This morning I flew up to Necedah to have breakfast with the ladies.
Our family has a house on one of those weird man-made ponds southwest of Castle Rock Lake. Allie and Danny take the girls there throughout the summer so they can experience “lake life” as Allie and I did when we were kids. It’s not the rural wooded lake country environment that we grew up with, it has more of a suburban, prefabricated, HOA-encumbered feel to it, but water is water and kids wouldn’t notice any of that as downside.
Also, the drive to Castle Rock is four hours shorter than the drive to Wascott. Kids would notice that as upside–or at least the adults riding with them would.
This being the week leading up to Independence Day, the family spent the week at Castle Rock. I didn’t, I had to work, but I flew up today to have breakfast with them in Necedah.
It was a nice morning to fly. I left relatively early, while the air was still stable, and I don’t recall feeling a single bump. There was a slight headwind but it’s such a short hop that it only took half an hour from takeoff at Sauk Prairie Airport to landing at Necedah Airport, even accounting for a little maneuvering over the neighborhood to signal to the others that it was time to load up the car and head into town.
The house is under the Volk airspace complex that covers much of the middle third of Wisconsin and is only a few miles outside of the airspace of Volk Field, so flying through and maneuvering isn’t always advisable, but today the military set the floor of its exercises at 6,000 feet, making it easy to sneak under and do a quick three-sixty overhead.
Immediately after passing over the house I made a descent to land in Necedah. The airport is really close as the crow flies. An airport guy in a pickup truck watched me land and rolled up to talk after I parked. I was in a time crunch, had to get my bike unpacked and pedal myself to Tourist Trap Cafe to meet the others for breakfast, so I wasn’t very sociable.
You want to be friendly with these guys, it’s great to know they’re around and on the lookout in case something goes wrong, but you don’t always have as much time for niceties as you wish you had.
I signed the airport guest book and pedaled off into the increasing mid-morning heat to meet the others at the restaurant. Which was closed. I don’t know whether it was closed for the day because it was Wednesday or closed permanently because it was for sale. But it was closed.
After a quick search for other restaurants in Necedah–there are none–we came up with Plan B and grabbed Kwik Trip breakfast and carried it to the pavilion at Old Mill Park. With a playground and a pond and dock to occupy us, the experience there was probably better than what it would’ve been at the restaurant anyway.
There is a swimming area with a sandy beach and a diving platform at the park but the water is swampy. It doesn’t look like a nice place to swim. We weren’t dressed for swimming regardless. We stood on the dock and fed bits of breakfast sausage to the fish and watched several turtles float by on a bog.
After breakfast the others returned home and I headed back to the airport. It’s only a few blocks from the park. I flew back to Madison with a few Wisconsin Air National Guard F-35s that had been working in the Volk practice areas. We’d heard them roaring around above us while we were eating breakfast. They landed in Madison a few minutes behind me.
I dropped off the plane and drove home, picked up Bitsy, and headed back to Castle Rock to sit on the beach for the rest of the day. I watched the ladies swim and dive and play on float toys. We paddled our kayaks all around the pond.
We played a game where you throw balls into holes in the sand. It’s sort of a combination of skee-ball and horseshoes. At the end of each round you total up each team’s score, subtract the losing team’s score from the winning team’s score, and the winning team scores the delta and the losing team scores nothing. The girls didn’t like that at all. They smelled a rat. “Hey, I scored three points, why do I get zero?” “Hey, I scored five points, why do I only get two?”
We played and fought over math until eventually Emmy and Caelynn were first to fifteen points, beating Beanie and me by one point. Beanie and I wished that we had won, but we realized that we’d had so much fun on a hot summer day with all of the people we love that we were happy even in defeat.
We will crush them next time.
Bitsy had her own thing going on as per usual. She played fetch with all the people. All the people in our family, all the people in the neighbors’ families, and all the people in all of the families that happened to boat or walk or swim by. She swam across the pond at least a couple times as she spotted new targets. She takes her show wherever it needs to go.
I was told that after we left some of the neighbor kids played a game with a character named “Bitsy Dog” in it. She has that effect on people. I have no idea whether Bitsy Dog was the hero or the villain. It could go either way.
Fool me a hundred times, shame on me
I placed my trust in Google Maps on our way home. It had gotten us here on a sensible route, surely it would get us home on a sensible route. It’s just the reverse, right?
Always verify. You may get good routes trip after trip for months, but never let your guard down. It’s going to throw one of these at you if you do.
What did I learn about flying?
The runway structure and markings at Necedah Airport are puzzling. It has stopways (rather than displaced thresholds) at either end reducing its usable length to 2,721 feet. I’d estimate the physical length of the runway to be around 3,300 feet without these truncations.
It’s common to see displaced thresholds on runways butted up against roads, trees, or structures such as this one. They disallow landing on the portion of the runway to which a normal ~3° glide path would not be clear of obstacles, while allowing takeoff from it, because obstacles in front of you on landing can hurt you but obstacles behind you on takeoff cannot.
But these aren’t displaced thresholds, they’re stopways–they’re painted with yellow chevrons rather than white arrows and there is no declared distance information associated with them. You can’t use them for landing or for takeoff (except as overrun if you abort.) To further confuse the issue, there are turnaround keyholes on both of them and a taxiway leading to one. These aren’t things you normally see and they don’t make sense for a piece of pavement that is theoretically only usable during an aborted takeoff.
It’s clear what happened here: the runway was paved to a certain length, some time later it was deemed to be too close to the roads on either end, and it was subsequently “moved” clear of the roads via runway markings. This happens all the time. But why they chose the markings they did is a mystery to me.
This is not an insignificant detail. If these areas were identified as displaced thresholds, you’d have, say, 3,000 feet rather than 2,721 feet to accelerate, get airborne, and climb. There are conditions where that might change a go/no-go decision.
Plus, in an aborted takeoff situation, every foot helps. Why am I forced to start my takeoff roll with 300 feet of runway behind me? Obscure rule? Mistake of history? I don’t know.
Appendices
- Photos
- Track Logs
- Airport Amenities
- Kitchen: small refrigerator, microwave, toaster oven.
- Refreshments: chips, soda, water with a donation jar.
- Transportation: none, but close to town.
- WiFi: none (tethering to AT&T network was good enough.)