Back to the Bricks | Part 3, Many Meetings

Three Nights, Three Different Cites

Visiting Flint was the motivation, but only the beginning of a three day odyssey through familiar Michigan locales. Leveraging a rental car, my airplane, and a couple of bummed rides, I roamed from place to place to reconnect with friends and family. Overall, I  spent the night in three different cities: Flint, Bloomfield Hills, and Kalamazoo.

A Twenty Year Reunion (But Not Really)

When I was a kid, I confess that I was afraid of my Uncle Brian. He smoked, he drank, and he was loud. I did not deal well with loud when I was young. But in the 1980s, he achieved the extraordinary. He stopped smoking and drinking in the coldest of cold turkey ways; one day, he just quit. (He was still loud, though.) The strength of will he demonstrated is almost unfathomable.

Following this remarkable transformation, mom and I spent a lot more time with him. Much of my early driving practice involved the 45 minute highway route to his farm. In college, because he lived just 30 minutes outside Flint, I went to him for brake work on my car. That car also had a penchant for destroying oxygen sensors. Fortunately, I worked in the Ceramic and Electronic Engineering Department at AC Rochester where used prototype O2 sensors were readily available. Uncle Brian and I installed a new one in my car roughly every six months. At my wedding, Uncle Brian became known as the "chief clinker”, mischievously waiting for me and Kristy to be physically separated before enthusiastically -- and inconveniently -- clinking his glass with a huge grin on his face. He kept us running all evening.

With Aunt Karen and Uncle Brian at the Lapeer Dupont Airport, 07 May 2023.

Our last meeting was in May of 2023 when I landed in Lapeer, MI while en route to Traverse City to train for my seaplane rating. By 2026, I was overdue for another visit.

"Hey Uncle Brian, it's your favorite nephew and I’m in Flint!" I exclaimed when he answered my call. We made plans to meet that afternoon at the farm. I checked out of Flint's Downtown Hilton Garden Inn and spent time on a work project at the Flint Public Library. Renovated in 2020, the library was a bright, open facility with massive windows filling the space with natural light. It is located in the Flint Cultural Center, just a block away from my former (now missing) home in Flint's East Village.

That afternoon at the farm, I told Uncle Brian and Aunt Karen about my visit with the university and updated them on The Bear's first year college experience.

"How long ago did you move to New York from Michigan?" Aunt Karen asked.

"Twenty years ago!" I exclaimed, hardly able to believe it myself. 

"Twenty years?!" They responded in unison, shaking their heads in disbelief over the curious subjectivity of time's passage.

At that moment, Uncle Brian's phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and gave it a long armed squint before answering. Interrupting the caller’s greeting, he said, "Hi! Thanks for calling. I'm talking here with a gentleman I have not seen in 20 years, so I'm going to have to call you back." Without waiting for a response, he terminated the call with a deliberate tap of the screen. To be certain, 20 years was an exaggeration -- it was more like three -- but his good naturedly boisterous behavior was perfectly on brand for him.

When his daughter Kim called later that afternoon, he grinned, showed me her name on the face of the phone, then handed it to me to answer. "Who is this?" she asked, unable to place my out of context voice.

We parted that afternoon with a firm handshake and a bear hug. 

Three days later, Kim called. I did not recognize the number, but when I saw the area code, I just knew. Uncle Brian passed away in his sleep that morning. I cannot put into words how grateful I am and how stupidly fortunate I feel that my university trip afforded me one last visit with him. It was another example of Warrior 481 delivering me to just the right place at just the right time to see who I most needed to see.

Clink in peace, Uncle Brian.

Meet the Parents

With Greg in Loveland, CO, 01 October 2022.

This guy.

He was the first friend I made in 1980 when I started at a new school, my fourth elementary school, and the beginning of the most difficult and chaotic six years of my life.

This guy stuck by me through all of it when others couldn't or wouldn't. For decades.

I have been very fortunate to include many wonderful people among my friends, people who are smarter, kinder, and more talented than me. But this guy was one of kind.

And I cannot believe he's gone.

I and the rest of the world lost Greg to brain cancer in June 2025. Because it was my first time in Michigan since his passing, I took the opportunity to visit with his parents in person. Adjacent to their property, our former high school was undergoing a massive expansion and renovation project, evolving along a path to become utterly unrecognizable. It was great to see Greg's parents again, to be back in their familiar home where I spent so much time as a kid, and to quietly celebrate our shared love for Greg.

Afterward, I returned to my hometown public library for the first time in decades, a place I frequented every summer as an elementary school kid where I voraciously devoured science fiction and Hardy Boys books. From the comfort of an overstuffed easy chair (they did not have those in the 80s), I wrapped up the computer work that I started in Flint that morning and sent the document I was editing off to a colleague.

Success

During the most unsettled part of spring -- March, specifically -- I twice attempted flying to Michigan for a visit. I was motivated to see friends and family, but also wanted to get in one last flight across Canada before my third class medical certificate expired and the trip became far less convenient.

Mike in Detroit, 24 July 2021.

Twice I made plans to meet with Mike from my high school inner circle and twice the weather was so unexpectedly bad that I cancelled on him. That night, I made good on those earlier attempts and we spent the whole evening at Red Ox Tavern in Rochester, MI. We arrived around 6:00 pm and talked until they started shutting the place down around us.

I spent that night at a nearby Hampton Inn in Bloomfield Hills. As I drifted off to sleep, my final thoughts were of the following day's weather and if it would allow the next phase of my journey to happen.

April 10: GTN Guidance Through the Soup

 

I dawdled the next morning under low ceilings and pervasive rain.

I planned to visit my cousin Jane by flying from Flint to my former home base, the South Haven Area Regional Airport. I was not directly worried about the ceilings or the rain from a flight safety perspective, I was more concerned that the combination of visible moisture and low temperatures might create an icing hazard. Surface temperatures were in the low 40°F range. Although standard lapse rates would suggest that cruising at 4,000 would be an icing risk, the temperatures aloft forecast suggested otherwise. I contemplated keeping the rental car and driving to the west side of the state, but instead decided to put some stock (I will not say “trust”) in the forecast and fly. As a contingency plan, if the temperatures aloft were colder than predicted, I would immediately return to Flint.

Departing the hotel near the intersection of Square Lake Road and Telegraph, I passed the distinctive intersection with Orchard Lake Road and suddenly realized that I had just spent the night near where Showcase Cinemas once stood. When I was a kid, these were the premier (i.e., most expensive) movie theaters in the area. Now they are gone. It was a jarring realization.

My mother's former house, photographed 31 July 2022 on a much drier day.

On the way to Flint, I detoured through Clarkston again and drove past the little house that I inherited from my mother in 2018 and sold that same year. With some time and distance from that house, the sight of it evoked surprisingly little feeling for me. Box checked, I drove on.

At Bishop International in Flint, the process of preflighting the Warrior and removing the cabin cover under a steady, frigid rain was absolutely miserable. Before running the engine start checklist, I took a moment in the dry cabin of the Warrior to rub my hands together in hopes of restoring some feeling and dexterity to cold fingers.

Flint was overcast at 900 feet with seven mile visibility underneath. I was cleared direct to South Haven at 4,000 feet. "November Four Eight One, cleared to depart runway nine. Maintain runway heading and please give a report on bases and tops -- if you reach them -- to Departure." 

Spoiler alert, I never reached the tops.

 

Inside the Ping Pong Ball

  

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
10 Apr 2026	N21481	FNT (Flint, MI) - LWA (South Haven, MI)	1.8	3125.1

In the chill air, the Warrior reached the bases moments after breaking ground and I was quickly engulfed in grey. It was my first flight in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) for the year and my first instance of navigating clouds with the GTN 650. Fortunately, extensive simulator practice with the GTN made it comfortably familiar. Actual use proved that it was far simpler to manage than the old GNS 430 with its clunky user interface.

Proceeding southwest bound, I left the rain behind but not the clouds. As I climbed to 4,000 feet, the gray obscurity beyond my windows brightened until I was surrounded by the painful brilliance of scattered light. I never reached the tops, but I came close. I was, as my friend Colin likes to say, "inside the ping pong ball". More importantly, the outside air temperature remained above 40°F with plenty of buffer present before icing could become a concern. With that confirmation, I surrendered a bit of the tension that I carried in my shoulders.

Great Lakes Approach issued a small vector near Lansing to better accommodate their departure corridor. Great Lakes is a massive consolidated TRACON (terminal radar approach control) on the field in Kalamazoo that superseded individual radar facilities in Flint, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Muskegon, and Saginaw. Great Lakes sectors still use the same frequencies and boundaries once belonging to those legacy facilities as numerical echoes of past cross country flights.

North of Kalamazoo, I detected some structure to the surrounding clouds. The layer was no longer uniform and I found myself flying through occasional voids in the mist until somewhere just west of Kalamazoo, I broke out laterally into clear air between layers.

Closer to South Haven, I set up to fly an instrument approach for the first time into my former home base. After all, I did not earn my instrument rating until seven years after leaving South Haven. For that matter, even the runway numbers changed since I left, from 4/22 to 5/23. 

With wind out of the northeast, I planned to fly the RNAV (GPS) RWY 5 approach that has LNAV minimums down to 361 feet above the ground. When I departed Flint, South Haven was reporting a 400 foot ceiling, still low enough that getting into South Haven was not assured. En route, the ceiling lifted to 600 feet. Thus confident that the approach would be no problem, I allowed a little more tension to shake loose from my shoulders.

Great Lakes took my approach request for South Haven, "RNAV 5 starting with the procedure turn at SUSOY", before passing me on to a very busy South Bend Approach. I must have arrived during a commercial push at South Bend.

Working together, the GTN and HAL intercepted SUSOY and flew a perfect parallel entry to the procedure turn. Once on the final approach course, I notified South Bend that I was established and received clearance for the approach.

Breaking out on the approach over the Palisades Nuclear Plant.

Warrior 481 precisely tracked electronic guidance downhill through the cloud deck. When I broke out near the 600 feet advertised by South Haven's automated weather broadcast, the first thing I saw were the twin cooling tower arrays of the Palisades Nuclear Plant on the shore of Lake Michigan. The instrument approach almost went right over the top of it. I later learned that the plant was decommissioned in 2022, but there are efforts underway to restart it. As a novice pilot, steam billowing from Palisades was always a marvelous visual navigation aid to finding South Haven. 

ForeFlight ground track from Flint, MI to South Haven, MI.

I arrived on the ramp at South Haven for the first time since 2013 and quietly celebrated the milestone of flying my first instrument approach in IMC with the GTN into what was my first home base for Warrior 481.

Reminiscence

Jane was waiting for me at the air side terminal entrance. I was welcomed "home" by Dan, the current airport manager. Seeing my surprised expression at this welcome, Jane explained, "We've been talking." I was next introduced to Randy, who was running UNICOM.

"This airport still maintains a UNICOM operator? You, sir, are an anachronism," I declared to Randy, who laughed.

Continued attention to UNICOM was not the only way that the facility seemed frozen in time. The terminal building itself had hardly changed since I left and many of the same pictures were still on the walls, albeit a little faded.

Dan and Randy were eager to establish who we knew in common and I was happy to indulge in some reminiscence with an apologetic glance at Jane. She smiled and nodded back at me, understanding completely. 

I already knew that Ron had moved north and taken his airplane with him. I learned that John the Mooney pilot from the old days had served as airport manager for a few years after I left. When I asked about Phil who used to join our fly-out trips in a distinctive orange Stinson 108, Dan and Randy broke the sad news to me that he had dementia. The pair had saved a lot of Phil's aviation treasures from dumpster-fixated relatives, including some of Phil's radio controlled aircraft now hanging in the terminal. I learned that Alan, the mechanic who replaced a bad valve stem in my nose wheel tire the night before I ferried Warrior 481 from South Haven to Le Roy ("Making an Impression"), was still on the field, but not actively repairing airplanes there. 

Dave and Mark over South Haven on 30 July 2005. Photographed by Jonathan W.

Jonathan, who once flew with me in Warrior 481 and captured one of my favorite formation flying photos (above), now owns an airplane based at the field. Jonathan's aviation roots run deep in southwest Michigan. Though his father Ross never learned to fly, his grandfather Don once piloted a beautiful Globe Swift and, at some point, managed the South Haven airport. His great grandfather, Irv, was a well-known Kalamzoo area pilot who was issued certificate #709 by the National Aeronautic Association of the U.S.A. It was signed by Orville Wright. Irv was the first pilot to solo from Charles A Lindbergh Field that ultimately became the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport (AZO). In 1942, Irv taught Suzanne Delano how to fly in a float-equipped Aeronca Chief at Austin Lake. Sue later served with the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) in World War II and co-founded the Air Zoo with then husband Pete Parrish in 1979.

Warrior 481 is back home.

These reminiscences reinforced for me that despite a short time as an aviator in South Haven, it was enriched with wonderful people. Through conversation with Dan and Randy, I realized that the strong pilot community in South Haven continued to thrive.

Fun with Jane

Jane and I departed the airport and caught up over lunch at Cafe Julia. Jane's mother, my Great Aunt Carolyn, was the sister of my paternal grandmother. Jane shared a number of stories about my grandparents that I had never heard before. She also clearly shared my frustration with the infighting that seemed to run rampant on that side of the family. The last time I saw Jane was when our Great Aunt Mary passed away ("Rarefied Prismatic Air").

After lunch, we visited one of my favorite locations in southwest Michigan, the South Haven Lighthouse.

After walking the pier, I was treated to a tour of Jane's lovely new home with a stroll to the nearby bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Jane was always one of my favorite relatives on my dad's side of the family and it was a genuine pleasure to reconnect with her.

The only significant change at the South Haven Regional Airport was the big corporate hangar next to the terminal.

Back at the South Haven airport, the "lake effect sun" phenomenon was clearing clouds from the immediate shoreline, but Kalamazoo was still IFR. I filed an IFR flight plan direct to Kalamazoo before launching VFR from runway 5 in a gusty crosswind.

 

The AWOL IFR Flight Plan

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
10 Apr 2026	N21481	LWA (South Haven, MI) - AZO (Kalamazoo, MI)	0.8	3125.9

Acquiring what is undeniably my favorite set of photos from the trip, I dallied in the sky over South Haven taking pictures through what remained of the ceiling.

I-196 just east of South Haven.

South Haven, MI.

I flew out over Lake Michigan hoping to get a peek at the lighthouse through the clearing sky.

The Black River and South Haven Pier.

A glimpse of the red South Haven lighthouse through the clouds.

Done sightseeing, I contacted South Bend Approach for IFR clearance to Kalamazoo.

"Cherokee Four Eight One, we don't have an IFR on file for you," responded the busy controller. Every once in a while, a flight plan filed through ForeFlight simply does not go through. This was one of those times. I hated to ask because South Bend was quite busy, but requested a pop-up IFR. To my surprise, the controller assigned a squawk and cleared me direct to Kalamazoo at 3,000 feet before handing me off to Great Lakes Approach.

A roundabout somewhere east of South Haven.

Looking eastbound along I-94 west of Kalamazoo.

I entered the clouds just east of South Haven and was in and out of them all the way to Kalamazoo. At one point, I noticed a complex of cylindrical metal structures on the ground and before I could consciously process what it was, the words "Lawton" and "Welch's grape juice" ran through my mind. It was a VFR waypoint that I frequently used over twenty years ago in my pre-GPS days when getting lost concerned me more than anything else. Before mentally processing any of this information, the clouds closed ranks and I lost ground contact.

I was vectored onto the ILS-35 approach for Kalamazoo and broke out close enough to the final approach fix AUSTN (for Austin Lake) that I logged the approach. West of the final approach course was my former office and the active pharmaceutical ingredient plant now belonging to UberCo.

Final, runway 35 at AZO with downtown Kalamazoo in the distance.

With YY and Kent in Kalamazoo, May 2023.

Kent was waiting for me at Duncan Aviation where we attended ground school classes together on our road to becoming pilots. After dinner with Kent and YY at Bangkok Flavor, a favorite Thai restaurant from the old days, we stayed up far too late into the night talking. Like with Uncle Brian, I had not visited Kent and YY since the seaplane trip to Michigan in 2023 and it was wonderful to spend time with them again.

April 11: Frosty

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
11 Apr 2026	N21481	AZO (Kalamzoo, MI) - SDC (Sodus, NY)	3.7	3129.6

Like the outbound flight from Sodus, the return flight also included departure from an area dominated by high pressure with commensurately beautiful weather.

Prog chart for the return flight on the morning of 11 April 2026.

However, Kalamazoo experienced a hard frost overnight. The next morning, Kent and I discovered Warrior 481 completely frosted over at Duncan. Because the airplane was facing north, frost on the right wing was easily wiped away, but where the left wing was eclipsed by the fuselage, moisture was tenaciously frozen. This was a problem. Even thin layers of frost can destroy lift generated by a wing and it needed to be removed. I turned the airplane to face directly into the rising sun and went about the rest of the preflight inspection while sunlight worked on the frost.

Austin Lake (left), where Sue Delano Parrish learned to fly with Irv in 1942.

With frost finally removed form the wings, I said goodbye to Kent and picked up my clearance home. I filed the reverse of the route I used to reach Flint, though by starting from Kalamazoo, Detroit's airspace was no longer a factor.

ForeFlight screenshot a few minutes off Kalamazoo.

Kalamazoo was inundated with traffic when I departed and I had to wait a while at runway 17 before receiving take-off clearance. Once airborne, I could see that Western Michigan University tail numbers crowded the sky, particularly clustered over Battle Creek.

Closer to Ohio, an undercast moved in to provide some interesting photographic opportunities.

"Ohio...io...io...io...!"

I proceeded east over what was once the Great Black Swamp

The Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, OH.

Erie-Ottawa International Airport in Port Clinton, OH was barely visible through the clouds.

Over Port Clinton, OH.

As with the outbound flight, Cleveland Approach made no modifications to my filed route where it passed through their Bravo airspace.

Sandusky Bay between Port Clinton and Sandusky, OH. 

In cruise on the way home, I reflected on the trip and the performance of the new GTN 650 navigator. After just one cross country flight with it, I would not have been enthusiastic about returning to the GNS 430. Despite initial frustration with installation errors, the actual performance of the unit swept away any lingering buyer's remorse.

Motoring along the Lake Erie shore, I looked down and thought, "Well, that looks like it used to be an airport." Situated just east of Painesville, OH, I believe this is what's left of Casement Airport (PVZ). A 2008 Detroit sectional chart in my collection shows a closed airport at this location, so it has clearly been shuttered a long time. Before it passed from view, I quietly mourned the loss of another transfer point with the sky.

Perry Nuclear Power Plant, Perry, OH.

I think I know which Erlenmeyer flask someone dropped the dry ice into...

A freighter in port at Erie, PA.

Bicentennial Tower, Erie, PA

Whosawhatsit?

Exhibit B: more reasons not to scud run.

As on the outbound flight, I was amazed by the amount of lingering ice coverage on Lake Erie near Buffalo. Buffalo Approach passed me to Rochester Approach for the final leg home when I heard the controller call a "Piper Sundowner" to another aircraft as traffic. This contradiction momentarily broke my brain.

I-390 south of Rochester.

The air over Rochester was quite cold, but my descent through the clouds was expedient enough that I did not pick up any ice.

ForeFlight ground track from Kalamazoo to Sodus.

Wrap Up

In all, I flew a total of 10.3 hours (2.3 hours IMC) on a very satisfying visit to Michigan. On its own, the visit to UofM-Flint and connecting with faculty and students there would have been worth the trip. But the greatest reward in this journey for me was an unexpectedly final connection with Uncle Brian. Beyond that, visits with Greg's parents, Mike, Jane, Kent, and YY truly enriched my whole experience. 

This trip was an excellent field test for the new navigation equipment that included logging two instrument approaches during my first IMC time of 2026. I also appreciated returning to my aviation roots and hearing updates about the folks I flew with during the South Haven era.

I often call Warrior 481 a "time machine" in reference to getting places faster, but there are moments when it seems like the airplane literally takes me back in time. On aspects of this journey, that certainly seemed to be the case.