Yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit one of the coolest little grass strips I have been to in a long time!
While attending the Stinson Summit in Quincy, IL, the attendees took Saturday morning to head out to 9I0 for a traditional pancake breakfast hosted by their EAA chapter. I gotta say, the pancakes were pretty darn good, but the sausages were amazing. I might have eaten a couple more than I should, but our 150HP 1947 Stinson, Charlie, still managed to get us back off the ground and back to Quincy after breakfast.
A unique “tower” adorns the top of the terminal building that allows pilots to climb up the stairs and sit and look out over the airport and the corn fields that surround it. There can be few more peaceful places to sit and sip a cup of coffee in the morning, even if no other aircraft happen to arrive while you are there.
When it comes to services, when is the last time you have seen a grass runway airport that offers 100LL 24/7 self-serve fuel? Or allows you to camp with your airplane and provide a camp fire pit with stock of wood?
A fully equipped kitchen is there for your use, hangars and tie-downs are available, and there is a large conference room. Want to have an aircraft picnic? Well, there is a pavilion and grass grills for that.
They even have on-site a 7-passenger van crew car!
Charlie even got to hang with a new friend while we hung out with fellow Stinson pilots and the local Havana EAA 1420 chapter members. These folks are definitely doing good work in the aviation community keeping the spirit flying strong here.
I don’t know what it is, but I always feel like our Stinson likes hanging out on a grass strip more than on a pavement ramp surrounded by new whiz-bang jet-type planes. It feels like Charlie belongs in places like this more often and begrudgingly acquiesces my flying endeavors that bring her to more modern places. Perhaps as pilots, we should take hints from our planes and go to places like this more often. For our souls and for theirs.
The airport has a great story and continues to do pretty cool things that go well beyond providing a great grass strip with services found at few others. Some of the coolest things they do there is turn all the lights off on well-planned nights to offer dark sky viewing events in the middle of Illinois corn country. A place where little light pollution exits when the local lights are turned off and you just might see more of the Milky Way than you have ever seen before.
Check out this gem of an airport at: https://www.havanaregionalairport.com/ to learn some more. And if you happen to be flying by in your aircraft, and it is suitably able to operate out of a 2200′ grass strip with super clear approaches on either end, drop in and say hello, walk around, and enjoy this special place.
Tired of looking up codes from FAA knowledge tests the hard way?
Me too, which is why I created a website to make that easier a few years. I recently reworked the website and expanded the functionality and options for lookups!
Check out www.FAATestCodeLookup.com
where you can enter ACS or PTS (LSC) codes from FAA knowledge tests.
The updated database includes newer ACS codes for Private, Commercial, and Instrument tests, Mechanic tests, and older PLT codes from CFI or CFI-I tests.
Enter codes from your or your student’s knowledge test reports to get the associated topics and if desired, enter an email address to have them sent to you, or even your examiner!
Enjoy all, and I hope you find this as helpful as it is for me in my daily flight training work.
A week or so ago I was talking with a friend at a flight training provider and we were discussing the challenges many flight training providers are experiencing at sourcing new employee CFIs as airline hiring has actively hired away as many CFIs as can meet ATP (or R-ATP) experience requirements. In some cases, I have been talking with flight training providers that are finding their operations losing more CFIs per month than they can hire.
It got me thinking, will we be experiencing a reduction in training throughput due to a lack of available CFI resources to train the following sequence of pilots? My gut said this might be a real possibility.
That was until I pulled some data from a source that reports the number of CFI certificates issued per month for U.S. and non-U.S. citizens. I took a little time, and put this into a quick table to see what the trend actually looked like, and here is what I came up with.
It appears in fact that we are producing MORE CFIs per month recently than we were over the past years. Continue reading