Centerline

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 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, 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.”

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 hangar 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 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 to be a good source of information and reviews about airport restaurants. I also recommend SocialFlight, 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.