Wendell Folks Alaska Trip - Page 1.

July 20, 2007:  The first day began with rain in the Chattanooga area as seen below.  This photo was taken with Terry's camera while crossing the junction of Interstate 75 and US 41 at exit 345.  The junction is directly below the airplane and not in this photo.  The view is looking north with the CSX railroad coming in from the bottom center of the photo and curving toward the gap near Ringgold, Georgia.  This location is about 10 miles East of Wendell's home field.  US 41 comes into the photo near the bottom right roughly parallel to the railroad.  Georgia highway 2 is coming in from the right side below the strut to join with US 41 as the highway turns west toward the gap.

This map shows the approximate route of flight from Wendell's strip to US41/I-75 shown in the photo above.

This photo was snapped at 8:02 AM not too long after the above photo.  The route of flight is EAST to get around an approaching rain storm into VFR conditions ahead.

This photo from Terry's camera focused on the windshield, giving a slightly different view of the rain in front of the airplane.  When I got the CD-ROM with all of Terry's photos on it, the date and time of all the photos were the same.  He had never set the clock in the camera.  More about that later.

For you map fans out there, here is an idea of where the flight route began.   Unfortunately, the GPS only stores 10,000 data points in the ground track memory.  The early part of the ground track was over-written when the GPS was used in the Anchorage area for ground navigation.  Wendell guided me with a verbal description to create this map segment for the flight path around the rain storms.   The RED track is hand drawn, while the BLUE track is the beginning of the actual GPS ground track. 

Here is a "big map" of the complete trip.  It shows each day's flights in different colored GPS ground tracks.  I will also be zooming in on the GPS ground tracks and providing additional maps where they may add some understanding to the various photos seen in these pages.

This photo was taken at 8:31 AM.  The Tennessee River and the town of Rockwood are ahead under the cloud deck below.  How do I know that?  I found a way to download the GPS ground track data points into a spread sheet file.  It shows the latitude and longitude for each data point in the ground track.  It also includes a date and time stamp for each data point, along with speed, and altitude.  I was able to correlate the photos to the map locations by comparing the data in the GPS data file with the time stamps on the photos.

Blue sky is approaching.  This photo was taken at 8:53 AM about 10 miles NW of Crossville, Tennessee and shows clearing weather ahead as seen earlier that morning on weather radar.   Wendell has his Garmin 396 with the Nexrad radar updates to guide them around the rain showers.  So far, the trip has been around or between cloud layers without the need to file IFR.  At this point the airplane is only 88 miles from home, but the flight path to get here was around 125 miles of detours to the EAST before turning on course toward the northwest.  The headwinds at this point are reducing the ground speed to about 125 MPH.  Earlier the GPS ground speed was down around 87 MPH.

The closer they get to the end of the rainy weather, the better the sky begins to look ahead.