To add a bit of spice to our week at Oshkosh AirVenture 2024, Brett Sylvester and I managed to arrange a flight from Milwaukee to visit the factory where Cirrus aircraft are built in Duluth, just over the border from Wisconsin in Minnesota. It was an “out of the blue” opportunity that started with us talking to the Cirrus reps at Oshkosh. Initially they said they didn’t organise visits to the factory in the AirVenture week because they’d be overrun with requests but after a bit more poking we were accepted for a visit on the Wednesday, so midweek of AirVenture. The next challenge was to arrange someone to fly us there. Luckily we ran into Ben Retzlaff from Pilotsmith who we’d hired for our flight to Chicago and Green Bay the previous week. He was spending a day at AirVenture and after some arm twisting his manager gave approval for him to accompany us from Timmerman Airport at Milwaukee out to Duluth in the SR20.

It was about a 90 minute drive to Timmerman from our AirBNB north of Oshkosh and was overcast when we arrived. Not as good as the day we’d flown the previous week.

However it gave us the chance to see how IFR works in the US. Taking off at 9:30 I flew us IFR with Ben taking charge of the radios as he’d done the previous week so I could focus on flying the plane.

The clouds gradually cleared so we could see something of the ground below.

It was partly IMC abeam Oshkosh, where between the clouds we could see numerous planes flying in for AirVenture. It was quite a procession!

Our midway stop was Taylor County where they had a very friendly caretaker but a somewhat less salubrious FBO. We made his day by being the first Australians he’d ever met!

Brett flew us to Duluth mostly in IMC and flew the ILS into the more than 3000 metre long runway (it’s a military base). The factory is adjacent to the GA apron so very handy to visit and for them to delivery planes to customers.

We learned quite a bit about the manufacturing process at the factory tour before heading to lunch at a nearby grill bar.

Climbing back into the Cirrus we had a bit of a wait for traffic to land and take off.

I flew us over miles and miles of forest, lakes and pasture in clear skies to Marshfield for another switch.

After a short break we took off again and Brett flew us back to Milwaukee.

There wasn’t a lot happening at Timmerman and was dead calm so the tower guy told Ben we could land which ever direction we wanted to so we’d have the shortest possible taxi to the hanger. How kind.

After parking the plane and collecting our things we bid a final farewell to Ben and climbed into the car for the one hour drive back to Oshkosh for the Wednesday evening airshow.