2011 Cottage Grove, Oregon Stearman Fly-In

We had originally planned on staying the entire weekend in Cottage Grove but our dear friend, Skeets Mehrer, died the previous week flying his Comanche. Skeets has restored over ten Stearman biplanes and he will be sorely missed not only by us but the entire northwest flying community.
We flew down Saturday in about 1hr5min after fueling at Lenhardt's. We enjoyed a lovely tailwind at about 1800'. Low hanging clouds would burn off eventually -giving me a bright sunburn.  I believe there were about 17 Stearman's in attendance but since we only came down for the one day I probably missed some.

The movies are  of a couple of Stearman's taxiing out for the Saturday 'activity' of flying over for lunch at Lakeside - near the Oregon Coast.

It seemed like we arrived only to find everyone departing. The planes came back in about 3 hours. Meanwhile we chatted up everyone else and I helped several kids explore the Stearman. One little girl even identified the elevator on our plane, I was so proud of her.

I took quite a few still shots  and two movies. I'm gonna give you the videos first and if you still haven't had enough Stearmans, you can scroll through all the still shots.

One note on both videos: The propellers are spinning really fast - but it appears they are only making two revolutions per second. Kinda cool.

While this is where we stand when we fuel the plane (center section), this pilot is adjusting his cameras!

Addison Pemberton's Speedmail

A purple biplane. My daughter would love this.

Yellow Stearman in front of us came from Santa Rosa, California.