
By Mike McCann
APA Day Trip Coordinator
2024 was a very active year for our day trip flying. A total of eight separate day trips were scheduled with only one cancelled due to bad weather. Over 100 pilots and passengers and 50 aircraft collectively flew to destinations including Marble Canyon, Seligman, Mogollon Rim, and Grand Canyon. One of the best parts of APA is the opportunity to enjoy various flying experiences with other members who share the love of flying.
With such good momentum during 2024, we want to continue building and adding more day trip flying opportunities. Here’s a brief preview of several new day trip flying opportunities:
- Pop-Up Fly-out events:
In addition to our normally-scheduled day trips, we’ll be adding several “pop-up” events. What’s a “pop-up” fly-out you ask? These will be quick notice (1-2 day) fly-out destinations which will give members more opportunities to meet up over a breakfast or lunch. We’ll also be scheduling some weekday pop-up events in response to members who enjoy flying during the week. We’ll be sending out pop-up announcements via eblast and Facebook postings.
- AZ Passport destinations:
The AZ Passport program has been a huge success. There’s an ever-growing number of Passport hats, backpacks, and leather jackets that have been awarded to APA members. With that in mind, we plan to schedule 2–3 day trips to locations where participants can collect several Passport locations (airports, restaurants and museums). As an example, our February, 2025, day trip destination is Tombstone, AZ. As part of that day’s flying, pilots can also make quick visits from Tombstone to several nearby southern AZ airports and collect numerous airports towards their Passport goal. Stay tuned for more details in the February newsletter.
- Combined Day Trip / Overnight destinations:
A couple of our planned 2025-day trip destinations (like Monument Valley) will also offer a great opportunity to stay overnight if anyone desires. I’ll be coordinating with our Weekend Getaway coordinator (Rod Kunkel) to offer both options for participating members. As an example, we will plan for everyone to arrive mid-morning for a 3-4 hour driving tour of the Monument Valley area (a fantastic experience if you’ve not had an opportunity to do this). The tour and lunch will conclude mid-afternoon allowing time for those needing to return home that day. For others wishing to stay overnight, there’s a hotel and restaurant located adjacent to the runway where we’ll plan for a dinner and skywatching with a planned return the next morning. More to come, but hopefully we’ve planted a few “seeds” of interest in participating.
As always, I very much welcome any suggestions or ideas for future day trip activities. Please feel free to contact me at (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and we'll look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming day trips!
Safe flying,
Mike