Member Benefits
College Park Airport’s first 100 years
Only 33 nautical miles away from AOPA’s headquarters, College Park Airport’s (CGS) 100th Anniversary AirFair was the nearest event for AOPA’s 2009 Sweepstakes Let’s Go Flying Cirrus SR22. The Aug. 29 event was the first centennial of any airport anywhere, as College Park in suburban Washington, D.C., is the world’s oldest continuously operating airport. And airport [...]
Where might the Cirrus show up next?
A quick call to friend and fellow pilot Tom Linton on Saturday, August 22, confirmed his participation in our all-day aviation immersion experience. I picked him up less than 12 hours later on Sunday morning and we headed to Maryland’s Frederick Municipal Airport. The Let’s Go Flying Sweepstaks Cirrus SR22 was [...]
Getting there is half the fun–and most of the challenge
Crossing two Great Lakes, a right hook into Canada, and a safe arrival at OSH Getting to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, from the Mid-Atlantic by Cirrus requires answering one central question: whether to fly over Lake Michigan, or around it? Flying over the lake means being out of gliding range of either shore for about 20 minutes – [...]
Chrissy’s Vinyl Wrap
When Alex Kosloff, owner, builder, and pilot of an experimental Pulsar based in Santa Paula, Calif., saw the vinyl graphics on the AOPA’s 2009 Sweepstakes Let’s Go Flying SR22, he decided to one-up us. Instead of parroting the distinctive, eye-catching scheme designed and installed by AirGraphics LLC, he decided to get an entire vinyl wrap for [...]
Flying the Soldier
Paratroopers tend to regard airplanes as good for takeoffs only. So it was no surprise that Sgt. Joshua Ben, a youthful, former cavalry scout in the 82nd Airborne Division, cast a wary eye on AOPA’s 2009 Sweepstakes Let’s Go Flying SR22 before boarding it at Florida’s Orlando Executive Airport. Ben, 22, an Afghanistan combat veteran, won a [...]
Home again in the sweeps SR22
The Let’s Go Flying SR22 is tucked back in its hangar at Frederick, Md., after a coast-to-coast-to-coast journey that showed general aviation’s exciting new possibilities from the Chesapeake Bay to the Golden Gate and back again. The two-week odyssey spanned the Appalachians, Great Lakes, Northern Plains, Rocky, Wasatch, and Sierra-Nevada, scorching Southwest and soggy Southeast. The [...]
Peeing in airplanes
Airplane designers have gone to extreme lengths over the last 100 years to make airplanes fly faster, farther, and more efficiently. We’re now blessed with general aviation airframes capable of flying four or five hours or more at a stretch – far beyond the bladder capacity of most pilots and passengers. Do the designers mean for [...]
On to California
Four takeoffs, four landings, 16 flight hours, and about 210 gallons of avgas. Some aspects of general aviation flying are easy to quantify, but the 2009 AOPA Sweepstakes Let’s Go Flying SR22’s trip from Frederick, Maryland, to Watsonville, California, like any air journey, is much more than the numbers in a logbook entry. The modern, GA airplane’s [...]
A real cross-country flight
Pilots tend to revert to regulatory definitions—even when the terms we’re using are perfectly descriptive. This week, for example, the AOPA 2009 Sweepstakes Let’s Go Flying SR22 is going on a cross-country flight. Most pilots take that to mean 50 miles, the minimum distance required to meet the FAA cross-country definition. But [...]
Let’s Go Flying SR22 gets AmSafe airbag seatbelts
Pilots have long been known to harbor an incongruous mix of fatalism and optimism. We’re fatalists in the sense that we know aircraft accidents will happen. We’re optimists because we believe they won’t happen to us. Consider the case of airbags for airplanes. Even though seatbelt-mounted air bags have become standard equipment in many new airplanes—including new Cirrus [...]
The Let’s Go Flying Cirrus SR22 will crisscross North America in 2009 |
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| Nov. 5-7 | AOPA Aviation Summit | Tampa, Fla. |
| Future events will be added to this schedule as information becomes available. | ||
