Don Schwanke submitted this photo and note: “This day, March 28, 2021, was my ‘someday’.”
In 1997, nine years before I earned my private pilot certificate, I took a road trip from central Illinois to Alaska in a Toyota motorhome. On the way back to the Lower 48, I made a side trip to Skagway, Alaska. It’s a cool little town in a canyon with a runway. I told myself that someday I was going to land a plane there. And now I can say that I have done it.
After buying this Cessna 177A Cardinal in Sitka, I flew it to Skagway, then to Petersburg, and Ketchikan, all in the panhandle region of Alaska. This is me, Don Schwanke, on the ground in Skagway with my new-to-me plane. I wanted to see the sights and become familiar with the plane before flying it home to Illinois. The following day I flew to Washington, then Idaho. I could overfly Canada but could not land because the border with the USA was still closed to non-essential flights due to the pandemic. My logbook now contains 17.7 hours on the two days it took to fly N30399 from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Springfield, Illinois.
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