Flying: Staying Frosty

I got up at a very unhealthy hour and made it to the airport by 7am today.

Joel and I were going to pickup the Dakota from the avionics shop as it was ready to be returned to service. Apparently a wire had chafed and it was sending bad signals to the pitch/trim servo.  

So we preflighted the Archer and Joel would fly me out then he was going to fly to Saginaw to pickup an item for his work and head back to Pontiac. So, Joel would fly, I'd handle the radios and then jump out, get the Dakota and fly back. easy and should be back before 9.

A gorgeous day and we got to see the sunrise.

 There were patches of fog over each of the lakes in the area tha tlloked like little baby clouds:

 

The air was very calm and cold so we had great performance

We arrived and Joel did a darn nice landing.

After landing we taxi'd over to the Dakota and we could see there was an issue.

Frost!  A thick layer of frost covered the wings, tail, windows, everywhere.

Frost is very much not a good thing to have on your airplane.  It badly affects the airflow over the wing and can easily cause a loss of lift and a loss of control.  

In short, if your plane is covered in frost, you're not taking off.

So, I borrowed some brooms from Huron Avionics and tried to get it off that way,

No dice, it just scraped the ice and made some snow, but a layer of frost still clung underneath it to the wings. The plane was not in a safe condition to fly.

So we did what any aviator would do.  We went to breakfast and waited for the sun to burn it off.

The small restaurant on the field in Owosso, Crosswinds Cafe, is amazing.

 We certainly didn't go away hungry.

By the end of breakfast the frost was all burned off and I was ready to go.

After a preflight, I started the engine and let the engine warm up for a bit as it was rather cold.

The day was absolutely beautiful, winds still totally calm, sunny, and not a cloud in the sky.

Pontiac was busy enough that they went to dual towers and two frequencies.   I contacted the tower position in charge of the north runway and let them know I had the ATIS.  They had me do a downwind entry for Runway 27R, which I did, followed by a very nice landing.

Sadly, the delay waiting for the frost to go away messed up my morning, so I'm scrambling a bit now trying to catch up, but that's fine.

That's 0.6 and a great landing worth of free flying.