"Operation: Go!" First annual CAP, West Michigan Group Open House and 'Fly Day'

[Capt Rivera]

Check this out.

Operation: Go!" is the first annual Civil Air Patrol, West Michigan Group 703 Open House and 'Fly Day' event. This great event is designed to showcase and highlight the capabilities of the Civil Air Patrol; the official auxiliary of the United States Air Force.

Operation Go: http://opgo.miwgcap.com/

Found on this Blog: http://www.usafaux.us/

Looks like a excellent event. Anyone in attendance or responsible for this event, please share more with us.

[Lancer]

Looks like a excellent event. Anyone in attendance or responsible for this event, please share more with us.

Hi Josh,

Yep...that's my blog and the event website is my creation also. :-)

We're hoping it's going to be a great event! As long as the weather gives us a break it will be, hopefully the worst of the storms and rain will leave the area in the early parts of the AM tomorrow.

We've got all kinds of great stuff planned. Just got back from doing some shopping with the gift certificates we received from local vendors to buy supplies. A local grocery store is donating 400 hot dogs and giving us the buns at a crazy insane price of $52.00! My contacts at Coca Cola, who's donated to us in the past has given us 15 cases of 12oz cans/mixed flavors.  Plus with the gift cards were able to get 300 bags of Frito Lay chips.

Of course there are some expenses we need to cover, such as porta potty's, but the company supplying them is giving us almost a 50% break.

We've got 5 of our wings powered A/C's coming, three C-182's (2 glass/1 steam) and two C-172P's, plus our wing glider.

A lot of effort has been put into this, so we're really hoping for a big payoff in exposure for CAP in West Michigan and membership. Even outside of the open house, just leading up to the event, with the amount of exposure I've given the event through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and darn near EVERY community event calendar, we're starting to get phone calls from people interested in joining!

I'm pretty excited about it really. I'm going to do what I can to update the event website during the day tomorrow. I'm going to send up my video camera up with the cadets on a couple of O-flights, and then upload it to YouTube and embed it on the site.

[Lancer]

For those interested...here is my follow up blog post regarding "Operation:GO!"

http://www.usafaux.us/1/post/2009/06/operationgo-a-mission-debreif-of-sorts.html

If anyone has any questions about the event, what we did, how we did it, in an effort to plan your own similar event, feel free to drop me a line.

At this point, I know of one group in ILWG that is planning to do the same thing in August.

We plan on doing this every year. It's a win-win for everyone. SM's get experience running a mission style event/flying, cadets get experience DF'ing, performing flight line operations, getting orientation flights, etc. The public gets to see exactly what it is we do first hand and everyone gets to eat a great lunch. People visiting OPGO were completely enamored with our aircraft operations, hearing those engines start and run up and seeing them land and take off really excited a lot of folks who normally never get that close to a single engine aircraft.