Please join us on Thursday, February 25th at 6pm for our first EFI event of the year! Bring your family and friends and meet some of your fellow pilots for a tasty dinner and a screening of the classic aviation movie “The Great Waldo Pepper”. There will also be some great prizes raffled after the show!

About the movie: A biplane pilot who had missed flying in WWI takes up barnstorming and later a movie career in his quest for the glory he had missed, eventually getting a chance to prove himself in a film depicting the dogfights in the Great War.

Tickets to this event are FREE for Gold Club members (limit one). For all others, tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for kids 6-12, free for kids 5 and under. The ticket price includes dinner, movie, popcorn. Your ticket will also serve as your raffle ticket at the end of the show.

Please call or visit the front office to purchase your tickets.  The movie will be shown in the hangar adjacent to the flight school, and there will be heaters to keep us warm. Feel free to bring your own outdoor chairs and blankets if you’d like! We need to have an idea of how many people are coming, so please purchase your tickets  by Tuesday, February 23rd.

This is going to be a fun event, so we hope to see you there!

Ben Strader, founder of the “EFI” flight school, a Cessna Pilot Center, said, “The original idea was to do something interesting for a team building exercise and create a meaningful learning experience for student pilots and those pilots with lower experience.”
That goal was certainly accomplished, considering that the flight school was able to generate enough interest to have 10 aircraft and 22 people along on the trip!

The flight school held a free ground course on the night of October 6, consisting of specific information about the moderately challenging approach required for Kern Valley Airport, as well as some scenario based training on subjects such as weight and balance, density altitude, and aircraft performance, with heavy emphasis on safe flight planning and how to research these factors before making any flight.

Each attendee was then paired up with an experienced pilot or flight instructor to act as a mentor on the nearly four-hour round trip weekend!

“We are so overwhelmed by the level of support we saw from our local pilots and our students that not only are we planning another trip for next year, but we are already working on several other interactive events for folks to come out and join the flight school in some educational fun,” said Strader.

“We can’t wait to watch this whole thing grow even bigger as the word gets out about how much everyone enjoyed their trip with a tent in their airplane!”