Three musketeers air race Classic 2013

Blog 6-17-14

Concord to Klamath Falls, OR to Elko NV - is the plan for today.  If you would like to track our location at all times, you can follow our Spot on Trackleaders.com.  We leave it on at all times and you can even check our hotel! Be aware that the tracker sometimes is inaccurate.  If it doesn't make sense, i.e. someone is 61 mph or has flown 1,200 miles, disregard.

After an extensive weather briefing, 52 race planes departed Concord, CA east bound, taking almost an hour to depart individually. within 2+ hours everyone was in and out of Klamath Falls

We're #49 which is good and bad.  We're behind the mob which is passing and being passed.  As time goes along the airplanes spread out.  Only 3 airplanes took off behind us, two faster than us and they quickly passed us.  One was a Beech Travel Air, the only twin engine in the race and an airplane I loved to fly back in the Beech days. The very fast airplanes were in and out of Elko before we arrived there.

The weather was tough today - high terrain combined with scattered rain and low visibility.  We did some going around stuff we couldn't see through (this is a VFR race, no instrument flying allowed).  We had some really good tail winds, as did everyone else, mitigated by some minor detours.  Our numbers for the first day which are in mph, not knots, and our handicap, top speed, is 123.651 knots or 143.295 mph:  max today 250 mph, 700 mi 6+44 hours, average speed 134.6 mph. So we did beat our handicap on the first two legs.

Anticipated weather is pretty wild for the days ahead, snow here in the mountains and tornadoes in the midwest.  That's part of air racing, dealing with flying weather challenges. Deteriorating weather as the day went on caused the slower aircraft to RON, remain overnight, in Elko.

RONs:  15 teams in Elko, 21 in Pinedale, and 10 teams made it to Scotts Bluff. You may be interested  to know that the teams making it to Scotts Bluff were: 5 Skylanes, 2 Arrows, 1 Cirrus, 1 Bonanza and 1 Mooney.  The Skylane is the airplane of choice for this race since it is relatively fast and has the fuel capacity to skip some stops after timing.  We carry 60 gallons (we're paying over $6/gal) so we have to land and fuel at every timing stop.