It's Easy Like Saturday Morning

Chances are, there’s something you can do with a local flying group.

Fly-outs. Say what? Yeah! Check with your local flight school, EAA Chapter, or join one of the nine Flights Above groups to see what other aviators in your area are doing.

Smokehouse Pilots Club president Gabe Muller is always planning something. A social group based primarily out of JYO in Leesburg, Virginia, there’s always something going on, even if it’s just a couple of friends flying together to grab food. At the end of June, there’s a fly-out to Cape May, New Jersey planned on a Saturday, and the group loves sharing aviation!

EAA Chapters all across the country host pancake breakfasts as a way to raise money to support their chapter and to have a place to hang out together. You get to fly and you get food; it doesn’t get much better than that.

What if the weather is junk? Guaranteed your fellow pilots will be at the airport drinking coffee and talking about flying. Couldn’t hurt to join them and maybe learn something new, even if it’s just a great story.

Grab a friend or family member (or two or three depending upon your plane’s max gross and weight and balance, of course) and go sightseeing. Maybe they’ve never flown over the places you consider familiar and mundane and would love to go flying with you. Or take them for the $100 hamburger to make them feel extra fancy. Just don’t make them sick.

Take a day trip somewhere. Yep, the social flying groups that I mentioned above do that. But if you don’t have a group, plan a flight to an airport museum, point of interest, that aviation restaurant with the cinnamon buns you’ve heard so much about, go to the beach, or just go fly to visit friends.