Goshen Airport Enjoys First Friday ‘Pilot Program’
GOSHEN — Long before the idea of First Fridays in Warsaw and surrounding areas took hold, Goshen Municipal Airport began a Friday fly-in lunch for its pilots, students, employees and their families. In 2017 the event expanded to include other airports, and has bought a renewed spirit of camaraderie to an industry hard hit by the recession.
This month marks Randy Sharkey’s 25th year as manager of Goshen Airport, and in 1995 he was piloting a corporate plane in a small airport in Florida when, as he waited for his passengers, the airport’s manager asked if he had time for a burger. Behind a hangar, a group of staff and pilots were enjoying their weekly cook-out.
“I thought, ‘what a great idea!’” Sharkey recalled.
At first, Goshen’s Friday lunches were just for employees, with Sharkey’s mother, Karen, acting as cook and hostess. Then it expanded into a fly-in, and the airport would feed pilots who happened to be passing through. Attendance that first summer was modest, “four or five guys … two airplanes,” said Sharkey, but before long it grew to as many as 20 planes on a clear day. “Pilots put it on their calendars.”
In 2017, the airport decided to hold its lunches in conjunction with Goshen First Friday events, and Sharkey approached managers of other smaller airports about joining the fun. Following the first lunch in Goshen, pilots could fly to Fort Wayne’s Smith Field the second Friday, LaPorte the third, Rochester the fourth and, if there is a fifth, Elkhart. This summer served as a “pilot” program.
The event is ending for the season, but Sharkey reported the other airport managers have “overwhelmingly” agreed to resume the Friday fly-in schedule next summer.
The real attraction for the pilots, many of them retirees, said Sharkey, is “hangar talk.” They discuss their flight experiences, planes, technology and the weather.
“It’s like a bunch of fishermen getting together,” he remarked. In fact, when the weather is bad, many will simply drive to the airports rather than fly just to enjoy the company of other pilots.
But there has been another benefit as well. The price of owning and flying a plane has risen considerably over the years, and when the 2008 recession hit, the industry struggled.
Corporations, whose planes make up much of small airport traffic, sold them off to cut costs; flying lessons dropped off dramatically. “We were in survival mode,” remembered Sharkey.
While he would not go so far as to suggest Friday fly-in lunches have saved local aviation, they promoted generational continuity and an infectious enthusiasm highlighting the fun of flying.
At the Oct. 6 Goshen fly-in, Sharkey presided during a special lunch celebrating New Paris’ Robert Lutes receiving the Federal Aviation Administration’s Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award in recognition of 50 years of aviation flying experience.
“Flyers like Lutes,” read Sharkey, “are the pilots who have brought the aviation industry forward for the enjoyment and benefit of future generations of men and women who will look to the skies.”
Sharkey is happy to report student start-ups are back up, and corporations are once again utilizing private planes to do business more efficiently.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” he said of first Friday fly-in lunches, adding, “It will probably be my legacy.”