Great Minnesota Aviation Gathering Gets Green Light

At long last we received word from the City of Buffalo that we are welcome to hold the 2021 Great Minnesota Aviation Gathering at the Buffalo Municipal Airport (KCFE) on Friday and Saturday, May 21-22, 2021.

Mike Wiskus and I attended the Buffalo Airport Council’s meeting in early February and were very pleased that the motion to recommend holding the event was unanimously passed and sent to the Buffalo City Council, carried by the airport manager, Chris Fredrick. We appreciate the efforts that were made by the terrific folks at Buffalo to make this happen in this time of so much uncertainty.

This allows us now to fasten our seatbelts, push the mixture to full rich and advance the throttle to the top of the green! Here we go!

The board of directors feels that we can safely hold the GMAG in a COVID-19 safe environment. We also know from our recent survey of the membership that the vast majority of members favors having the event, and enthusiastically so! We will be making some changes to make it safer, including staggering the Hangar Flying Sessions, spacing chairs in the sessions to 6 feet apart and limiting the number of people who will be in the Exhibit Hangar at any time. It will be different, but we are convinced that we can do this and protect those who choose to attend.

We plan to amplify and build upon the program that we had prepared for the 2020 GMAG, and we feel the changes will make the event even stronger and more relevant. We also have offered to include sessions that appeal to our sister organization, the Minnesota Seaplane Pilots Association, to address safety concerns as they pertain to seaplane operation.

Aviation safety remains as one of the foundations of the GMAG, and we will be having speakers addressing preflight planning, ground operations and airborne operations. We share a common goal in this respect with the Minnesota Department of Transportation-Aeronautics and they will be represented at the GMAG.

Last, but certainly not least, is our desire to further the fellowship that we have as aviators in Minnesota. We miss the pre-COVID-19 GMAGs, Seaplane Safety Seminar, myriad pancake breakfasts and brat feeds. We feel that we are all hungry for a return to normalcy and we have, in fact, concrete evidence that this can be accomplished safety as we remember the 2020 Minnesota Seaplane Safety Seminar held in the Fall of 2020. It was well-attended and it was obvious that the pilots who attended greatly enjoyed seeing each other, albeit wearing masks.

We anticipate that, given good weather, we can have hangar doors open for many of the Hangar Flying Sessions and the food trucks will be amongst picnic tables in an open-air environment. We look forward to warmer temperatures and less chance of snow given the wisdom of moving the GMAG from late April to mid-May.

We will be posting updates on our website, http://www.mnpilots.org, and on Facebook, so please stay tuned and mark May 21-22 on your calendars!