A good friend started up the West Coast Mooney Club when he bought his M20F. We had a huge kickoff event in April of 2018 with a fly-in at Paso Robles where we ended up with 53 planes and 125 people. Michael made some arrangements with the Camarillo airport to get us a discount on admission to the air show if we flew in. For the price of one ticket you could get everyone in your plane into the air show. Let’s see, fly the Mooney and see an air show for a discount? Sounds great to me!
My wife was the leader of the young women’s group at church for a number of years and she invited two of them to come along with us. Neither had ever been in a small plane before (one hadn’t flown at all since she was just a few years old) but both were very excited to come along. As you will see, the smiles on their faces when we lifted off from KFUL were HUGE! 🙂 I was glad that my wife thought to get a video of them as we were taking off because I never would have seen their smiles, as you will see in the video I was just busy flying the plane.
We picked up flight following, and although I thought it was going to be busy getting into Camarillo but we pretty much flew straight in from over Van Nuys all the way to landing on 26 without any delays for other traffic. It turned out that we landed right before Michael and ended up parked right next to each other.
The weather was perfect, the show was amazing, the “Wall of Fire” did not disappoint (and stopped traffic on the 101 freeway), and the company of the other West Coast Mooney Club members was great. Departing was just as easy as arriving with a quick taxi to the run-up area and then takeoff clearance as soon as we were ready to depart. I suppose everyone in the plane was comfortable flying, they all fell asleep on the way back.
