Chicago to Poland airplane delivery – day 1

I delivered a Mooney Acclaim from Chicago to Poland last week. I was accompanied by one of the pilots for the company that purchased the airplane. We had several interesting experiences during the trip, so I’ll do separate posts on each day of the trip.

Day 1 was supposed to be a fairly easy day: Aurora (KARR) to Goose Bay (CYYR) with fuel stops in Dunkirk (KDKK) and Bangor (KBGR).

Day 1: karr - kdkk - kbgr - cyyr

Map courtesy of Great Circle Mapper (click on map to see full size).

We left Chicago in IMC but flew into clear skies about an hour before landing at DKK. We fueled up and were ready to leave again 15 minutes later… only to notice a huge flat spot on the RH main as I walked up to the airplane. Later we found out this was a known squawk but somehow got missed before our departure in Chicago, and I missed it on the preflight as well.

Being Saturday afternoon did not help us at that point, but Lou at Dunkirk Aviation was kind enough to open the maintenance shop for us and a bit later we were on our way to Bangor with a new RH main.

Changing right main tire at KDKK

After KDKK we had some good tailwinds so we took the Mooney up to FL190. In Bangor we did the eApis manifest, Canpass, flight plan to Goose and grabbed a sandwich at the terminal. Taking off out of Bangor we ran into a small frontal system near the US – Canada border and had to use some of our TKS fluid, something I had preferred not to do this early in the trip.

We finally made it to our hotel at Goose around 1:00 am local time.