, but otherwise good. The weather down in Hondo was not quite as good, with occasional overcast, but basically VFR flight was possible.
The main problem was that none of the Friday flying group was able to fly down on Saturday. They all had other important stuff to do. So, I would be a flight of one.
I lifted off from RBD, and set off for Hondo. I ran at 6500, climbing to 8500 and then (briefly) to 9500 as I went over the top of some overcast and round a line of developing showers with tops to 14+000 feet.
Flying into Hondo was my first experience of off-field aircraft marshalling, where they put a temporary tower 5 miles out, and have incoming aircraft report over that location. I was expecting things to be a lot more hectic, but everything worked out well, and I touched down at around 13.00 CST and taxiied to the experimental end of the flight line.
That was when the fun began...on closing up the plane, and looking in my flight bag, I found that I had left my wallet and checkbook back at the house in Dallas. This was unfortunate. I had enough fuel on board to fly back to RBD (I always leave a healthy reserve when operating to distant locations - fuel is a lot cheaper than a forced landing). However, without any money, I could not even pay the fly-in admission fee.
I decided to go walk the flightline in search of a good samaritan. I soon found one in the person of Elwood Johnson, who, from sitting under the wing of his plane catching some rays, was instantly transformed in front of me to become CFO of the First National Bank of Elwood. Acting as CFO, he approved and disbursed a loan of $20 in cash, payable in 1 instalment. I was saved!
I then spent the rest of the afternoon roving the flight line. There were not many canard pushers at Hondo - several guys had made it up from South Texas, and Elwood had flown all the way from CA (he was en route to visit relatives further East). None of the Dallas area folks made it down there except for me.
Elwood and I failed to locate Skip, who appeared to be taking a timeout. Elwood was complimentary about the overall arrangements and logistics for the fly-in. He was camping close to the field.
The fly-in is of intermediate size - it is at the large end of "organized" fly-ins, but is not large enough to be classed as an airshow. It is more formal than (say) the Rough River fly-in, and the experimental side of the event was dominated by the RV community, as you might expect.
Several smaller warbirds (notably a B-26) took part in the flying display, the highlight of which was Debbie Rhinn-Harvey providing real-time commentary from the cockpit as she went through her airshow acrobatic routine (I'm not sure how she managed to keep commentating while upside-down and pulling x g's, but that probably explains why she is a past US Aerobatic champion, and why I have yet to perform a proper aerobatic maneouver as a PIC).
The really interesting (and somewhat funny) events occurred immediately after the airshow ended at around 6.00pm. There was a large storm system moving slowly to the West just North of the airfield, and it was growing in size to the point where it looked like we could be trapped for a while. I therefore got in line early at the end of the airshow to take off when they re-opened the airport.
Because of the sheer number of planes trying to leave in a short period of time, the tower was positioning-and-holding aircraft to get them off quickly, and asking them for aircraft type direction of departure. The rat-a-tat nature of the tower's questions should have alerted pilots to the need to respond rapidly, but, no. Time after time the tower would bark "state aircraft type and direction of departure", to be greeted by silence, sometimes followed by a hestitant "er, Decathlon, er, East" or similar. One pilot announced a West departure, then was corrected by the co-pilot and changed to East. (One wonders how good their flight planning was). I could sense the tower operator's frustration with some of the pilots, who appeared to be totally la-di-da, with no sense of urgency whatsoever.
As I rolled down the runway, rain hit the canopy, so I left just in time. Looking back as I climbed out, I could see rain enveloping the North of the airfield.
The return flight was uneventful, except that when I tried to briefly run at 2540 rpm, I was forced to back down to 2450 due to significant vibration from the engine (when I put my head into the headrest, I found I had blurred vision). That is not acceptable for long flights, and the plane will not be flown for any distance until this issue is fully resolved.