Cleared for Takeoff – June 2005
by Pat Halligan, Chapter 25 President
from On Final June 2005
It’s the Memorial Day weekend-the start of summer-”yeah sure”, and I’m on my way to the Indy 500. I thought about flying my C-172 since I still own it, but that only lasted a short time as I looked at getting down and back flying VFR without much extra time for weather days. My son Kevin and I have been on the road about six hours and we’ve been in and out of rain showers a dozen times, so the choice to drive today was the right one. I know on Monday as I’m driving home I’ll wish I was flying if the weather is nice, but I just need to keep in mind the saying I heard when I was first learning to fly “You’re better off on the ground wishing you were flying, than flying and wishing you were on the ground.”
It’s official, we now have a hangar committee. Lee Hurry, Harv Havir, Ron Oehler, Ed Hansen, Dale Johnson and Ron Hoyt have agreed to be responsible for keeping the hangar in order and doing projects that we feel will make the hangar a better meeting place for our chapter. They need your help though. They are not our mothers, so please pick up after yourself and don’t bring things to drop off at the hangar until you get approval from one of those fellows. We want you to feel pride as you walk into the hangar. We don’t want it to look “junkie”. They recently installed some shelves on the south wall and they are looking at adding a hinged board to the front/bottom of the mezzanine. It would be painted white, so we could use it as a video screen. Craig Nelson’s employer donated a projector, so now we have a projector and maybe a wood screen without having to pay an arm and a leg. Thanks to a few, the whole chapter will benefit.
During our June monthly meeting and at our annual chapter picnic the following Saturday we will be passing out this years raffle tickets. The raffle is identical to last year in that you will be getting ten tickets that sell for $5 each. I hope I can count on each member to sell or buy their ten tickets. I talked last month in my column about how we use the raffle money for scholarships and summer camps, so I ask each member to take this challenge seriously and do your part. The drawing will be held at our awards banquet on October 9th.
I’ll write about AirVenture 2005 and how excited I am about it in next months column, but I did want to give you a heads-up about making your plans to attend the flyin and especially making room reservations at this time. A month from now all the hotel and dorm rooms close to OSH will be taken. If some of you want to share a ride, hotel room or camp site let one of the officers know and we can put some information on the website and get people together.
Now for the $100 question; who won this years Indy 500? Was it Danica Patrick, Dan Wheldon or Patrick Halligan? It was not Danica, even though she was the first women to ever lead the 500, she finished 4th. It was not Patrick Halligan, he just talks 200mph. It was Dan Wheldon from England. It was a great race and we had a wonderful time.
ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM Pat