Landing on the Yellow Dot at KOSH – Relived

Written in 2020, the year AirVenture was cancelled

Chuck uses CloudAhoy to relieve a memorable flight, flown 7 years earlier.

 

Converging traffic!

I was on the left base to runway 36 when I saw at my 2 o’clock a Bonanza on a one mile final. Seeing converging traffic almost on a collision course rings all your alarm bells. Normally I would immediately abort my approach and initiate an evasive maneuver, but this was not a normal flight. The tower was fully aware of the situation. 

On that day, the tower had a banner “The World’s Busiest Tower”. It was seven years ago, on July, 30th 2013, and in one minute I would land on the yellow dot on KOSH RWY 36, after flying the Fisk arrival.

Now it’s 2020, the year Oshkosh did not get to be busy.  I took my time to relive that memorable flight. A year later, in 2014, we would have a booth at AirVenture, and, sadly, I could no longer afford to take a few days off to fly my own plane to KOSH. 

Relive

Landing – I was assigned the yellow dot.

I did my best to touch down exactly on the yellow dot. How well did I do? Not so great. 

Landed.

Reliving the flight was emotional and fun. Admittedly, I watched the landing more than once.

Watch capture of the landing on CloudAhoy:

Was it a good landing? 

As is well established, a good landing is one you can walk away from. In this case it was an amazingly good landing: not only we could all walk away, but it was on KOSH soil during AirVenture! CloudAhoy was great to relieve the flight.  But there’s some interesting debriefing to do.

Debrief

First I looked at the touch-down and yellow dot.  Indeed, CloudAhoy confirms my frustration. The touchdown was 3586’ from the runway’s threshold. The yellow dot is 3300’ from the threshold, and I missed it by 286’.

Looking at the graph with the 3D Cockpit view :

Then I got curious how stable my approach was.  The automatic scoring did not exist in 2013, but now I could see my score:

I lost most of the points on airspeed. CloudAhoy reported airspeed of 89-96 knots between 500’ AGL and the runway threshold, while for the Warrior the goal was 65-85. In my defense I can say that since I intended to land long, I flew faster over the threshold than I would for normal landing. Still, I should have been slower. 

The other contributor to the low score was the descent angle’s consistency. I was approaching the runway pretty much on the glide path, but then I flew pretty low over the runway.

* * *

Where is the video?

While looking at the flight with CloudAhoy, I had a moment of confusion: I remembered that Etan (CloudAhoy co-founder) took the video of the landing from the back seat.  However, I could not see it in the flight debrief… why?  Then I remembered – the feature to embed a video in CloudAhoy was added a year later!  (blog-2014/08/18/video-embedded/)  So I dug up the video and added it. 

Relieving this flight is a prime example for using this feature 🙂

* * *

The trip

The trip from KBED to KOSK took us 4 days (originally planned for 3, but we added a day due to weather).  A leisure trip, four friends, two airplanes:  Eldar and I alternated left seat flying in a rented Warrior, with Etan in the back. Itay was flying his Beech B-19 Sport. 

We spent the last night before OSH on the beautiful Mackinac Island. In the morning a horse-drawn taxi brought us to the airport. 

 

From KMCD, Eldar flew our first leg, only 9.5 minutes of air time, to 83D where we fueled (no fuel on KMCD).  He then continued to KISQ.

We swapped seats, I took off, and landed 1:59:30 hours later just past the yellow dot.

It was delightful and nostalgic to dig out the old OSH flights, and remember the jokes we exchanged on the radio (we used frequency 123.45 for chatting between the two planes).

 

 

Oshkosh!

We are here.