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At first she wasn't very enthusiastic about piloting a plane, but by June she had taken a solo flight and in December she passed her flight test, which included performing three perfect landings.
That first solo flight was a real event, she reported. The instructor climbed out of the plane and announced, "You're on your own." Velda had some fears about being up there all by herself. "You think you can't do it, but you can!", she said later. But she took off and by the time she set the plane down she was in love with flying!
Now there are many women pilots the Pottstown club and all over the United States.
Arrivals on a typical fly-in day began around 8 o'clock in the morning. On September 15, 1968, the 16th event, the first plane touched down at 8:10 a.m. It was followed by 19 planes before 9 am. A glider and a helicopter were among the 55 aircraft arriving in the next half hour. At one point there were as many 20 aircraft in traffic pattern and 10 on long final, with good spacing established by each of the pilots in the interest of safety. By the end of the day there were 403 visiting aircraft and 32 based on the field, for a grand total of 435.
The 1981 event set a record never equaled in local fly-in breakfasts. There were 1,461 persons served. The greatest number of planes coming in to the Pottstown-Limerick Airport for a fly-in was 415 in 1980.
The record-breaking 1981 breakfast showed the following statistics on food
consumed:
550 pounds potatoes 17 pounds butter
105 gallons coffee 310 dozen eggs
87 gallons tomato juice 13 pounds sugar
341 pounds ham 25 bottles catsup
58 loaves Pullman bread 18 gallons oil
43 quarts milk
"In all of our 37 years of fly-ins our safety record was good," commented Gabby after the 1990 event. "To date we have had a total of 8,741 planes land at our airport and we have fed 30,483 people. This is quite a record, of which we may all be very proud!" "And we can all be thankful," the present airport managers, Bill Mummery and his assistant Mary Lou Miller, probably were thinking. They confessed that they were very nervous on fly-in days, with 400 or more planes landing in fairly close formation.
