April solar eclipse

Jim K said:
It's still unclear to me how you fly an Archer wrongly enough to put the prop into the the pavement.
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Porpoising on landing? I'm guessing that's the most common method.
 
dbahn said:
Porpoising on landing? I'm guessing that's the most common method.
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Agreed, but man I made some really bad landings in an archer when I was learning, and didn't manage to hurt the airplane. It's a real bummer for the club. That plane flies a lot, and it'll be down all summer for sure.
 
Jim K said:
Guy in our eaa chapter had his club plane booked for the eclipse over a year in advance. Then one of their members had a prop strike in it in March.

Rolled about 8" of the prop tips back. 6 months before they can get it into a shop for IRAN. It's still unclear to me how you fly an Archer wrongly enough to put the prop into the the pavement.
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Sorry to hear. If the front strut is shot the nose can go a lot lower than normal, but there's still a lot of clearance there.
 
dbahn said:
Porpoising on landing? I'm guessing that's the most common method.
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Yup. It happens. Big disclaimer: -I- didn’t do that.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
One thing people will try to do during an eclipse is take a picture of the moon itself. There is enough light reflected by the earth towards the moon to faintly illuminate the moon and a long exposure (or a bit of post-processing) will make the moon visible. While this wasn't my primary goal, I was able to recover enough detail from a corona picture to see recognizable lunar features:

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The hoopla in the community leading up to the eclipse was insane. We were in the totality path. $100 hotel rooms went for $600 and there were zero vacancies. It was being said that our town of 15,000 would swell to 45,000 and I was made fun of because I openly stated that it couldn’t even get close to that.

It came eclipse day and there was not even a noticeable population increase. We opened the warbird museum all day eclipse day and were moderately busy in the morning leading up to the eclipse and almost all of the people disappeared immediately after the eclipse and left behind only their trash to be picked up.

Only a few people that disbelieved me about the crowdedness admitted afterward that I had been correct.

The owner of the museum has an Eclipse Jet as one of his personal transportation planes. We said ahead of the event, while there were doubts about weather allowing the eclipse to be seen that we could guarantee that an Eclipse could be seen at our airport, an Eclipse Jet that is.

I attached a few pictures that indicate how much darkness we experienced.
 

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AV8R_87 said:
How full was it? I tried making a reservation there on Saturday, after the weather turned sour at my primary and back-up locations, and was told they were full and not accepting any more.
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I called Plattsburgh on Friday thinking it would be no problem considering the size of the ramp. Apparently the airport commission limited the FBO to 50 GA aircraft. That ramp could easily accommodate 10 times that.
 
Seemed like all the airports in VT that were anywhere near the eclipse path had the same number listed as the airport manager, and I wasn't able to get much useful information out of him. Other places went out of their way to accommodate as many planes as possible (with a decent fee to cover the costs of the effort), but VT definitely felt like "don't bother us".
Could be worse. A friend ended up stranded (together with a couple other planes) because the manager at his airport decided to close the runway for maintenance on the evening of Apr 8th. Apparently he wasn't aware this might pose a bit of a problem.
 
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