Flight Training - April 2013 - 6

CENTERLINE

By Adam Smith

WILL FLY FOR FOOD

HAVING FUN IN FLIGHT TRAINING

A

couple of hundred years ago the French leader Napoleon
Bonaparte famously said, “An army marches on its stomach,”
to make the point that soldiers need a regular supply of
food in order to keep on fighting. The same principle
applies to general aviation. If you ever want to test the theory, simply
lay on some food at your local airport, and it won’t be long before
pilots start showing up.
Every Saturday, Sporty’s Pilot Shop
serves a free hot dog lunch at its Clermont County Airport (I69) headquarters
in Ohio. They’ve been keeping count
since the tradition began in 1992, and
it won’t be long before the quarter-millionth Sporty’s hot dog is served. Number
200,000 went to British magazine publisher Ian Seager, who flew a Cessna 182
all the way across the Atlantic Ocean for
his free hot dog. Pilots will sometimes go
to extraordinary lengths for a meal.
A lot of recreational flying
activity revolves
around food. On any
given weekend the
aviation calendar
will contain numerous fly-in breakfasts
organized by an
airport community
group. These are
very popular with
pilots, giving us a reason to go flying—and
a destination to visit with family or friends.
They also do a valuable job of bringing
ordinary people out to see general aviation
activity at their local airport. Hundreds
of airport restaurants around the country
perform the same valuable functions on a
daily basis.
My own favorite destination is Friday
lunch at Iola, Wisconsin (68C), where it’s
not unusual to see 50 or more airplanes
landing at a picturesque grass runway.
There will always be a healthy crowd critiquing performances in the spot-landing
contest, with a free lunch for the winner.
When the snow lies thick in the winter

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FLIGHTTRAINING.AOPA.ORG

months there will be several skiplanes in
attendance. Over the years, Friday lunch
became such a success that the airport
association was able to construct an
impressive building to house the crowds.
In other areas there are aviation
breakfast clubs, where pilots and aviation
enthusiasts meet up for breakfast at an
agreed destination. The South Carolina
Breakfast Club has been doing this every
other Sunday since 1938. It publishes its
destination schedule a year in advance.
According to its website (www.flyscbc.
com), there are no club rules other than to
“Fly in or drive to the airport, belly up, and
talk aircraft to your heart’s content.”

gar flying with friends, and looking at neat
airplanes on the ramp. But the food was
pretty good, too, and it somehow tasted
even better when we learned our servers
were all air traffic controllers!
I was especially pleased to see that one
of the instructors from Frederick Flight
Center, a local flight school, combined
the breakfast run with a training flight for
one of his students. It reminded me that
one of my most memorable experiences
when learning to fly was flying for lunch
with my instructor to the wonderfully
named Tipsy Nipper restaurant at Glenrothes Airport (EGPJ) in Scotland. It was
exciting to have an applied sense of purpose to our flight and gave an important
glimpse of what the future would hold
when I finally earned my certificate.
Every student gets discouraged at some
point in his or her training, and positive
experiences like this can make an important difference in getting them through.
There’s no law that says we can’t have fun

ONE OF MY MOST MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES
WHEN LEARNING TO FLY WAS FLYING FOR
LUNCH WITH MY INSTRUCTOR.
This sounded like such a good idea we
decided to start a breakfast club here at
our Frederick, Maryland, headquarters
for the AOPA staff and anyone else who
wanted to be involved. It has turned into
a great example of how powerful a tool
Facebook has become for social organization. With just a few minutes' work we
created the club’s Facebook page, set a
date for the first breakfast, and sent out
a few invites. Less than two weeks later
more than 80 people had subscribed to
the page, and a healthy contingent of
people and airplanes made the flight
to Lancaster, Pennsylvania (LNS), for a
Groundhog Day fly-in breakfast.
It was a classic “$100 hamburger” trip.
The destination wasn’t as important as the
pleasure of getting away, doing some han-

during flight training—in fact, I think having fun should be made compulsory!
If you need some help with “fly for
food” destinations, there are plenty of free
resources available. Personally I’ve found
Adventure Pilot (www.adventurepilot.
com) to be a good source of information
and reviews about airport restaurants. I
also recommend SocialFlight (www.social
flight.com), available as a mobile app,
which is quickly gaining a reputation as a
go-to information source for fly-in events
such as pancake breakfasts. And, of course,
our own website (www.aopa.org).
Email Senior Vice President Adam Smith at adam.
smith@aopa.org. Learn more about the Center to
Advance the Pilot Community (www.aopa.org/
CAPComm).
http://www.flyscbc.com http://www.flyscbc.com http://www.adventurepilot.com http://www.adventurepilot.com http://www.socialflight.com http://www.socialflight.com http://www.aopa.org http://www.aopa.org/CAPComm http://www.aopa.org/CAPComm http://FLIGHTTRAINING.AOPA.ORG
Flight Training - April 2013

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