Somebody hollered, "Come down for breakfast and then stay all day!" and that's pretty much what everybody did.

Several thousand aviation enthusiasts turned out for the 6th Annual Virginia State EAA Fly-In at Dinwiddie Co. Airport on September 7th and 8th. The weather was spectacular, so was the show, and people had a hard time tearing themselves away..yours truly included. Let's take a look.

The first thing to greet you when you got through the gate was Bruce Christoph's pretty little Piper Vagabond. Dinwiddie's its home, and it was right up front like a friendly handshake.

Bruce says he bought the Vagabond about a year and a half ago up in Oshkosh. It weighs all of 650 pounds and, as Bruce tells it, it's so stable in quiet air that he can take his hands and feet off and let 'er go.

The Vagabonds, he recalls, were Piper's stab at making the cheapest airplane possible back in 1948 when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. "They took a J3 Cub," he told me,
"they made the wings shorter so it took less spar material, less ribs, less covering, less paint..the standard Cub ailerons almost take up the entire wing! It was so cheap that they put no suspension on the landing gear at all. The CFO (Piper's Chief Financial Officer) said that's what tires are for." Bruce said what they finished up with was a very basic airplane with no frills whatsoever: "It's noisy, it's loud. You can sit in it for about an hour and a half and you have to start moving around because it is so uncomfortable." But he says it's fun because it's like flying the way the "old-timers" did..with a map, a watch and a compass. Bruce, who's accustomed to flying his Citabria on GPS, says he still gets lost in the Vagabond about once every third time he does it the old fashioned way. Us "Old Timers" did that, too, Bruce.

Next to the Vagabond was one of the nicest Stinson Voyagers I've seen for awhile:


Its cockpit looked as if it had just come out of the factory showroom. A real beauty.

What's an airshow without some Pitts?.

Care to try one on for size? This small space, in a Pitts Special S-2S, belongs to aerobatics flier, Skip Stewart, who's been flying competition for over three years. His show is beautifully honed..

Click to continue. . .