July 17, 2004

This morning I had breakfast at the airport with Linas, his wife Babe, and Dave Klages. Linas is building an RV-7A, and Babe had never gotten a ride in a -7 before...so he asked if she could fly along with me, and he would fly with Dave. The order of the day was to make a clandestine huge RV formation over Flabob for Trish & Mark's wedding. They had invited the whole SoCal RV group, and Gary Sobek planned this massive surprise arrival. First everybody met up at San Bernardino. Tom Prokop, Dave Klages, and I flew over there in formation from Chino. Linas, flying with Dave, caught a few shots of us. This is the first in-flight photo I've got with the wheel pants on (still don't have lower fairings yet) and all the fiberglass stuff primed grey. Cool shot.

This one's a neat shot, too. Linas is modest about his camera abilities, but I think these photos came out great!

Here's a shot looking forward and left at Tom, who flew lead. Dave and Linas flew #2, and I was in the #3 slot, right echelon formation.

At SBD, twelve RVs met and Gary gave us a briefing. Gary's pretty serious (to put it lightly) about formation flying. The plan was to have Dan Hall in his Ercoupe (RV-0.45A as he calls it) scouting out to see when Trish left Redlands for Flabob. The goal was for us to have a surprise mass arrival in formation over Flabob just after Trish landed. After the briefing, we all got ready...we started up together and taxied in formation to the runup area. I don't think I've ever seen so many planes in one runup area at once. It was very cool.

Once we were ready, we sat there and waited for word from the scout. Eventually we got the goahead to take off, and we all took to the air together. It all worked out well, and hopefully somebody got some good photos of us flying overhead in formation...I had my hands full at the time. If I find some photos I'll post 'em here or link to them later.

Trish and Mark are partners in an RV-6A that they bought last year. The story is that Mark proposed to Trish on approach to Oshkosh last summer. How cool is that? Congratulations, Trish and Mark. Best wishes.

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Dan Checkoway ()