[jeff thomas]

I fly an Airborne Outback at a small, not busy, non towered airport in very rural North Central PA. I’m the only trike -It’s a tricky airport built in the early 30s right on the edge of a 1,000 foot gorge with runways positioned the opposite direction to the prevailing winds, but it’s a beautiful spot with fields for miles and miles and then forests stretching out beyond that and I love it there. We have a couple ultralights (without radios) but they only fly when the weather is perfect. Which is mostly never. Each one of these guys built their planes and taught themselves to fly as the airport didn’t have an instructor for a long time. When I arrived last year three men on the airport authority came out to greet me (suspiciously) to let me know I should consider getting a plane “that’s nothing more than a kite!” and then asked me to fly the pattern at 500 ft AGL and 500 feet out. “a gunfighter pattern” is how one of them put it. There’s a grass strip and a paved strip so if there are planes in the pattern I almost always land in the grass just to get out of the way…We have a couple bi-planes and they do the same. Nobody at all flying early in the morning, I always have the place entirely to myself. But as the day gets on there are a handful of farmers that might fly in from their private strips and they never use their radios. They just show up. The occasional crop dusters and helicopters come in out of the blue as well as does the fella in the Mustang P51, but you can hear him from miles away. So I make sure my eyes are peeled and I’m on the radio announcing “yellow light sport trike” and I most often cross mid field in case someone on the ground looks up. Most pilots do use the radio, though to be honest the majority of those guys just announce they’re coming straight in. I guess it varies, but after a year most pilots know me and when I’m out flying but I do tend to do a decent amount of letting pilots know that I’m flying the pattern at 500 ft both on the radio and in person when I see pilots at the airport that I don’t know.