Mo's Fly-in, on the river!

Last weekend, Feb. 22nd, was the date for Mo's Fly-in on the Ottawa River, the aircraft landing on ice. It was good weather for it! The sun shone and melted some of the surface ice, but the ice beneath was strong enough for a runway to be ploughed and even aircraft not fitted with skis could land for the event, the 25th one of its kind.

Here's a video made by Yves Grenier of the ground operations, this year:

The event started at 1000 hrs and ran all day on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, 1 mile west of the Ottawa VOR. The Canadian Owners and Pilots Association published the following details about it:

Coordinates: 45°26'57" N, 75°55'48
Runway: Runways 34 & 16, 3500' x l00'
Frequencies: ground 122.75 MHz, air 123.20 MHz.
Notes: Ski landing recommended. Landing is at your own risk.

A very Canadian event

Today was the day of Mo's Fly-In, an annual gathering of aviators at an ice strip on the Ottawa River near Aylmer, at which Maurice Prud’Homme (a retired chef at the Ottawa Parliament Buildings, "the man with a snow-blower and a dream") serves his "world famous chilli." It is the 22nd time this has happened and this year's organisers were expecting hundreds of aircraft to land on the improvised runway (either on skis or on wheels), with the ice more than half a metre thick this year. Other enthusiasts, including a couple of our friends, drove in to share the fun. It was a good day for it, but landing on a river when not strictly necessary didn't appeal to my husband, so we stayed in the air instead of joining in.

Further up the river, towards Quyon, there's a residential airpark in the woods —we saw that from the air, too, while making our way up the valley above the ridge of the Eardley Escarpment—developed by a gentleman called André Durocher, where another couple of friends are planning to build their own house right beside the taxiway, with hangar attached.
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Over the escarpment, with the river in the distance
(photo taken in 2008, but the view looked very similar today)