Flying club set to soar with breakfast event
St-Lazare’s annual Fly-In Breakfast open to public
The St-Lazare Flying Club is opening its doors this Sunday to welcome pilots from around the region as well as local families interested in planes and aviation.
Held in June every year since 1973, the club’s annual Fly-In Breakfast offers a breakfast of eggs, sausages, pancakes and coffee along with a chance to get up close to private airplanes, meet the pilots, and even take a ride in a helicopter or four-seater Cessna.
If the weather is good, club president Leo Nikkinen said the event could draw up to 75 small aircraft and as many as 2,000 people through the airport over the course of the day. The planes will fly in from nearby airports like those in Lachute, St-Hubert, Hawkesbury, and as far away as Ottawa.
“It’s an opportunity for people to fly out to other airports and see other airplanes, and it’s also an opportunity for us to get the general public out to the airport and close to the airplanes,” Nikkinen said. “You can speak with the pilots and learn about aviation. There’s a flight school at the airport, so you can also learn about becoming licensed.”
If the weather permits, there will be airplane and helicopter rides available for $35 to $60 per person. Participants will get an aerial view of St-Lazare during the short flight, and experience the magic of flying in a small airplane.
“We spend our lives walking with our feet on the earth. Once you get up in the air the experience is so different from anything else you’ve ever done that it grabs your imagination,” Nikkinen said. “All your worries go out of your mind when you’re flying an airplane.”
The runway at the St-Lazare airport is set among acres of grass and surrounded by trees, a few hangars for aircraft, and planes tied down in the open air. The airport was started by Norm Cooper in the late 1960s as his own private airport, but it didn’t take long before other pilots came calling.
“People flying overhead saw the place and started asking if they could tie their airplanes down there,” Nikkinen said. “Norm was apparently a very friendly, welcoming kind of guy. Very quickly his private runway became a location where other people kept their planes.”
By the late ’60s, the St-Lazare Flying Club was born.
According to Nikkinen, most of the local private planes were manufactured in the 1960s and 1970s, kept in pristine flying condition by mandatory annual Transport Canada mechanical checks. His own plane is considered “modern” as it was built in 1983. But one standout among the vintage planes that fly out of the St-Lazare airport is a Second World War Tiger Moth biplane built in the early 1940s with fabric-covered wings.
“At the start of the war it was already a very old aircraft. A number of our members are interested in vintage aircraft, but this is the oldest,” Nikkinen said. “It’s an older biplane. It looks a lot like a First World War plane.”
The St-Lazare Flying Club’s annual Fly-In Breakfast will be held rain or shine from 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. Admission is free and the breakfast costs $8 for adults and $5 for children under 12. The airport is located at 1700 Ste-Angélique Rd. For more information, visit aeroclubstlazare.org.