Mark Deliduka Posted May 22, 2015 Report Share Posted May 22, 2015 About two weeks ago, my Orange County IPMS club held a Make-n-Take at the Fullerton Airport "Airport Days" event. The event itself ran from 9AM until 5PM and offered helicopter rides, warbird exhibits and flybys of various aircraft; as well as opportunities to fly Air Combat USA which is based on Fullerton Airport. For those not familiar with Air Combat USA, you have the chance to literally fly an aircraft with an experienced ex-military pilot in your copilot seat and engage in actual dogfights in these aircraft. For more info, here's their website: http://aircombat.com/ This year, as Sean and I walked around; we saw that they were featuring a flyable DC-3 which was converted from a C-47 that had 40 combat missions over Europe in WWI. It had also carried the Queen of England and Winston Churchill as well. The Commemorative Air Force was there as well with a An-2 Colt and (to our surprise!) a Bf-108 Taifun, both of which had been flown in. Sean and I got to sit inside the Taifun and afterward; when they'd been asked to shift it to a new position, we got to help push it into place! This is the second year that we were invited back due to the popularity of our exhibit. This year, we had even more attention from attendees. We had brought 150 model kits for the kids to build and we had ten volunteers to assist them as they built their models. Our first model builders arrived at about 9:10 that morning and soon the word got around. By 9:40 we had a line of kids waiting for their turn. This line consisted of anywhere between 7 and 15 kids (and their parents) and lasted for the entire rest of the day. We ran out of model kits at 2:30PM and had to turn away about 40 kids or so before the end of the event. Discussing this event later; we figured we'd need at least 250 kits to get through an entire event next year. The Fullerton Airport people told us that of all the attractions featured at this event, ours was ranked in the top three by all attendees. They are thrilled to have us there and have already invited us back next year. Here is a link to my Photobucket account showing some of the pics that I took that day, including the DC-3, the Colt and the Taifun; as well as a low level flyby of the Goodyear Blimp: http://smg.photobucket.com/user/Duke_Maddog/library/Air%20Shows%20and%20Museums/IPMS%20Make-n-Take%20Fullerton?sort=4&page=1 I hope you enjoyed this post. Thanks for looking in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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