AOPA Pilot Blog: Reporting Points

“Pilots return year after year to see familiar faces, including a San Diego pilot who flies a J-3 Cub. It takes him two weeks to get to Sentimental Journey and two weeks to fly back to the West Coast.” That’s what I wrote for “Color Me Yellow,” my article on the Sentimental Journey Fly-In, which was published in the June Flight Training.

Len Buckel knew I had to be talking about him and his 1945 J-3, even though the Sentimental Journey folks who told me about him never mentioned him by name. After all, how many pilots go coast to coast in a J-3 Cub, year after year, to the Sentimental Journey Fly-In at Lock Haven? He e-mailed me to set the record straight: “The most time it ever took was seven days going there in 1986. We had bad weather that year and sat on the ground a lot. We had headwinds in both directions in 1986. We put 80.7 hours on the tachometers for the round trip. Two J-3s went from San Diego the first year.

“In 1987 I had tailwinds both ways. I put 70.7 hours on the tachometer that year and got to Lock Haven in three LONG days. I had a 50-mph tailwind for the first two days out of San Diego. It was hard to believe that the same route would be 10 tachometer hours shorter because of the winds. The least amount of round trip time of my 13 trips was 62.3 hours in 1995.”

Consider yourself vindicated, Len. And as for your question about whether I’m related to Frank Tallman, well, that’s a blog for another week.

Tags: J-3, Piper, Piper Cub, Sentimental Journey, taildragger, tailwheel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 8:07 am and is filed under Editors, Jill Tallman, What's in AOPA Flight Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.