Flying in the cold from November to April
If it were not for its weather, International Falls, Minnesota, would be no different from any other small town in America. It has a park in the center of town, a two-block-long business district lined with classic brick storefronts, and a local paper mill that employs most of the community's 8,500 residents. What distinguishes International Falls from other communities, however, is that it regularly experiences some of the most severe winter weather in the United States. Temperatures so consistently mark it as the coldest spot in the country that it was the inspiration for "Frostbite Falls" in the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle television cartoon show. And it has been legally granted the right to the title "Icebox of the Nation."
Operating a flying service in a town on the Canadian border where temperatures regularly fall to 30 degrees below zero, wind chills have registered as cold as 96 below, and the average snowfall is more than 100 inches a year would classify as a nightmare for most pilots. But after running the Falls International Airport for the past 45 years, Francis Einarson and his family take the weather in stride.
Einarson, his brother James, and his parents bought the sole fixed-base operation at International Falls in 1948. Today, Einarson Brothers Flying Service is owned and operated by Francis, James, and Francis' two sons, Francis, Jr., and Thor. The operation is not fancy, but it is truly a full-service flight facility. The Einarsons provide aircraft maintenance, tiedown or hangar rental for the 55 aircraft on the field, flight training and charter services, as well as fuel services for both general aviation aircraft and the five Northwest Airlink commuter flights that serve International Falls every day. They also clear the runways after snow or ice storms, operate the fire, crash, and rescue equipment for the airport, run the Hertz car-rental concession, and, until recently, provided medevac support for a nearby hospital.
Because the Einarsons are responsible for so many aspects of the airport's operations, their workdays are long, especially during the winter, and they are on call 24 hours a day. It is not unusual for Francis or one of his four employees to start work at two or three in the morning to make sure the runway is plowed for the first Northwest Airlink departure at 5:30 a.m., and someone must be on duty until at least 10:20 p.m., when the last Airlink flight arrives.
The day-to-day management of the FBO is handled by Francis, James, and Thor, because Francis, Jr., is now employed full time as the chief pilot at Mesaba Airlines. As a result, the three Einarsons have had to develop diverse skills. Francis and Thor are both A&P mechanics, and James has inspection authorization privileges, as well. Although James does not fly anymore, Thor and Francis are both commercial pilots with multiengine instrument ratings. Francis is also a CFII in both land and seaplanes, and he estimates that close to half of his 20,000 total flight hours were spent instructing.
Over the course of those 20,000 hours, Einarson has become somewhat of an expert on flying airplanes in severe winter conditions. The biggest problem in International Falls, he says, is actually not snow or ice, but the cold temperatures. At 20 degrees above zero, cold weather is an uncomfortable inconvenience that may require some engine preheating or some extra clothing. But at 30 degrees below zero, the temperature becomes a serious obstacle that can ground an airplane as quickly as any other winter hazard.
Flying in double-digit sub-zero weather is a whole new ball game, and the Einarsons have had to learn a wide variety of special airplane modifications, preflight procedures, and piloting techniques to keep their airplanes flying throughout the winter. "We've learned a lot of tricks that aren't in any book," Einarson says. "In fact, sometimes you have to do things the book says not to do."
The brothers learned the hard way, for example, that the engine breather tube in a piston engine freezes over easily in extremely cold weather, which can pressurize the crankcase and vent the engine oil overboard. As a result, they now insulate their breather systems and drill a couple of holes in the sides of the tubes, so they can still vent even if the ends freeze.
The Einarsons have also learned to leave the mixture rich and the carburetor heat on when they park an airplane, so they can still start the engine again even if the controls become too stiff to move. In fact, Einarson teaches his students to leave the carburetor heat on for all taxi and takeoff operations until the engine is running at full throttle during winter operations. The problem is not carburetor ice, which rarely occurs in the dry air of sub-zero temperatures, but simply that the normal induction air is often so cold and dense that it will create too lean a fuel mixture for the engine to operate, even with the mixture control set at full rich.
Other recommended practices on Einarson's super-cold list include parking with the airplane's tail into the wind, because he has found that "any aircraft left facing into the wind without a cowling cover for more than 10 minutes won't start," and replacing flush-mounted fuel sump drains with ones that can be physically pulled shut again if they get stuck. Extremely cold weather can also cause ice crystals to form in fuel. To help combat this problem, the Einarsons use only 100LL avgas, which they have found to be less susceptible to ice crystal formations than 80-octane fuel or autogas. They also stock bottles of an isopropyl fuel system dryer and antifreeze additive for any pilots who do experience problems with fuel ice.
The most critical and time-consuming preflight procedure for any pilot in International Falls, however, is preheating the engine. Although many pilots assume that preheating is used primarily to warm the engine oil, that is actually a secondary consideration in extremely cold weather. In sub-zero temperatures, preheating is necessary not only to heat the oil, but also to prevent damage to the cylinders and crankshaft.
A simplified explanation for this problem is that aluminum shrinks and expands at twice the rate of steel, which means it is affected more by changes in temperatures. Because the tolerances for different engine components are generally set at room temperatures, sub-zero conditions can cause an aluminum crankcase to shrink so tightly around the steel crankshaft that there is no room for movement. By the same token, aluminum pistons will expand faster than the steel cylinders that surround them. So if an engine is started when it is still extremely cold, the pistons may cause or sustain damage as they warm up and expand.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the Einarsons spend a lot of time preheating engines. A number of the airplanes that operate in the far north use Tanis heaters, which locals consider the Cadillac of preheating systems. Tanis heaters are permanently installed in an aircraft's engine, requiring only a connection to a 110-volt outlet. For aircraft without built-in heaters, the Einarsons stock a good supply of small electric heating units that they can place inside an engine cowling.
Plugging in your airplane before you leave the airport may seem like an odd procedure, but the same rule also applies to automobiles in International Falls, so people are used to it. In fact, many of the town's public buildings, motels, and offices have numerous outside outlets specifically so people can plug in their car preheating systems.
Even after the airplane is warmed up and started, there are still a number of special precautions and techniques Einarson uses and teaches his students for safe flying in the arctic winter weather. For example, he stocks extra snowmobile suits and heavy, insulated rubber and leather boots, because he insists that his students dress appropriately for the weather. "Most airplane heaters work pretty well until about 0 degrees," Einarson explains, "but below that, it's going to get pretty cold in the cockpit, and you have to be prepared." Being prepared also means checking the emergency locator transmitter operation not only when the manual requires it, but also before every single cross-country flight. In conditions where exposed skin can freeze in a matter of minutes, getting immediate help and being dressed sufficiently warmly can spell the difference between survival and death in the case of a forced landing.
Very cold weather also can affect how an airplane behaves in flight. "Engine management is critical," Einarson says, which means allowing for a richer than normal mixture — and thus higher than normal fuel consumption — making power adjustments very gradually, and keeping power on during the entire descent to keep the engine from getting too cold or quitting. Einarson also has to make sure his students know how to judge power settings by the sound of the engine, because tachometers will sometimes fail or give erroneously high readings in extremely cold temperatures.
Considering the amount of extra effort flying requires in this kind of weather, it might seem that there would be little call for flight instruction in International Falls during the winter months. Some of Einarson's students actually prefer winter, however, because it doesn't conflict with their other recreational activities. "Well, I couldn't learn to fly during the summer," one student explained, "because that's boating season, and I couldn't learn in the fall, because that's hunting season. And I didn't want to wait until spring, so here I am."
Even with all the coping skills they've learned over the past 45 years, the Einarsons still stop short of calling winter flying in International Falls fun. But like the other residents of the Canadian border town, they view the weather as a challenge, and they take pride in their ability to overcome the obstacles it presents. "It's kind of like a Sicily, Alaska, thing," Thor explains, referring to the fictional town in the television series Northern Exposure. "We're kind of a close-knit clan, and there's a lot of pride in people about living here."
Besides, not everyone in International Falls thinks the weather is all that bad. Jim House, who works at the National Weather Service station there, acknowledges that winter temperatures of minus 30 or 40 degrees are not uncommon, but he points out that they can also be as high as 17 degrees above zero. "People forget that when they complain about the weather here," he says.
Lane E. Wallace, AOPA 896621, is an aviation writer and private pilot who has been flying for more than seven years. She owns a 1946 Cessna 120 and is restoring a 1943 Stearman.
Venice, Florida
Sometimes the wind chill hits 60 degrees or so.
BY WILLIAM L. GRUBER
In the days preceding my first visit with Bill Thomas, folks in Florida had been complaining bitterly about the frigid weather. We've had nighttime lows in the 40s and daytime temperatures — heaven forfend — in the mere 60s. These lamentations probably would not elicit sympathy up north, where record lows have transformed everything above Georgia into a giant ice block. Temperatures in the single digits — and double digits below zero — have been the norm, with wind chill factors that would make Old Man Winter himself start thinking about a vacation in Jamaica. In one northern city, an elderly woman is found barely clinging to life — and literally frozen to her kitchen floor. Here in Florida, the hardships of the cold snap are somewhat less severe: Sweaters are a desirable option at the golf course.
Thomas is in shirt-sleeves as he welcomes me into his small office, tucked cozily into the corner of a hangar at Venice Municipal Airport. The office wall is crowded with large trophies, silent testimony to the many laurels won by Thomas as an international aerobatics competitor. These days, he no longer competes but devotes himself instead to the full-time job of teaching others the art and craft of flying aerobatics. On the other side of the wall, his bright-red Pitts S-2B sits in the hangar in that nose-high attitude that always makes Pitts Specials look like they're ready to spring into the air.
After the social preliminaries, I settle into the chair and start to ask Thomas what's special about flying in Florida in the wintertime. "Isn't it obvious?" he asks with a smile that seems to emanate from his clear, blue eyes. "It's just beautiful down here. This is just a marvelous place."
Indeed, for aviators and other species of snowbird, Venice does offer a pleasant migratory refuge in winter. The City of Venice is one of the few on Florida's west coast with no barrier island — it's situated directly on the Gulf of Mexico. Evidence of its allure as a cold-weather haven is the fact that the city's year-round population of 17,000 (not including the surrounding hamlets of South Venice, Laurel, Nokomis, and Osprey) just about doubles in winter. There are several beaches, a long wooden fishing pier, marinas, restaurants, and hotels. The historic downtown has numerous little shops facing a palm-lined boulevard. Nearby Sarasota features museums, theater, concerts, and ballets. Venice is a quiet little town, but it's not a bad place to escape snowdrifts. And for pilots, of course, the jewel in the crown is the airport.
Venice Municipal is situated directly on the water. Take off from Runway 31, and you immediately find yourself cruising over the gulf. Turn left and you can follow the beach down to Fort Myers, Naples, and the Everglades, as Boca Grande, Sanibel, and other places of tropical beauty pass beneath your wing tips. Turn right and follow the beach toward Sarasota, St. Petersburg, Tampa, and points north. Or head inland for Disney World and its suburb, Orlando.
Like dozens of former air bases scattered across the state, Venice Army Air Field came into being during World War II, when the flat landscapes and cooperative weather made Florida an ideal place to train the air armada needed to conquer Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. During the war, squadrons of P-40s, P-39s, P-51s, and P-47s plied the skies above Venice, which then was an isolated town more or less left behind when the Great Depression caused the great Florida land boom to go bust. The town experienced its share of the rapid postwar growth felt all over the state, and in the 1950s, the city bought the airfield from the federal government as surplus property.
Today, the Venice airport leads a double life. In the summertime, when tropical heat turns it into a huge concrete griddle, things are pretty slow. But in the wintertime, there is steady air traffic as seasonal pilot/residents like Thomas take advantage of the pleasant surroundings and almost daily VFR weather. (In the entire month of December, for example, weather observers in the Sarasota/Bradenton International Airport Control Tower recorded a total of 28 *hours* of instrument meteorological conditions.) A successful flight school, Huffman Aviation, which attracts students from across the United States and many foreign countries, does a booming business in the winter months. Business jets are regular visitors, and the Mod Squad shop draws a stream of Mooneys, but the varied mix of traffic — Pitts Specials and Wacos, Decathlons and homebuilts, warbirds and ultralights — shows that pleasure flying is a big part of the winter aviation scene here.
Thomas is no stranger to flying for pleasure. This fact is reflected in the very name of his training programs: Fly for Fun with Bill Thomas. He teaches aerobatics and advanced aerobatics, with a little bit of aerobatics thrown in, too. And, oh yeah, he also teaches a course in emergency maneuver training, which is — you guessed it — aerobatics.
"If I want to get from here to there, I go in an airliner," says Thomas. "I go up in the airplane to have fun."
It's the sort of fun best savored by the kind of highly skilled airman who can practically *will* an airplane to do whatever he wants it to do. Thomas is an archetypal example of just such an experienced stick. At age 70, he can literally fly rings around most pilots half his age. He grew up in aviation at a time when aerobatics was a normal part of flying. Everyone learned spins before their first solo — if you wouldn't fly spins, you didn't become a pilot. Nearly everybody learned loops and rolls. It was a time when airplanes had joysticks and when tailwheel gear really was "conventional."
He started flying in high school, back in Olean, New York (where he now owns a home and bases his school in the warmer months). There, he learned to fly in a J-3 Cub on a grass strip. Soon he got his commercial and instructor certificates, and when war broke out, he found himself teaching Cub flying to prospective Army and Navy aviators in the Civilian Pilot Training Program. "For some reason," he says, "I decided that I wanted to see some more action and fly bigger planes. So I joined the Army Air Corps."
Thomas neglected to tell his Army flight instructors that he already was a pilot — and an instructor himself — so they were quite impressed with Aviation Cadet Thomas' progress as a fledgling flier. He was tearing up the skies in AT-6 Texans when the war ended a week before his graduation, putting a sudden stop to the need for new military pilots. He was discharged without ever having earned his wings.
After the war, he went to college to study business administration and then went to work in his father's grocery business, eventually running the entire chain of 35 Market Basket stores. As a busy manager, he drifted away from flying. But when he went to the American Management Association for business advice, he was struck by the "formula for success" offered by association President Lawrence Appley. "If you want to be happy," Thomas recalls Appley saying, "you find out what you like to do — and you get so good at it that people are willing to pay you for it." It's advice that Thomas lives every day when he climbs into his Pitts.
In the late 1960s, with Appley's words gnawing at him, Thomas went into business with his brother as an aviation entrepreneur. They became the exclusive U.S. importers of new Bucker Jungmeisters, and Thomas headed to Florida to set up a dealership. They also garnered the Southwest Florida Citabria dealership, and although only four of the factory-built Jungmeisters ever were produced, the airplane helped Thomas get back to his lost love, aerobatics. He started teaching aerobatics and began flying aerobatic contests in the Franklin-powered Jungmeister. Despite his best efforts, though, he never seemed to do better than second place. He felt he needed a more capable airplane. A forced landing at Curtis Pitts' home field provided an answer. He first flew a Pitts Special on Christmas Day, 1969. He bought it and began a lifelong romance with the nimble little airplane.
What followed his match-up with the Pitts was a string of aerobatics titles too long to list here. He made the U.S. Aerobatic Team twice, flying in the world championships in France in 1972 and the Soviet Union in 1976. He was in second place in the 1972 competition until he forgot part of his freestyle performance and dropped instantly to thirty- second place. Still, he says, "Just to be there with the rest of them was a great experience."
In 1977, Thomas decided that competition aerobatics was demanding far more time and money than he could afford to devote to it. "I was right up there at the top, and I figured that was a good time to quit."
Since then, he has been following Appley's advice: Teaching aerobatics is what Thomas loves to do, and he is very good at it. I can vouch for this fact from my own brief lesson with Thomas, flying the wonderful Pitts inland from the Venice airport and sampling the pleasures of basic aerobatics. I felt a bit like an aviation cadet myself, with Thomas' voice bellowing at me: "More back-pressure! More back-pressure! More back-pressure!" He is a stern but terribly capable teacher, and it was a privilege to fly with him.
Ironically, the scenic setting presents something of a distraction when you're trying to do some serious flying. Aerobatics may be all fun for Bill Thomas, but for Bill Gruber it's also hard work.
With the gulf shimmering in the background, there's a strong inclination to sit back and take mental snapshots, thus losing track of the rapidly changing flight environment. And my modest aerobatics skills are rusty enough that concentration is pretty important. Still, I'm sure you get over this after the first couple of flights. As soon as I can get enough scratch, I plan to sign up for the standard 10-hour Fly for Fun course to find out for myself.
If Thomas had his way, everybody who flies would take the course or something like it. "I think that all pilots should have to do spins," he says. "And if they don't want to do spins, they shouldn't be pilots.... All pilots should learn to fly some sort of a taildragger. It makes them a much better pilot."
I ask if the high-performance Pitts is an appropriate learning tool for spam-can pilots. "I teach them to fly by the seat of their pants, and they say, 'Well, it doesn't work that way in my Cessna.' Then they go home and fly, and they call me up and say, 'Yes! Yes, it does,' " Thomas says with clear satisfaction. "I enjoy taking someone who is an airplane driver and turning them into an airplane pilot. I spend half of my time teaching people to fly and half my time teaching them aerobatics."
Whatever their skill level or background, it's a sure bet that people leave Thomas' hands as better pilots. And it's equally probable that they had a good time in the process. Many pilots combine their winter vacation with a Fly for Fun course, bringing spouse and kids along to soak up the rays while they soak up the benefits of Thomas' instruction. Pilots travel to Venice from all over the country — and all over the world — to fly with Thomas. Others simply wander over from Huffman Aviation and buy an hour to see what flying a Pitts is like. After that, of course, they're hooked.
After 11,000 flying hours, all but 2,000 of them instructing, Thomas seems to be getting the hang of teaching people to fly. He plans to keep flying as long as he is physically able, having passed his most recent medical with no trouble last month. And he's doing it in the airplane he wants to fly, in the place he wants to be. "It's a marvelous place to fly from," he says. "You take off and head out over that blue- green water of the gulf."
I understand where he's coming from. As I write this, the windows in my little home office are wide open. It's in the upper 70s outside, and the Venice Municipal traffic is maintaining a steady, pleasant drone above my house. On the radio news, they're saying something about "27 below zero in Boston," but they might as well be talking about the surface of the moon. It's summertime outside or, at the very least, spring. This is no time to be cooped up indoors. I think I'll head down to the airport and see what's doing.
William L. Gruber is a former AOPA Pilot staff editor who now resides directly under the Venice Municipal Airport traffic pattern, which he enjoys very much, despite the inconvenience of having to run outside and look every time he hears a radial engine.
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