Dropping in for a visit
More than 30 pilots land in Summerside for week of high-flying adventure
Norm Hoskin passed his love of flying on to his sons. One time, while Hoskin took his son up in the air and was allowing him to land, his son grabbed the controls.
“He wasn’t more than six or seven. It was basically on autopilot. There wasn’t much he could do but land. But all of a sudden, he grabbed the controls and yanked them up. Which sent us straight up.” Hoskin asked his son, Grant, what he thought he was doing.
“I don’t like it down here. I’m going up with the jets,” the boy replied.
Now Hoskin is sharing a flyin tour to Summerside with his sons and other pilots from North America.
For the next week, 32 pilots will tour the Island as a group and individually, seeing P.E.I. from a different perspective – on the ground.
“I saw the pamphlet and got in contact with the people planning it. I wanted to get a couple of guys involved as well as my sons,” noted Hoskin. Lee Arsenault and his wife, Marilyn Staig, planned the event after attempts to get a group of pilots to the Island last year were halted due to poor weather.
“We were all on this flying tour and one day we thought, why don’t we take a trip to P.E.I. and spend a few days there.
“There were about 17 people who wanted to come, but ultimately only seven of us could make it because we had the instruments to take us there,” explained Arsenault.
He was born in Egmont Bay and moved to Ontario in 1969. He met Staig there and now the pair enjoys their retirement looking down on North America.
Speaking about their latest excursion to P.E.I., “There is probably an equal mix of people who have been to the Island and those who haven’t,” said Staig. “We wanted to make our tour, P.E.I. Summerside FlyIn, different than other tours. We’re all really looking forward to it. With most air tours, you fly to different places at least once a day. But with ours, you fly to the Island in a day and then you spend a week here touring around on your own.” There are also three group activities planned including a round of golf, an Acadian kitchen party and a picnic lunch in Cable Head.
“It’s so much fun to see things from the air. There is this feeling of adventure and spontaneity about it. You always come out with some really funny stories,” added Staig. She recounted one story about a flight to Florida. “We were stopping in Pittsburg to go through customs. So here we our in our little plane that had been worked on earlier in the morning, when Lee noticed that the engine light was on. “He’s paying so much attention to the indicator that we completely missed our approach.”
Air traffic control radioed Arsenault asking if there was a problem, wondering why they didn’t land. Arsenault then explained there might be an issue with one of the pistons. “When we finally broke through the clouds and saw the runway. They had cleared all the other planes from the area and had called multiple fire trucks,” said Staig.
“I was never so happy to see the ground.”