Chili Party

Saturday Ray and I flew the Tri-Pacer down to Massey for the annual Chili Party. It is always well attended with both fly in and drive in traffic. We had flown in before but managed to arrive before the traffic, this time was different. About 15 miles north of Massey we started to pick up traffic on the radio as they were arriving at the field. Aircraft were announcing their locations as they started to maneuver into position downwind for runway 20. Some aircraft we could locate and others that were seemingly at our exact location we couldn't. To make it more stressful we had to assume that many others didn't have radios. There was at least one aircraft announcing 3 miles north of the field for runway 20. A quick glance at the GPS had us at 3 miles north of the field also so I again announced our position and intention. I scanned the instruments and fought off the urge to pull out of the pattern. We had done everything right, it was a textbook approach as we descended from 3000 to pattern altitude. We had a clear view of three aircraft in front of us, if I made any unexpected turn out of the pattern I could clip someone hidden behind or above me. We turned base and the wing obscured the runway to the left but gave us a clear look to the right confirming that there were no aircraft on long final. I finished out the base leg and turned final the field was right in front of us and the last of the three planes that we were following was aborting and starting a climb out. The field was ours. As we started our flare it became apparent that we were going a lot faster than the 70 mph showing on the airspeed. We should be at about 60 so 70 was a little hot but we seemed to be going close to 90. There were people sitting on the rise along the left side of the runway that got a clear view of a nice Tri-Pacer bounce as I struggled to get it slowed. The wind had obviously changed direction and because of the large amount of traffic Massey had not been able to switch directions. Ray quickly retracted the flaps as I worked the brakes and tried to keep it straight. Grass is more forgiving than pavement but it also has a lot less traction and for a brief moment I thought we might loose control but it quickly passed. We got her slowed down as a golf cart with a large flag directed us off the active and to a parking place in the rows of aircraft.

We spent some time looking at the other aircraft, talking to some of the regulars and even eating some chilli. There were a lot of other fabric aircraft on the field so we took the opportunity to check out other peoples fabric work. We were glad to notice that the slight problems with our fabric work were not uncommon.
There had been a threat of bad weather all day and Ray had been monitoring an approaching storm front with an iPhone app. We had been at the party about two hours and the front was about an hour away when we decided to leave. We took the senic route back to the plane stopping to talk and look at some of the more interesting aircraft. As we started to preflight the plane it was obvious that we weren't the only ones watching the weather. The line to leave was already about 8-10 planes deep but people were still landing. Massey had changed the active runway so we would be taking off into the wind but the landing aircraft were now taxing back down the runway toward the taking off aircraft. We waited behind a yellow Piper Cub and inched forward as traffic permitted. It was nice to be in line and get a chance to see how all the more experienced pilots handled the congestion, there was a lot of trust at work. It was finally our turn and we quickly taxied out and did a brief check of the mags and the carb heat before announcing departure. I set a notch of flaps and elected to go for a short field takeoff as I pushed in the throttle. The plane that had just landed was taxing back towards us from the far end of the runway. He looked like he was planning to stay to our right and if things went right we should be off before we reached him, if not I was planning to stay as far left as possible. We got off quickly and stayed left as we did our climb out. At about 800 feet I started a turn to the left and saw a Piper Warrior behind and below us. He must have left right behind us, it was nice to see our old plane was so much higher and quickly leaving him behind. We had planed to fly up to Morgantown on the way home and look at some ultralights but the approaching front changed our plans and we went back to New Garden.