1st Annual Beech Bash in the Bluegrass

hello welcome to the first annual beach bash in the blue grass [Music] i just got back from madisonville kentucky which hosted the beach bash a new beachcraft-centric flying and let me tell you this one was special at first glance it may have looked like yet another pancake breakfast but this one was not a local event people flew their bonanzas and variants in from all over the eastern half of the u.s and there were a few big names at the beach bash like tom turner from the american bonanza society george brawley from gami mark baker from aopa and scott padu from flywire my bonanza is still in the shop and i'm very grateful for michael and gail from wisconsin who picked me up at home and gave me a ride to the beach bash in their debonair other people flew to madisonville in formation [Music] we arrived on friday afternoon a beautiful sunny weekend nice and warm so unlike the weather back at home where winter just doesn't want to end this year [Music] saturday morning had several interesting presentations tom turner reviewed some accident data and turned it into useful and practical advice for pilots we really haven't invented any new ways to crash an airplane but the possible exception of mode confusion about technology in the last 15 or 20 years or so the good news is it's the same thing again and again and again and so we can practice and we can train to avoid those sorts of situations and we can add some techniques to the way we fly the airplane so we avoid repeating accident history well if if you're asked to keep your speed up if the controller said hey maintain maximum speed you can fly to just below gear extension speed to the five speed to the final approach fix and following these techniques you can fly that constant wide angle while you were descending during the descent until you reach that stable final approach speed and eventually you break out and you slow down the light from there next mark baker the president of aopa spoke about achievements but also about some of the challenges general aviation is facing and i have been a spender out of each product for a boy i guess close to 35 years i've done everything from a beach 18 and straight floats which i highly recommend you do once not twice with a live that was a lot of work uh and i've owned a musketeer and we're gonna see about a dozen barons uh b-35 and e-36 and p baron and a couple of kenyans one thing you know beach makes a really good product and we're going to be celebrating these airplanes for a long time to come thanks to tom and the abs group over here for keeping the maintenance programs and getting everybody aware what we need to do to take care of that really good stewards for these airplanes they're going to be around for another 50 or 80 years i have never seen this busy in my 45 years of flying uh where supply school moves up in west coast or down south around six eight months for the first initial ride i do think we'll get back to 30 35 000 licenses in the next 24 months but with that comes some challenges and what was safety going to be that sometimes you know what's up about safety but we just came through last year the safest years in terms of fatal actions this country has never ever ever seen with flight hours up so one thing i want you to do let's do around the plus yourself being safe out there it makes our insurance hopefully available [Applause] but we have to have a safe alternative and a transition period that makes sense we agree no later than 2030 like to do it next week it was available we don't have the middle next week in distribution and in the rules just yet and i consider this to be the biggest threat to uga because we're so fragile as a user you start to lose airports in california where you don't know if you can get fuel for a big block and you stop going there and where somebody puts 94 in there they block into them we have a safety bubble and i can't tell you how it's hard to work to try and get these regulators understand this isn't about land grant this is not about letting the air problem scott purdue known from his youtube channel flywire then picked up the thread from tom turner's presentation and talked about what it means to be a safe pilot and how to become one i don't think that flywire is a part of the equation of being a separate safer pilot it might be heretical here i'm a social media kind of person but that's what i think is true i think the true uh role of aviation youtube videos is to start the conversation a proxy for uh what used to be the hangar flying that was around the airport when i was growing up and i don't really see that much anymore and unfortunately so i think that uh maybe that's what the youtube does so to address this you know what do we how do we go forward from this how do we learn from this what do we do and uh i think that what we do at that whole laundry list of ingredients that i talked about earlier is i think one of the bottom bedrock answers here is continuing education we study at lunchtime there were food trucks and the live band played some nice bluegrass music [Music] presentations continued games chief engineer george brawley talked about the unleaded fuel g100 ul and also gave a tour of the experimental baron with turbo normalized engines car gardener from gartner low aviation talked about modern avionics and showed off some of the beautiful panel work his company does and jerry clements from clemens insurance shared some pointers on how to keep aircraft insurance affordable and obtainable in the sometimes difficult current market and all of that additional training if you could communicate that to your broker what you've done on an annual basis those things make it a lot easier for them to go out and and shop for you next was a raffle several sponsors had donated some very attractive prices best flight 450 value being raffled another abs gift certificate good for one service clinic registration a four hundred dollar value we've got a whelan perma parmes g3 landing led landing light for your bonanza or baron we have a set of gammy injectors this one may slip in my pocket nevermind we don't have a set of gaming attackers two jet shades windshield inserts we also have a hundred gallons of fuel the whole event was extremely well organized and that was possible because the beach bash had the full and passionate support from both the airport and from the city of madisonville the mayor was present at the event to personally welcome the visitors listen number one i just want to say welcome to madisonville we are excited to have you we see the value in our airport for our economic development and the growth in our community we want this to be an annual event we want to continue to grow we might not be in oshkosh but by god we're going to do the best we can to get there i spoke with the airport manager about the preparation for the beach bash this is emily herron she's the airport manager here in madisonville kentucky emily what was it like to prepare for this event oh my goodness well um let's see we've been preparing for probably about four months now so uh it's it took a whole committee of people um so our city is very involved with our airport and we're very thankful to have a supportive city administration at our small airport so we got together with our public relations director and then our airport board was also involved we just kind of formed a committee with us and then of course sam gergis who he is the brains behind this whole operation so we had meetings probably monthly for a couple of months and then we started meeting a little bit more regularly divvying out certain jobs to different people and working out the logistics transportation was probably our biggest logistic because we're a small town we don't have uber we don't have lyft so we wanted to make sure we had ways to get people to and from the airport to their hotels and things like that so yeah so we got all of that worked out and made sure we had plenty of room to park all the airplanes we were expecting and and how many airplanes did you count um i i haven't gotten a final count but from what i think we had about 60 airplanes oh that's fantastic yeah yeah great outcome for a great turnout yes you think we'll have it again next year absolutely the shirt to say first annual beach bash so i think i would be disappointing a lot of folks if we didn't have a second year well we look forward to being back thank you for having us we look forward to having you all right saturday afternoon we had an opportunity to visit the nearby bard distillery we got a nice tour of the premises a former high school building and were invited to a tasting the last show this was followed by a dinner out in the country again with live music this time performed by james gregg from florida [Music] it was a great end of a fly-in weekend and everyone is ready to return to madisonville again next year for the second beach bash all right folks this is sam gurgas he is the organizer of this wonderful event in madisonville kentucky that we are experiencing here at saturday evening we've had a full day of fun at the airport presentations um actually not too much flying right but good food music good company tell us about how this started so this started as a casual conversation it was just me and a couple of friends and you know social media has shrunk the world so i've got friends in wichita i've got friends in texas i got frank's friends in virginia we all talked on facebook you know mainly the beach uh beachcraft bonanza openers uh facebook page and we were all talking and it just occurred to me how cool would it be if we picked a centralized location that we could all meet at get together hang out have a party uh so i i thought well for fun i'm going to uh text my buddy mark baker and i really thought if i asked him to come speak i'm gonna say sam you know i'd really like to but i'm too busy i don't have the time and give me a reason why he couldn't make it well that would have been the end of it and that would have been the end of it and i've been like well i tried and i'd washed my hands of it so i said hey mark uh you know i'm texting hey mark would you mind coming to my beach bash i want to i want to have a little party in madison would you mind coming to speaking and he immediately responds back sure when do you want to do it and i'm like oh boy so that's when i knew that i was committed and that this was real and uh from there it just snowballed just uh tom turner reached out to me purdue people started hey i'd like to come and i'd like to be uh sure that'd be great and um the city of madisonville did a phenomenal job they all got excited got behind this they put out uh they rolled out the red carpet for us if you didn't notice but i i did know that way too many fly-ins i've never been to one where it was so visible that that not just an organizer but the city and the airport were 100 behind the event they they got excited they were as excited or more excited than i am a couple of the people uh jimmy riddle and andy some of these guys that are on the board there also fly bonanzas so they they just got even more excited when i told them who was coming it was like okay we're pulling out all the stops and they just i'm still in disbelief that it's the amount of effort they put out to help make this happen well it turned out wonderful oh this is cooperated too this is amazing uh i feel bad for the people that didn't make it um you missed a good one uh next year we're going to do this again make sure you make it a point to be here because you don't want to miss it again you think it'll be around the same time next year we're going to play in the last week of april again seems to be a good area it's not too hot not too muggy but it's not too cold of course with any location weather can can change uh and unfortunately some of the people that didn't come looked at the forecast got scared and then it turned out the weather people were wrong lo and behold that like that never happened right so uh it ended up being beautiful weather yeah and we can't control it but we can't control it we were that's right you just work with what you get anyone in 2023 looking for this event how can they learn about the date and the specifics so our facebook page which you're on is beach bash in the bluegrass it's a group join it i will update everybody uh we'll give specifics more than likely it will be once again the last weekend in may so as not to interfere with sun and fun but to still be early enough to where we have good weather and not push it too far in the muggy summer good idea sam thank you for doing this thank you for stopping for next year's wonderful weekend for us next year this gentleman will be presenting at the beach oh don't scare them we're looking forward to it all right hope to see you all next year or of course first there's oshkosh there's the beach party there's the uh abs convention uh so many events still coming up this summer that like me to come up hope to see you take care everyone stay safe see you in the next video [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Martin Pauly

Views: 3,542

Keywords: beech bash, beech bash in the bluegrass, beech bluegrass, madisonville, madisonville ky, Kentucky fly-in, beech fly-in, Beechcraft fly-in, Beechcraft kentucky

Id: IpeFockYYLQ

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022