Small Airport Fly-ins

[Jason Alexander]

Next weekend I'm going to my 5th fly-in at a tiny grass field in western NC. The runway has a dogleg in it! But every year I've gone, it's gotten bigger and bigger! Every year we get comments from pilots that it's like parking at Oshkosh. This is because the marshallers have either worked AirVenture or been trained by those of us who have. We take it as the height of compliments!

There's no real purpose to this thread. I just love this little fly-in and wanted to post about it! If you're in the NC/SC/TN/VA area, it's at Laney's Airport (N92) southeast of Hickory, NC, there's free (delicious) food, live music, and a ton of aviation enthusiasts! It's not an EAA-sponsored event, but it's still a lot of fun!

[FlyingRon]

Laney's is great. Alas, I'm going to miss it this year.

Were you at Long Island Airpark last week, we had our little fly-in too? I've got the Frank Lloyd Wright style house with the hangar that faces the center taxiway.
Missed the one at Miller as well.

[Jason Alexander]

This fly-in was a nightmare! The turf runways were 5/23 (main runway) and 13/31 (little-used downslope, ski-jump runway) with trees around most of them. So naturally, the winds 340 15G30+ and about 55 degrees. Not only did we have a record-low turnout of planes, we had no idea where they were coming from!

The 4 of us directing ground traffic didn't have a radio on the unicom and I was told that few pilots actually called in during the day. I had a 152 scare the ever-loving bejeezus out of me when I was directing traffic off of 5 and the Cessna appeared at the treetops and dropped in over the crowd, parked and taxiing airplanes, and me and landed just short of mid-field on the downward-sloping 13. I would chalk that up to me being fixated on the ground traffic, but the guy came in so low, I never would've seen him behind the trees in the first place! That was one of about 6 times I got on the ground network and announced, "I am not comfortable with this situation!" lol

To give you some idea: One conversation with a pilot ended with him saying, "I hope your day stays incident-free!" lol

Overall, it stayed incident free. Got all the airplanes in and out safely, but by the end, those of us on the ground crew were twitching, jumping at every loud noise, and in need of therapy...... yet I can't wait until next year's fly-in. There's something seriously wrong with me.