From the Flight Deck
July 2025
By Marlon Gunderson

Oshkosh Airventure

It's next week! The chapter year peaks with this event. I hope many of you will be able to enjoy it and recharge your enthusiasm for the next year. Look for Jay Schrankler's talk on Friday afternoon 2:30pm in the forum tents. Look for the Anderson's Bamboo Bomber (if the Mag problem is solved) in the warbird show and Paul Rankin's rare Champion Lancer twin in the vintage flybys. Stop by for a visit at the Chapter 54 campsite at 15th and Lindberg where Bill Schanks, Gregg Adler, Vicky Moore, Scott Hanson, Craig Mueller, Dan Theis, and Jay Schrankler will be spending part or all of the week, and Jeff Dale & family nearby. And look for me on the west side of the homebuilt camping area with my Cozy the last half of the week, possibly joined by a nephew visiting from Alaska.

It's Go-Time for the Pancake Breakfast

Less than four weeks out now. We're still short of volunteers so please contact myself or Bob Collins if you or a friend are available but not yet volunteered the morning of August 10th and we'll find a team to put you on.

This fundraiser is what fuels our mission to help young folks get a jump start in aviation by funding summer camp at Air Academy, and if we raise enough, to guarantee a Ray Scholarship award next year by helping pay 25% of it; there is no guarantee we'll continue to get a free Ray Scholarship to award as we have in the past. We hope to double the attendance of both aircraft and customers from 40/400 last year to 80/800 this year to make a bigger funding impact for our youth support mission.

To that end we have posted Flyers at 40 airports in the area, Bob has sent invitations to all EAA chapters within 100 miles, and an EAA Chapter Blast will go out within 2 weeks of the event. And we'll have a regionally targeted Facebook Ad campaign closer to the date to drum up customers.

We need your help! Pick up Flyers from the clubhouse and post them at public places in your community. I went out to post some in Lake Elmo today and was pleased to see that someone beat me to it at the Twin Point Tavern and Hagbergs.

I posted one at the City Community Center and will place one at the Lake Elmo Library when it opens tomorrow. If you live in Woodbury, Bayport, Stillwater, White Bear Lake, Oakdale, or Maplewood, or other community near 21D please look for community spaces where you can put up our Flyer.

Post our Flyer on social media pages that you belong to in your community. I've posted it to the 7300 member FB community group 'Lake Elmo, A place we call home' and to the 4400 member FB 'Midwest Airshow, Fly-In and Flight Club'.

Please spread the news in the online community groups that you belong to in your local communities nearby the Lake Elmo Airport. Remember to comment them a day or two before the event so that they will rise to the top of the group feed to remind the group.

New Chapter Directors & Coordinators Needed

Board Officers and Class I Directors serve two year terms that expire this year. An election at the November chapter meeting will select those to serve the 2026-2027 term. Existing directors and coordinators opting not to serve in those rolls for the next term have created vacancies for Facilities Director, Web/News Editor, and Membership Director. These are all vital and important roles. Please contact me if you would be willing to fill one of these roles for the chapter. We have a great team for you to join!

What I'm Doing For Fun, Part Deux

With doing my Cozy Condition Inspection, some flying, a vacation, and hosting visiting family and a family reunion, I've made little progress on 'amphibisizing' my SkyRaider. I did complete the primary float rigging work but need to now work on nose wheel, rudder, and retract controls.

Preliminary weight measurements show that W&B should be close to center of desired range.

My wife and I visited the Portland, Oregon area for a week's vacation in June, starting with a couple of days in Hood River on the Columbia Gorge. I can only take so many art galleries so I slipped away myself one afternoon to tour the Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum (WAAAM) located in Hood River. What a treat. Hundreds of antique and vintage aircraft and gliders, many rare, all in pristine condition.

Here's a list of their inventory, and here's a collection of photos I took while visiting (click any photo then arrow left or right to rotate through them). The St. Louis YPT-15 Biplane from this collection is a feature article in this month's (July) EAA Sport Aviation magazine.

We discovered an interesting St. Paul connection in the Columbia Gorge area. St. Paul tycoon JJ Hill's daughter Mary's husband built a mansion in the middle of nowhere at the arid east end of the Columbia Gorge, ten miles above the dam on the Columbia River at 'The Dalles'. Mary only lasted 6 months in the Pacific NW before declaring it unfit for her and moving back to St.Paul, separating permanently from her husband who stayed behind. Her husband turned the mansion into a massive museum, now called the MaryHill museum, with an eclectic/odd collection of art and artifacts. 3 miles away on a hilltop above the Columbia River he built a full size replica of the complete original Stonehenge monument. The local stone wasn't suitable for such use so he built it with reinforced concrete finished to resemble stone. I snapped this photo of Concretehenge with the Columbia River and Mt. Hood in the distance:

We also visited some longtime friends who relocated to Canby, Oregon just a couple of years ago to a horse ranch there. Being a pilot, they told me an odd story about a detective who stopped by their ranch shortly after they had moved in. The sheriff's dept. was resurrecting a cold case from 2007 about a pilot that went missing after departing the Aurora airport which is only 5 miles from their ranch. About half of their ranch is virtually inaccessible due areas of swamp or dense Cedar and Douglas Pine forest with thick underbrush. The detective was following up on a tip that had come in years ago from a neighbor who overheard a conversation between the former owner of the ranch and another neighbor at a garage sale on the same day that the airplane disappeared. The two neighbors were overheard to say they had both heard a loud 'boom' early that morning, which happened to be the day that the pilot disappeared, and the former owner said he went outside to see if he could tell where or what caused the noise but everything was then still and quiet; neither had reported anything or learned of any cause for the noise. Our friends gave the detective permission to search their property. A few weeks after the detective visited, he followed up to say that a grid search was abandoned after volunteers were attacked by ground bees, and their funding had dried up so they couldn't pursue the case after all. Our friends speculated maybe the pilot was lining up to land at the airport but had a problem and went down somewhere on their inaccessible property.

That was all the information they had on the incident. Armed with the year of the incident, I was able to find a description of the incident and the subsequent 10 day unsuccessful 130 flight search that was ultimately unsuccessful and abandoned. The pilot was Cortland Mumford, a 65 year old just retired airline pilot who was taking his first familiarization flight in a brand new bright yellow Cubcrafters Sport Cub N222TB christened 'Tweety Bird'. I found this PNW Missing Person podcast from last year describing the case in detail (<5 minutes if you skip the first 2:20 of unrelated content). The podcast relates the NTSB's conclusion of what 3 areas they think most likely hold the missing aircraft but with no rationale why these areas are likely, despite all three areas being significant distances away. Our friend's ranch is not in these 3 areas. I looked up the wind direction and weather that day, and a light northerly wind would have Tweety Bird using runway 35 with a pattern to the west of Aurora rather than over our friends farm, which at 5 miles east wasn't really under the pattern or on an approach for either runway 35 or 17. What is clear from the geography around Aurora however is that there are rivers and small towns in most directions except to the southeast of Aurora (and Canby) which is largely a farming area with lots of flat open fields. I suspect Cort flew SE to be over open fields while he climbed to altitude to test slow flight and stalls. If he had an engine failure and tried to glide to an open field just north of our friends property, there is a grove of 100' tall Douglas Firs on rising terrain on approach to that field that could have snagged him if he came up short. On my next visit to Canby, I'll be going with a camera platform drone. I'll also try float down 'Bear Creek' in a kayak which runs through the swampy part of their inaccessible property. One day, Cort and Tweety Bird will be found.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to seeing you all at the pancake breakfast or the August 18th chapter BBQ, if not before then in Oshkosh Wisconsin!

Marlon Gunderson