Landing on snow-covered grass

Yesterday we flew to nearby Amana (C11) to show my sister Iowa's most
popular tourist attraction, the Amana Colonies. Amana has a grass
strip -- one of the nicest in the Midwest.

We had received an inch of snow the night before -- the best kind of
snow, too, since it only "stuck' to the grass. (Any snow you don't
have to shovel is "good" snow.) Surprisingly, the temperature was
still below freezing at noon, so we would be landing on snow-covered
grass -- a rare challenge.

Mary purposefully flew a "747 pattern" to give us a nice, long,
stabilized approach. The runway at Amana is relatively short (2300
feet), and with braking action expected to be virtually nil on the
snowy grass, she wanted to touch down at minimum forward speed. This
meant three-notches of flaps, something we don't normally use in the
Pathfinder. It also meant dragging Atlas in somewhat behind the power
curve -- another tactic we normally avoid.

There are "square ponds" (waste water breathers) just off the arrival
end of Rwy 26, along with some trees -- just to make it more fun.
It's a "sporting" approach that we enjoy making a dozen or more times
per year -- but this was the first time we'd ever attempted it on
snow.

Mary skimmed over the ponds, jousting with a mild left cross wind.
She made a perfect touchdown on the sod, and rolled quickly to a
stop. The grass was a bit long, and the ground wasn't frozen, so the
added drag slowed us quickly -- one big advantage to the first snow of
the year. (Later in the year the sod will be like iron, frozen to a
depth of several feet.)

After enjoying a marvelous afternoon in Amana (their "Prelude to
Christmas" activities are always traditional and fun, and the food is
the best) it was my turn to fly us home. During preflight I
discovered that Mary had accidentally parked Atlas with the right
wheel up against a tie-down tire (hard to see in the snow), so that it
would act just like a wheel chock. Worse, the soft sod had allowed
the plane to sink in just enough so that Mary and I couldn't push it
back -- so we unloaded my sister and daughter so that they could give
us a hand.

With the four of us pushing, we were able to break Atlas free and push
him back about four feet -- enough so that I could clear the tire.
Start up was normal, and, as expected, back-taxiing on the soft, snowy
grass took considerably more power than normal. I utiliized the
"Sylvania Swing" (accelerating *away* from the direction of departure
and swinging it around while applying full throttle -- a short-field
technique that we learned at Sylvania Field in Wisconsin that can buy
you an extra several hundred feet of runway) to get off the short
field, and used classic soft-field technique to get the nose wheel out
of the snow. The cold air and Atlas' 235 horsepower did the rest, and
we climbed strongly in the cold, clear air.

After all that, landing on Iowa City's long, wide runways seemed
pretty tame...

;-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"