AOPA Fly-In

One of the cool things about sharing the flying bug with Husband is that we get to spend time talking and dreaming about flying-- and we're both ok with spending the day doing flying stuff, even if we're not in the airplane!

So Saturday, we went to the AOPA Fly-In at the Frederick Airport. We went to this last year, too-- before we bought the plane. Last year's Fly-In was one of the turning points in what plane "we" (i.e. my Husband) decided to buy. While I had fun last year, this year was great! We talked about trying to talk an instructor into flying over to the fly-in with us, but finally decided to just drive. That was probably a good thing as visibility was pretty poor in the morning hours, and we heard rumblings of thunder as we left in the afternoon.

After our trip to Sun-n-Fun in April, I had a lot more sense in how to prepare for these-- i.e., wear shorts, comfortable jogging shoes, put on sunscreen, and bring lots of water! We walked around and looked at all the planes (both the pretty, shiny ones on display and the ones that merely served as transportation for the event). I was interested to see a Caravan on display-- I read John's posts on Aviation Mentor a lot (http://aviationmentor.blogspot.com/)-- and apparently, he used to fly a Caravan.

We also went to two of the seminars -- we listened to Phil Boyer speak on the current aviation issues of the day, and we saw Rod Machado do his spiel on having fun and flying safe. Both were really interesting. Since we fly out of JYO, all of the news on the ADIZ boundaries is of huge interest to us. And since we live in the DC Area and are pilots, we are naturally interested in what' s happening with the whole user fee debate. We both felt we got a much better understanding of what's happening-- and felt very connected to aviation things after the day.

I even talked to a woman after Rod's session whose husband is learning to fly. Rod had been talking about what pilots' biggest fears are-- and she said her husband was her biggest fear. I told her how I went for a flight to see what it was like-- and that now I have more hours than my husband! She seemed to think that was pretty cool.

All in all, it was a really fun day. After we left the airport, we went to downtown Frederick (a cute little historic district) and had coffee and found a little Mexican cafe for dinner. Pretty fun, considering there was no actual flying involved!