Back in the Saddle

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
22 May 2022	N32816	SDC (Sodus, NY) - local flight	2.0	2447.1

Each year, the Williamson Flying Club holds a massive fundraiser pancake breakfast at the airport that coincides with the Apple Blossom Festival. When we were based at Le Roy, The Bear and I used to fly in regularly. From my perspective as a visitor, it was always an enjoyable, well-managed event. Historically, the club has been known to serve as many as 1600-1800 breakfasts and I have even heard numbers as high as 2400. It is a wonderful means of community outreach that has been sadly curtailed over the last two years due to COVID-19. Since joining the club, I have participated as a ride pilot, flying the general public on short hops in the club aircraft.

My assignment this year was to fly N32816, the club's most recent acquisition. The assignment made sense because Eight One Six is a Warrior and I have more Warrior time than anyone else on the field. The difference is that Eight One Six is a Warrior I (PA-28-151) that has undergone a Bold Warrior STC conversion from 150 to 180 HP. (Warrior 481 is a Warrior II with the stock 160 HP engine.) Differences include Friese-style ailerons with centering springs (that Piper abandoned before building Warrior IIs), a couple of additional and inconvenient fuel sumps to check (also abandoned for the Warrior II), an airspeed indicator calibrated in MPH instead of knots (so I added 10 to all my usual numbers), and more climb power than what I'm accustomed to.

While staging the airplanes around 7:00 am, we wondered if we would be able to fly at all. The lousy visibility was not exactly conducive to VFR flight and even departing IFR would have been ill advised. As for IFR arrivals, conditions were well below minimums that morning. Looking forward, thunderstorms were expected by early afternoon. We would have a window to fly, but the question on everyone's mind was whether it would be long enough to be worthwhile.

We stood around socializing for some time as pilots and airplanes alike waited for the weather to lift. 

Shortly after 9:00 am, the weather cleared rapidly. Barry was the first fly-in, characteristically arriving by Widgeon.

I had never even sat in Eight One Six prior to that morning, so I did a practice flight to get a feel for the plane before flying others in it. It has an immaculate paint job and comfortable leather interior. The panel is as basic as Warrior 481's was when I bought her, but upgrades similar to Warrior 481's are expected in the fall. When those are complete, Eight One Six will be a very nice, capable aircraft.

I found the centering springs for the ailerons to be somewhat annoying. They imparted a heavy feel to the controls, making Eight One Six handle more truck-like than my airplane. The extra power was very welcome on take off, however. Especially when loaded with passengers. The bigger engine up front meant that an extra 30 lbs of ballast in the baggage compartment was useful to prevent the weight and balance from going out of the envelope forward when only two adults were up front. This was something that I watched carefully for each load of passengers. In the landing flare, the airplane was nose-heavy compared to mine, but on my first landing I hauled back on the yoke and made a picture perfect touch down accompanied by a little squeak of the tires. After that first run, I was open for business.

I flew for roughly two hours and carried about 13 people, a mixture of adults, teenagers, and young kids. Everyone seemed to have fun and thanked me profusely after each ride. Sometime around 11:40, I was relieved from my flying duties by the club president and was one of the very last people to go through the breakfast line as the event ramped down.

It may not be obvious, but it was raining steadily when this photo was taken.

Between four club aircraft and seven pilots (five CFIs plus me and the club president), we flew rides for over 90 people before gusty weather moved in and shut everything down. We refueled all four airplanes in the rain, then pushed them back into hangars while getting absolutely soaked in the process. I ended the day with a new tail number and model (PA-28-151) in my logbook, meaning that I now have time in -140, -151, -161, -180, and -181 Cherokee variants.

Despite the foggy start and the stormy end, we managed to serve over 1500 breakfasts. That's over 1500 people that we welcomed to the Williamson Sodus Airport to enjoy the delights of general aviation for the morning. It's a worthwhile endeavor and the community was delighted that we were back in business.