Rio Creek Airport

A little history:

 N94888 was brought to Rio Creek in 1973 when it was purchased by Don Walter and Sonny Raasch, the local cheesemaker.  The "blue coupe" was flown regularly for the about the next 10-15 years.  Sometime on the mid-to-late 80's, Don and Sonny decided that the airplane had to be parked until they could "figure out where it was leaking so much oil."  In the early 90's Don bought Sonny's share but the coupe remained parked for over a decade.

N94888 as it looked sometime in the 70's or 80's.

The rescue of N94888 started on Monday, May 29, 2000.  Rio Creek Airport was coming back to life after sitting dormant for most of the previous 15 years.  A group of pilots (including Armond Ullmer, Lyle Humlicek, Don Jahnke, Dave Platten, Larry Heyrman and Tom Jeschke) from Green Bay had recently made the move to Rio Creek because their airport in Green Bay was closing.

The airport bums and their families were enjoying a Memorial Day cookout in the clubhouse when talk turned to that "old blue Ercoupe" sitting in the hangar.  Don had been to Oshkosh the year before and bought some new tires.  He was ready to get the coupe airworthy again.

This was finally the day!  As the talked turned more serious, Don J issued the challenge: "Let's go get those new tires on, pull it out and see what we need!"  The hangar doors were opened and the story begins...

Don is under the wing to get the tire changed as Shawn looks on.

As you can see in the picture above, the coupe had been covered in 10 years of dirt.  It was also surrounded by 10 years of junk.  The first step was to get a jack under the wing and put the new tires on.  It was a little bit of a challenge with the right wheel but by the time we got to the left one, we knew the tricks.  The tire on the nose wheel was actually in pretty good shape so we checked the bearings and put it back on.

Once the tires were good to go, N94888 saw daylight for the first time in years.  Of course, it probably couldn't tell the difference until we gave it a bath.  There was plenty of work to do but at least it looked like a respectable airplane again.

Shawn and Cory put the finishing touches on the cleanup effort.  Notice those fancy, new "sticker tires."

While it was out of the hangar, we made a shopping list of things from Univair and Skyport Services.  We decided what we wanted to work on right away and ordered those parts, everything else would wait until Oshkosh.