Holy Traffic Jam Batman!

Likely burned enough Jet-A to buy a couple of those 4 seaters ...
 
Looks like the day I left Airventure last year. Taxi from parking spot near the forums to departure end of 36 took close to an hour.
 
Gotta say no sympathy here. This was a know issue month ago when they decided to let up to 600 aircraft arrive. I was at Independence St. (7S5) with about 200 or so aircraft. Folks were cranking up on the ramp within 5 minutes of Totality! Apparently there are some almighty important people that need to be somewhere.
 
painless said:
Taxi from parking spot near the forums to departure end of 36 took close to an hour.
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As someone that's based in NYC, that's cute.

;)
 
We sat on the taxi way for over two hours in Nashville.

They halted all departures because Memphis Center ran out of beacon codes.

When we finally became number one, they gave us a reroute and we had to return to the gate for more fuel. After another hour in line we timed out for the day and cancelled the flight.

After three hours there were still 150 planes in line on the GA side waiting to depart.
 
jaybee said:
We sat on the taxi way for over two hours in Nashville.

They halted all departures because Memphis Center ran out of beacon codes.

When we finally became number one, they gave us a reroute and we had to return to the gate for more fuel. After another hour in line we timed out for the day and cancelled the flight.

After three hours there were still 150 planes in line on the GA side waiting to depart.
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Wow....just wow...
 
Much like when I leave a ball game... There's no way I would have cranked the engine there. I would have stayed in my lawn chair an extra hour and a half or whatever and watched the air show.

At ball games I play cornhole or fire back up the grill in the parking lot waiting for the traffic to settle, but watching planes is way better in this case.
 
I was there. As noted about 500 planes total on the field, perhaps 400 leaving that day. It took from 11 until about 4 for them all to take off. Yes that was the line and there were actually two lines to start with. Most people were pushing their planes down the line eventually to save fuel - including a Citation jet!

Departures were not particularly well scheduled or coordinated.

The FBO is a nice bunch of folks but they simply weren't prepared for this crowd in any way. For example, there was only one vendor serving espresso drinks.

People in the planes did better than those who drove. The highways and the road in front of the FBO was basically at a standstill until 5:30. About 100,000 people were in Madras, which is normally a town of 7800.
 
Palmpilot said:
My guess is that was a row of parked planes, not planes waiting for takeoff.
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Actually that was the line. People were pushing by hand and so the tail-draggers were pushed tailwheel first to be more controllable.
 
We were in Greenwood SC, it's uncontrolled, and a very nice little airport in the middle of the zone. I would estimate that they had 100-150 planes fly in on Monday. They did a fantastic job of getting everyone fuel that wanted fuel and it was cheap!! As it started getting brighter, I told my wife and kids, "When you hear an airplane crank, load up, I don't want to be at the end of 30 planes trying to leave!" A few minutes later I heard one crank up to our left and in less than a minute they were taxing past us. Just loaded up and fired up, when we got to the end of the runway, there were about 8 ahead of us. Everyone was departing VFR and I think they were probably getting 1 per minute off the ground, so it went smoothly. When we took the runway there may have been 4 in line and a bunch more heading for the taxiway. I flew high to avoid most of the VFR traffic and picked up FF as we got closer to Atlanta. I bet there were more general aviation flights around here on Monday than any other single day in a long time! It was fun!
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
The FBO is a nice bunch of folks but they simply weren't prepared for this crowd in any way. For example, there was only one vendor serving espresso drinks.
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And there we have it folks...
 
N747JB said:
We were in Greenwood SC, it's uncontrolled, and a very nice little airport in the middle of the zone. I would estimate that they had 100-150 planes fly in on Monday. ...
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A worker at the FBO in Columbia said they had 100 going into CAE and 70 into CUB; we were at CUB.

Here's the aftermath, and my ADS-B receiver is only a single band, not dual band):


PostEclipseTraffic.jpg
 
wayne said:
A worker at the FBO in Columbia said they had 100 going into CAE and 70 into CUB; we were at CUB.

Here's the aftermath, and my ADS-B receiver is only a single band, not dual band):


View attachment 55828
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It was crazy, we took off and climbed to 8500 feet as quickly as we could to get above the traffic.
 
I was in Rigby Idaho.... along with 12 other planes, and still had to wait behind a crop duster when we left... My CFI was there in Oregon, and he said it was really nuts getting out.
 
Amateurs.
I sat in a lawn chair, in my driveway wearing a welding mask, drinking Tequila Sunrises and listening to "Blinded By The Light".
There was no avgas wasted for my eclipse event.
:cheers:
 
A couple members of our club were there. I was talking with one of them on Tuesday. He waited until about 4 pm to depart. From engine start until take-off was about 12 minutes. One way to avoid the mess.

My approach was to fly down to the Salem, OR area, watch the eclipse from the air and then fly home. No delays at all.
 
I was *at least* number 35 leaving Casper, WY. I sat on the taxiway in line for about 70 minutes. Plus 20 minutes waiting for taxi. They had assigned arrivals slot times, but departures were a free-for-all. Should have slotted departures so that we knew when it was our turn instead of getting a tailwind up the back of my engines, and burning $50+ in fuel sitting on the taxiway.

Ah well.. worth it!
 
Passenger said:
Who flies the 4 engine ?
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That was actually one of a number of partly disassembled planes at the north end of the field. If you look carefully at that picture you can see the two inner engines are without props.
 
We went to Torrington, WY, which worked out great. There were maybe 80 airplanes there, and no huge wait to get out if you didn't need to leave absolutely as soon as it was light again. On the way back though, Denver center was not accepting any requests for VFR flight following, and said at one point that this was the most traffic coming back into the Denver area that they had seen ever.
 
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