September 2022 Meeting and Triple Tree!

Alex Nelon

Oct 2, 2022 • 4 min read

What a great month for flying here in Western NC! Well, after the first Saturday, anyway. We like to run over to Morristown TN for EAA 1494's First Saturday breakfast but mother nature intervened for most of us and the morning fog in and around the mountains was just too much ... spring and summer have a way of tricking us like that.

But ... there was a promise of adventure!

We were treated to a terrific regular monthly meeting program by Member Sid Tolchin. Sid helped build a LongEZ in 1987 ...

Gillespie Field, San Diego: Sid taxis out for the first flight of LongEZ N12ET, April 1987

... and promptly took some time off from his day job as a Neurosurgeon to make a house call using the airplane for transportation. This is where the story gets really interesting. The airplane had just had its Phase I hours flown off, Sid and the airplane were in southern California and the patient was in Ireland!

Let's back up a bit. Sid (to us) is Dr. Sidney Tolchin, a retired Neurosurgeon and past President of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. A long time pilot, Sid used Cessna 210s to travel to his many speaking and professional engagements and flew a VariEZE several years before embarking on the LongEZ project with a friend.

Fast forward to 1987. Sid had removed a brain tumor from a patient from Ireland in a marathon, 18 hour operation and a checkup was due. A flashbulb went off and Sid decided to give the LongEZ a real shakedown by combining the follow up call on his patient with a trip across the North Atlantic Ocean!

The Great Circle route from San Diego to Shannon, Ireland.

You don't just kick the tires and hop in the old zoomer for a trip across the ocean. This, obviously, takes some planning. For one thing, there's a lot of water between fuel stops .. cold water .. so there are supplies, a raft, survival gear, and a few other things to consider.

This is Sid, stuffing the LongEZ with necessities for the trip home from Ireland. The same was true for the trip over, although the raft and polar survival gear weren't required for departure from southern California; those were added as the oceanic part of the trip loomed large.

As it happened, Sid had some friends who wanted to fly their Cessna 182 around Europe so they joined forces and began their journey together.

The paperwork is quite complicated. Aside from flight plans like these there are permits to obtain, arrangements for customs, immigration and quarantine and services along the way.

The intrepid aviators decided to do the first part of their trip over the relatively safe route across the U.S. to Boston, then north to their jumping off point at Goose Bay, Labrador, in the Canadian Maritime Provinces. So far, so good. Then that mischievous Leprechaun, Murphy, had some fun.

More about Sid's trip in another post. Suffice to write that Sid and his friends made it home again after their North Atlantic adventure and had enough tales to tell to last a lifetime!

Triple Tree Aerodrome in South Carolina is a pilot's fly-in. The old fashioned kind where you don't have to negotiate vendor tables full of ricky-ticky trinkets to mix and mingle with your friends. There's food, there are airplanes and the best people in the world: People just like us!

We saw well-behaved kids of all ages having fun at Triple Tree; dogs on their leashes, great airplanes and perfect weather for once!

There are two airplanes new to the members: Matt Holsopple bought into a Mooney which is kept at Greenville (SC) Downtown Airport and Angelo Zollo picked up a Cygnet amphibian in New England which he has in Hendersonville.

Angelo's Cygnet, waiting for pilot training and endorsements

October 11th's meeting is coming up: Steve Murray on Ignition systems, both Electronic and Magneto, Electronic Fuel Injection and electronic monitoring systems. With fuel prices as they are, these new systems dramatically improve the cost of operating our airplanes.

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