More than one hundred women will take off from the Sonny Callahan Airport in Fairhope today for the 48th Annual Air Race Classic. Lieutenant Katrina McCleod is an instructor pilot with the U.S. Coast Guard. She has spent years saving lives and tracking down drug smugglers. But now she’s trying something different–a cross-country air race.
“I am in the Coast Guard and my specialty is flying low and slow a hundred feet over the water and throwing things out the back of my plane instead of picking my way through mountains,” she said. “So that's been to me so far. One of the most enjoyable aspects so far. The Air Race classic provides a lot of opportunities for online training. We've had a lot of Zoom sessions with experts in the field of mountain flying and density altitude and pressure altitude. It's been an awesome learning experience.”
Katrina is part of forty three teams racing across the country with the finish line waiting in Spokane, Washington this Friday. The pilots are all women and from all walks of life. They’ve been getting ready for months for this race across the country. One by one, 43 teams will lift off from Fairhope — every 30 seconds — each with two women in the cockpit and a flight plan for the 2,500-mile journey ahead. For Coast Guard pilot Lieutenant McCleod, this race brings a brand new challenge: flying over the Rocky Mountains for the first time.
“Right now we're going to try to knock out about 700 miles in the first day and then about the same in the second day,” she estimates. “So that'll leave our last two days actually pretty light on hours. But if we can push that those first couple days, just doing a little more research. Mountain weather can be very unexpected and quick changing. So we kind of want to build a little bit of a buffer on the backside in case some afternoon storms roll through or just some mountain wave activity that we can't get through.”
The next stop for the racers is Starkville, Mississippi. Then it’s west through Arkansas, Kansas, and Colorado — with the finish line waiting in Spokane, Washington on Friday.
