M6 Was AWESOME- Thanks COPA/Cirrus

The last 10 days have been super hectic with all the fun in Duluth, my dash back across the country with Tony, packing for Del Mar and then driving here. I am finally in Del Mar, CA. (here is the view from my window)

With some peace and quiet I plan to catch up on my summer blog. My first update is on my experiences in Duluth, more to follow in the next week as I get my "relax" on good and tight.






M6 was the best yet.
After dodging a few storm cells on the way up (no big deal with NEXRAD on board), I arrived in Duluth for the COPA event (M6). This was my 5th Migration and probably the best yet for me. I met up with lots of COPA friends including Sanjay, Rick, Mike, Curt, and Jim, and made a lot of new ones. I also ran into someone I worked with 30 years ago at Intel (Steve Dominick). Isn't it a small world. Not sure how many planes came this year, but you can see for yourself, its a lot.

Rather than relay all the details, here, for anyone interested, I will provide a couple of links. Fellow COPA member Gil Williamson put up some pictures and captions on his website. Just click here if you want to take a look. (since I wrote this Gil has attended the Dayton Airshow, so you need to scroll down and move to the second page to find the pictures.

Just added today- Aero News Video about the COPA Migration. Its about 8 minutes but check out my 5 seconds of fame at the 3:43 mark




One of the other great improvements this year was the publication of the Migration Daily News. I put up the files on this website for anyone to read. I tried using a new on-line program called Scribd to allow easier viewing. [note: sometimes it takes a few seconds to download, be patient] Let me know what you think. If you want to download the files, click the Scribd logo and then download. Use the + sign to make it larger. I think this will be great for putting things on my class website for parents to read.

For those that don't want to delve into the details, here is my "15 minutes of fame" picture in Saturday's Daily Update. No surprise, the picture is of me standing in line for some food. Eating fish and shrimp while walking around at the Duluth Aquarium was sure a bit weird, although tasty. It was a nice change from the trains at all the previous events.

My best memories from this year's Migration were Rod Machado's great speeches and just having the chance to "shmooz" with a bunch of great people. Of course being across the street from Dairy Queen didn't hurt either. I also had a chance to see "the -jet" in its hanger as they were doing some maintenance, as they prepared it for Oshkosh. Thoughts of purchase are still dancing through my head, if someone can get the stock market to go up instead of down, I might be tempted. For now, its just drool and watch.

Duluth put on a great weather show with nice days mixed in with a wonderful lightening storm on Friday night- what a show. As always, everyone in Duluth was nice, and the people at Currus, IOLS and Monarch Aviation were all wonderful. Thanks to all the hard working volunteers of COPA that put this event together. I'll certainly be back next year.