Airport patrons enjoy pancakes, planes

"Look, there's your grandpa," Peggy Hollabaugh, left, tells Sawyer Hollabaugh. Dave Hollabaugh, treasurer of the Kingdom Pilots Association, helped provide flights to children Saturday during the Pancake Breakfast and Fly-In.
"Look, there's your grandpa," Peggy Hollabaugh, left, tells Sawyer Hollabaugh. Dave Hollabaugh, treasurer of the Kingdom Pilots Association, helped provide flights to children Saturday during the Pancake Breakfast and Fly-In.

The air around the Elton Hensley Memorial Airport on Saturday morning was filled with the drone of small airplane engines and the scrumptious smell of frying sausage.

A healthy crowd turned up to enjoy the hearty breakfast, Kingdom Pilots Association President Steve Wendling said.

"This gives us the opportunity to raise funds for scholarships," he said.

During the event, Kareem Boakye-Yiadom was presented with a $1,500 scholarship to help him earn a pilots' license, Wendling added.

Compared to last year, when stormy skies kept pilots away, this year's event drew quite a crowd, he said.

"It's a great day to fly," Wendling said. "The difference between a good day to fly and a great day to fly is on a good day, you want to go flying but the weather conditions prevent it. A great day to fly is any day you get to fly."

Attendees brought motorcycles, planes, plenty of appetites and even a functional SR-71 Blackbird model at 1/8th scale. It took its creator, Lance Campbell, 10 years to perfect. He'd initially expected it to be a four-year project, but decided he couldn't bear to cut corners.

"I thought it was too cool of an airplane not to build," he said.

Campbell has 35 years of experience building model airplanes.

"I started as a kid with my grandfather," he said. "We had the slightly inappropriate goal of buzzing the neighbor kid off his riding lawnmower. It turned out building model airplanes is harder than we expected."

He fabricate the Blackbird from scratch, using materials such as fiberglass and carbon fiber. The completed plane weighs 85 pounds when fueled up and can fly for about nine minutes.

Campbell has now flown the Blackbird more than 180 times at airshows during the past six years, he added.

Members of the Central Missouri Civil Air Patrol were also on scene, recruiting. Cadet Joshua Haubner, who's working toward his single-engine pilot license, said he joined after catching the airplane bug from one of his mother's coworkers.

"The Civil Air Patrol was founded a week before Pearl Harbor," he said.

Members are volunteer first responders who might be called upon to help with things like performing an aerial search for a downed aircraft.

A few lucky youth participants in the Wright Flight and Young Eagles programs even got to go up in planes after breakfast.

Amanda Arbuckle, a Wright Flight participant from Columbia, was among them.

"I got to fly with the stick a little bit," she said after returning to the ground. "It was easier than I expected."

She said she enjoyed getting a first-hand look at how to pilot the plane and looking for familiar landmarks down below.

"I saw Little Dixie Lake," she said, adding that's where her mother, Laurie Arbuckle, regularly paddleboards.

The KPA hosts the annual event, and proceeds go toward improvements at the airport and funding scholarships for young pilots. Since the last breakfast, the KPA has purchased some comfy furniture for the pilot lounge.