On Sept. 24, friends and family tested our muscles with a team of 20 and played tug-of-war with a UPS Airbus A300 (weighing 99 tons!) at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago to benefit Special Olympics Illinois. Your donations helped provide the nearly 21,000 Special Olympics athletes with intellectual disabilities and the more than 6,000 Young Athletes (ages 2-7) the chance to participate in year-round sports training and competition – all at no charge to the athletes or their families!

The event is over, and we all had a great time for a great cause. I would like to extend a personal thank you to my sister Michelle Beecher for inviting me and working so hard to plan and organize (and in general being her usual awesome self), to Jay Behnke of S.T.A.T.E. testing for his generosity, and to my teammates who actually pulled the plane, because I was only pretending to (actually, my right arm and both legs still hurt several days later). Please visit my site online at http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/ericuner/2011letrplanepull and consider donating more. We all truly appreciate even a small donation for this terrific program.

That’s the plane	We aren’t afraid of rain or puddles	Sunbeams	CFD
News crews	Growing crowd	Our team	The S.T.A.T.E. Testing pull team
Getting our instructions	Getting ready to pull	Almost ready	It’s moving!
So proud!	You aint so big	Boys climbing into the bucket	An unsure Devin
Um. Linda’s going, too?	Going up	Up in the bucket	All the way up
Hello up there	Ethan’s shot	They did it	Devin on the bus

Just to put things in perspective, we are talking about an Airbus A300 here, folks.

• 266 passengers
• 177 ft long
• 147 ft wingspan
• 55 ft high
• 200,000 lbs
• Flys at about 541 mph

Our team got the plane up to a very respectable 1.3 mph, but then we had to stop because, you know, we started to see some lift on the wings.