60 seconds over the St. Croix

Every summer, the recreations of the Nina and Pinta, two of the planes in Cristopher Columbus' arsenal, sail up the Mississippi and St. Croix River to Hudson, Wis. Why, I do not know but it seemed like a good chance to take a look from the air.

They're small. Really small. So small they're not that interesting from the air.

But RV-7A's are.

Switch to HD settings are you'll miss the darn ships.

Hello, down there!

I think more than anything else, the best part about flying is picking out a rural airport on the sectional map, and then flying there just to see who's there. So this evening I flew to Boyceville, WI., (3T3) about 45 air miles from South St. Paul. It was a beautiful evening for a flight, and I picked up Mpls Approach on the way to help navigate around parachutists in Baldwin.

And, surprise, there was a plane in the pattern at this airport with a postage stamp-size-wide runway. A man was giving his grandson rides in a Cessna 150.

There's no taxiway there so he said he'd go ahead and land. Originally he was going to leave the pattern and let me in, which is typical Wisconsin small-airport hospitality, I've found. But I waved him on in and he landed then pulled off into the grass and invited me to come on down. He said later that he wanted to sit with his grandson and watch me land.

I landed and then we both turned and back-taxied to the hangar area where I got out to stretch my legs.

Greg was his name and he really liked my airplane.

He showed me his airplane, which was a doll, too, and pointed out the tires, which showed no tread.



"I flew it all last summer," he said. "I teach and I had a young man from Alaska here wanting to earn as many ratings as he could."

The student earned his private pilot license, went back to Alaska (Wasilla, for the record) and is a checkride away from having his instrument rating.

He said he bought his plane from his son, who works for Compass Airlines. I said that's a well-worn route to the major airlines and told him about several friends who've gone that way, as if I was telling him something he didn't already know.

He knew.

"Want to see my last flight" and he pulled out his iPhone and showed me a picture of a globe with a big line. He had flown a few days ago from Detroit to Shanghai on a route that took him directly over the North Pole.

He's a captain for Delta, flying 747s internationally.

He showed me his pictures of the North Pole ice sheet and told me about flying that route, on which his only emergency runway would've been Norway, which you wouldn't think would be sort of on the way to Shanghai by way of the North Pole, but then again we think of the world in up, down, left, right directions.



He said he was surprised to find that enroute and very near the exact North Pole, there's a base of some sort. "I think it's the Brits," he guessed.

"Could you land there?" I asked, wondering just how long a runway has to be to handle a 747.

"I could if I had to," he said of the 9,000 foot runway he saw.

He pointed out something else in the photos he took. From the vantage point of the front seat of a 747, he saw the curvature of the earth.

"Imagine how few who've ever walked this planet have seen any of this?" I said, repeating what my RV flying pal, Brad, had said to me as we climbed above some scattered clouds on the way home from Oshkosh a few years ago.

I've been talking to people I didn't know for years as part of my day job (I found "Radar O'Reilly" in a Denver McDonald's some years ago) and it never disappoints me.

The conversation was fascinating and we made plans to get together at some point this summer so he could also enjoy the view from an RV-7A. I've never flown a 747, but he's never flown an RV-7A, he said.

As for the grandson, he was unimpressed, refusing all offers to sit in my plane, or even look at it.

"I like my grandfather's plane better," he said. Seven-year-olds don't yet realize yet that an airplane can't sense betrayal.

I walked back to the spurned machine for the ride into a setting sun.

"Next time you come," the kid said, "I'm still not going to sit in your plane."

"Fair enough, kid," I thought to myself. "You can never go wrong with grandpa anyway."

Behind the scenes of the AOPA giveaway

In today's AOPA Live (watch it here), there were details of last Sunday's giveaway that I wasn't aware of, specifically that some of the AOPA people were landing in Litchfield as we took off, which suggests that we were just minutes away early on from blowing the whole operation, especially if Steve Lagergren's wife had arrived a few minutes earlier.




Why did we head for Hutchinson instead of Winsted? Let me explain.

The whole goal of the effort was to get Steve to Winsted, from which we could launch for home and allow Tom Horne, flying the Debonair to catch up to us.

But there was nothing going on in Winsted and, to make matters worse, Steve indicated early when we met that Jim Weckman in Hutchinson (who also has the Waco project in Winsted) and his RV-9A were going to come over to Litchfield, a move that would have put us solidly on the ground in Litchfield for most of the afternoon, ruining the surprise.

So I quickly suggested, "hey, let's fly over to Hutchinson to see Jim instead and then go over to Winsted."

I figured, "let's just get OUT of Litchfield and play it by ear."

Fortunately, when we jumped out of Steve's plane in Hutchinson, Steve headed off to talk to one of my other RV pals, which allowed me time to meet Jim and explain what we were up to, enlisting his help getting us all over to Winsted and setting the final rendezvous in motion.

How I helped give a guy an airplane

The mission was clear: Quickly get to know a Litchfield resident I'd never met before, figure out a way to get into the passenger seat of his airplane on one particular Sunday when he might not be interested in flying and coordinate an air rendezvous with a refurbished 1963 Debonair airplane at which time Steve Lagergren, 43, would be told he had won the airplane.

The request came from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), the largest association of general aviation pilots, of which Lagergren and I are both members.

Every year the AOPA rescues a down-on-its-luck airplane and extensively overhauls it over the course of a year and then awards it to one of its members. But we didn't want a run-of-the-mill surprise; we wanted to do something different. We wanted him to find out while he was flying his small airplane.

I didn't really have an idea how to pull off an air-to-air surprise, but then I found that Lagergren built his own airplane -- an RV-7, the same model I built.

Then I enlisted these people in the ruse -- a small group of pilots of planes each built themselves.



Out of the blue, I called Lagergren and told him our group throws a dart at a map of Minnesota each week, visits the airport and treats the people we find there to lunch. Lagergren, an engineer at Hutchinson Technology, warmed to the idea quickly and even suggested a short hop over to Winsted, home of an active parachuting squadron.

"Yahtzee!" I thought. While we're at Winsted, the giveaway elves could swoop into his home airport in Litchfield.

But how to get into his passenger seat, from where I could shoot video and capture the moment of his surprise?

I told him that I'm not comfortable with landing an airplane on a grass strip (which I'm not) and since Winsted is a grass runway, I could fly with him instead.

The co-conspirators launched out of Fleming Field in South St. Paul on Sunday morning at 10, about an hour after the AOPA crowd landed from an early morning flight from Fredrick, Maryland to Anoka, where they would wait for me to tell them we'd left the airport in Litchfield to fly over to Winsted and watch parachutists jump out of perfectly fine airplanes. Then they'd swoop in and transform the small airport into a real air show.

When our crew of six small planes landed at Litchfield, it was clear Lagergren was still puzzled by our appearance. "How did you get my name?" he said. An expert liar, I told him we merely checked the FAA aviation database to see if there are homebuilt-airplanes on the airports we visit.

Then he noted that there was no parachute jumping at Winsted today because of the weather, but mentioned he had homebuilding friend in Hutchinson. With the battle plan already not surviving its first contact with the enemy, we piled in the planes -- I in the passenger seat of Lagergren's plane -- and headed to Hutchinson.

Once we were off the ground, we sent a signal to Anoka to let everyone know to move in to Litchfield, and and AOPA president Mark Baker, a Minnesota native, called Lagergren's wife, so that the whole family could be at the airport for the moment of our return.

Here's what was going on behind the scenes while we were trying to pull this off:




In Hutchinson, I took Lagergren's friend aside and told him what we were up to, and enlisted yet another co-conspirator, which worked out well because he had an airplane project in Winsted, and I'd previously arranged with the pilot of the airplane to be given away to rendezvous between Winsted and Litchfield. He would circle the field in Winsted and meet up with us when we departed. That plan would only work if we actually were in Winsted.

We again jumped in our planes and headed to Winsted. This might work, yet.

We visited a beautiful restoration of an old Waco...



Then departed Winsted. I could see the giveaway-airplane circling well off in the distance. But we had a problem. Lagergren's plane was outracing the Debonair. And, besides, it's very hard to spot -- let alone fly alongside -- another airplane.

Here's the entire video from the moment at which Horne asks Lagergren to slow down, with Lagergren believing that the person who was calling him was one of our South St. Paul co-conspirators. It gave me the opportunity to quickly come up with even more lies.



The AOPA website picks up the story from there.

"I'm Mark Baker from AOPA and I'm here to present you with your new airplane," he said on the multicom frequency, 122.9 MHz.

"Yeah, that's a good one," Lagergren replied, dismissing the statement as a joke.

"It's also true."

There was a long pause before Lagergren keyed the microphone again.

"Unbelievable—I love that airplane!" he said as reality sunk in. I've got to calm down a little bit to land. Oh my gosh."

"It was a total surprise," said Lagergren, 43. "There were a few things going on that seemed unusual in retrospect, but I never suspected this."

The Lagergren family—wife Dawn and daughters Nora, 12, and Holly, 10—was listening to the exchange on the radio base station at the Litchfield airport, and the girls giggled as they heard their dad figure out the secret they had learned that morning. (Baker had called Dawn Lagergren at 9:35 a.m. to tell her the good news and invite her and her daughters to be at the airport when the airplane was awarded. They also brought about a dozen friends to see the handover.)

"It was a total surprise," said Lagergren, 43. "There were a few things going on that seemed unusual in retrospect, but I never suspected this."

Frankly, I was worried in the planning that we had two problems: (a) Steve is an engineer and (b) Steve is a Minnesotan. The chances of a big reaction were slim. But he didn't disappoint us and once on the ground, Lagergren was reunited with his family, got the keys to a new airplane and enjoyed an airshow put together by AOPA.


A more produced video will be made available on the AOPA website later this week.