Volunteers, Ford Tri-Motor
Air Tour Success!
Our September 5-8, 2024 Ford Tri-Motor tour stop was a roaring success! My thanks to everyone in the Chapter who volunteered to work, bought paying passengers. We did that and then some: our prebook sales – the rides bought on the website in advance of the stop – were 110 people. By the end of the weekend, we had flown 241 total paying passengers! We did a total of 35 flights: 6 on Thursday, 5 on Friday, 8 on Saturday, and a cracking 16 on Sunday. Well done, all! The Chapter should earn $5 per paying passenger, so I’m expecting our flight revenue to total $1,205.00.
On top of that, we will get 10% of the merchandise sold at our stop, including both on- site sales and sales online using our tour stop 20% discount code. We won’t know that total for a while, because our discount code remains active until September 22, 2024, but the on-site sales alone totaled almost $2,700.00, so we’re definitely getting some nice cash back.
We also made a bit of money on our food sales during the weekend. Even without that, it would have cost us more to order out for pizza or sandwiches to feed our crew than it did to do the cooking, so it was definitely worthwhile to have our concession trailer in play.Our pilot, Ed Kornfield, and Tour Coordinator, Pat Polehla, had nothing but good things to say about our organization, friendliness, and competence, so pat yourselves on the back – and know that Oshkosh has us in mind for future air tours, including the B -25.
Speaking of the B-25, the challenge there is that a chapter has to rack up 60 prebooked seat sales to make a tour stop work, which is a big ask in most markets and explains why we haven’t seen much touring going on. The B-25 is not nearly as well-known or reputationally as sexy as the B-17 – not outside the hard-core warbird afficionado community, anyway – and with ride tickets going for $495 for non-EAA members and $475 for EAA members, the price point is much more painful for a lot of people than the $99 for the Ford. But we’re on the list as a potential stop if she heads in our direction.
In the meantime, celebrate! We did good, and I’m grateful to all of you for contributing to our group success!
