Pancakes, volunteers and Saturday morning at the airport

On plenty of Saturday mornings, a small airport somewhere near you has its hangar door rolled open. Somebody has a griddle going, there's coffee in a big steel urn, and a few kids are lined up for their first airplane ride.

The Experimental Aircraft Association started in 1953 with a group of people in Milwaukee who wanted to build and fly their own airplanes. Paul Poberezny and his friends met in his basement. Today EAA has chapters all over the country, and Oshkosh every summer is one of the biggest aviation gatherings anywhere.

If you have been to an EAA chapter fly-in, you've probably had their pancakes. A pancake breakfast is a restaurant run by volunteers for one morning. Somebody shops, somebody mixes batter, somebody runs the cash box, and somebody parks airplanes. Anyone who has worked a restaurant shift can tell you that's harder than it looks, and they do it for the price of a plate.

EAA's Young Eagles program has given free first flights to kids since 1992. The count is now more than 2.4 million. In the last year alone, about 4,250 volunteer pilots flew more than 50,000 young people, and they paid for every one of those flights themselves.

The Civil Air Patrol is older than all of it. Civilian pilots formed it on December 1, 1941, six days before Pearl Harbor. During the war its members flew their own small airplanes along the Atlantic coast looking for German submarines. Today CAP flies search and rescue and disaster relief, and its cadet program has given a lot of young people their first taste of flying.

Then there are the pilots who fly people who need help. Angel Flight volunteers fly patients to treatment far from home and pay for the fuel themselves. Pilots N Paws volunteers move rescue animals to new homes.

When I worked at AOPA, most days were spent helping members with whatever they needed. The thing I noticed then, and still notice, is how often pilots say yes. Somebody needs a ride, or a hand on a project, or one more person on the breakfast line, and a pilot shows up.

That's a big part of why I built Flying And Dining. Breakfast at the airport is where a lot of us met, and it's still a good reason to fly somewhere.

If your chapter or flying club has a fly-in breakfast coming up, tell me about it. I'm putting together a list of them for the monthly Postflight newsletter. And if you've never flown a Young Eagle, find an EAA chapter near you and ask when the next rally is. It might be the best hour you spend in an airplane this year.