New Years Freeze? Fly

 

Happy 2023! Our traditional New Years's Day Freeze Fly was a dud...in that almost all the snow had melted. No complaints, though. The temperature was tolerable...jacket weather...and there was very little wind. Rare weather for the first of January.

Is it really 2023? When I was a kid, 2023 was supposed to be a time of flying cars, cities on the moon, and all that. The sci-fi stuff will remain the stuff of fiction for a while longer. At least our hobby has progressed since the good ol' days, with affordable digital radios, gas engines, and electric planes. Good bye, stinky, oily, cantankerous, methanol engines.

The field was in great shape. Not too soggy; nice, short grass thanks to the last mower of the season. We had several nice flights before the sunlight began to fade and the clammy chill set it. 

The corn is gone. It is hard to image the forest of stalks that surrounded the field for most of the 2022 season. Thankfully, there were few planes that went down this year, for whatever reason. We eyed up the remnants of the corn stalks and imagined what it will be like to have the low-lying bean bushes again. Were the beans easier to negotiate when a plane had a mishap? Maybe. Maybe not. Sucks to wade through in shorts.

One thing is for certain, the last bean year was a near-record year for planes going AWOL or falling victim to gravity. Perhaps our pilots are more careful with preflight, or take less risk when flying over the corn forest.

A few more months and the usual suspects will be setting up lawn chairs and telling tall tales again.