Greg's Horrible Waste of Internet Bandwidth

We lost Fred in August 1997 after he departed the Bowling Green AYA Convention, en route to visit family in California. He was flying VFR across the country but never arrived at his destination. After frantic calls and starting to set up a search party, we learned that a fisherman reported witnessing an airplane "with no sounds" going down in Lake Sharpe in South Dakota. Five days later Fred's body was recovered; his 1974 Traveler was never found . Fred's MIT class obituary said he was "a hardware electrical engineering consultant, whose work involved assembly guidance systems, lasers for manufacturing, and laser graphics for the entertainment industry." To us, Fred was our friend, highly intelligent and always humorous. His posts on the Grumman Gang always ended with a topic-relevant catch-phrase sig line; Harold Mignola captured some below. Miss you, Fred. Fred Fenning N7148L “Yes, officer, we were 500 ft below the cloud bases” Fred Fenning N7148L (Was t...

NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) report, dated 10 August 1997 This past week I attended our type-club convention in Bowling Green, KY (BWG), a 670-nm trip from BDR. I flew with a group of two other Tiger owners, and our one-fuel-stop VFR flight to BWG was uneventful. The performance of my Tiger was on par with my history of it, with average speed and fuel consumption were right where I expected it. I've owned my Grumman Tiger for 2-1/2 years and have flown it over 400 hours to date. I typically cruise at 6500 or 7500 feet MSL for best speed and fuel consumption, 130+ knots averaging 10.5 gph with 51 gallons of fuel useable. Most of my trips are within a 2-hour range of my home field (BDR - Bridgeport CT) so fuel usage has never been a concern. I always used my watch as a fuel gauge, switched tanks religiously, and always re-calculated and mentally updated my fuel consumption after every flight. The return trip, however, was not so straightforward. A warm front was movin...