jrl767

you have to pay to get into North Dakota? one of my ROTC classmates (may have been a year before or after) was assigned as a Minuteman combat crew member at MOT ... he had a roll-the-eyes reaction: "Why not Minot?"

GagaPilot

I have to respectfully disagree in that we if do not travel, airlines will see no reason to restore service and these cancellations will sadly continue for much longer than necessary. The more demand they see, the sooner we get to the other side.

As someone mentioned earlier about smaller airports, I have seen that myself recently. Last week I travelled to TLH. During “normal” times DL usually had a minimum of 6 flights per day. Now, they have reduced the schedule to 2 (a morning and evening). On the day of my travel the morning flight cancelled (luckily I was on the evening so was not impacted). My return is next week and there is a morning and afternoon departure. I’m on the afternoon departure and hoping it does not cancel as it appears to be booked more heavily than the morning. But, I will be monitoring frequently in the chance it does, to switch to the morning. I think for those of us traveling right now we should check our flights a minimum of twice a day in the week leading up to travel just to be safe.

MSPeconomist

Autocorrect strikes again, but I assume that there's indeed a fare to enter the fair. Otherwise it just wouldn't be fair at all.

Some of the missile silos look awfully isolated; they're scattered over the landscape. There's at least one that's maintained as a historic site. I went down to see the living quarters and equipment, which was very interesting. It seemed like a time warp from around 1960.

ATOBTTR

Which was done on purpose so that one incoming missile couldn't take them all out. The missiles are spread all over the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states (our missile bases are F.E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, WY, Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls, MT, and Minot AFB in ND). But the crews are often flown out to the missile sites via helo. Many of the silos are often in the middle of someone's farmland too. And some of the farmers are known, not in negative way, to refer to them as "their missiles".

There were a ton of SAC bases, particularly for B-52s, all over the country during the height of the Cold War. The B-52s were spread out across multiple bases for a similar reason that the missiles are spread so far apart. After the Cold War, B-52 ops have been consolidated to Minot AFB and Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, LA. Two reasons not to be a B-52 crew member. Many of the bases are still active in some capacity and have had their mission reset (e.g: Fairchild AFB in Spokane is now a KC-135 base - it was a B-52 base during and just after the Cold War). Others have been completely shut down or are used in other civilian capacities but not necessarily militarily anymore though you can sometimes still see remnants of the base via Google Maps, such as the Christmas tree alert ramps near the runways.

jrl767

Marquette (MQT) uses the former K.I. Sawyer AFB ... I had a forced RON there in 2007 when I was attempting a transcontinental turboprop run; MQT-MSP cancelled due to thunderstorms, and I spent the night in the Red Fox Inn (the former VOQ), where my family had stayed in 1966 while on a road trip from DC -- visited my parents' aunts and uncles in Chicago; then headed home via the Upper Peninsula (spent the next night at Kincheloe AFB), North Bay, Ottawa, and relatives in the Morristown NJ area

ATOBTTR

I'm sure you did too on your programs but I had plenty of visits to Moses Lake, another former Cold War B-52 base, while on KC-46. With flying out of BFI, if we were doing anything heavy weight, we often had to hop over to Moses Lake first to gas up to heavy/max weight since the runway at BFI wasn't long enough to permit the heavy weight takeoff while Moses Lake had more than ample runway lengths. Moses Lake also permitted other maneuvers you couldn't do in the far busier Seattle airspace. And it wasn't uncommon to see C-17s from McChord also flying around Moses Lake to do touch-n-go's and other training that was easier to do in less crowded airspace.

jrl767

it's been a VERY long time since I was last at the former Larson AFB at MWH ("Moses Water Hole") ... in the early to mid 1980s JAL had a crew training base there, and it wasn't at all unusual to see one of their 747s in the pattern

Boeing Flight Test also uses the Glasgow Industrial Airpark (formerly Glasgow AFB, also a SAC base), about 15 miles north of the namesake town in northeast Montana ... I spent three weeks there in the fall of 1980 with the 767 engine test program (a PW JT9D-7R4 installed in the # 2 position on RA001, the first 747), and another week in early 1981 with the 757 Rolls-Royce RB.211 test program ... Mrs767 and I drove through the town on U.S. 2 in June 2017 on our DC-to-Seattle trip, and the motel where most of the test support team stayed looked remarkably unchanged


the little coffee shop across the street was considerably more contemporary, though

MSPeconomist

DL 3576 from MOT to MSP operated on time today, arriving one minute early at C4. It was a 175 operated by SkyWest.

DL 1714 from MSP to MCO is in flight, having left three minutes early from F6 and due to arrive two minutes late.

So assuming that the OP's daughter didn't have any problems driving to Minot, everything should be good.

Bcla

Everything went fine. Thank you 😊

MSPeconomist

Yay, I'm glad it worked and apparently even went smoothly in the end.

A321neo

Great, Rene's Points covered this.

MSPeconomist

HUH? Link please.

xliioper

https://renespoints.boardingarea.com...ndemic-delays/

Bcla

Thank you for the link. I guess my daughter is famous, lol. Love it.

MCO Flyer

Chris has used multiple stories from this forum in the past before on his blog. Rene himself had a FT account although I looked and it appears his account has been suspended.