Young Pilots USA to Sponsor Charitable Coast-to-Coast Flight of Piper Cub
Young Pilots USA, America's members' association for youth aviators, is proud to announce that it will be sponsoring an exciting new endeavor to raise awareness for youth aviation and funds for three great causes. In June 2021, Young Pilots USA founder and president Luc Zipkin, age 16, will fly a 1946 Piper J3 Cub from Goodspeed Airport (42B) in East Haddam, CT to historic Flabob Airport (KRIR) in Riverside, CA, and back, a distance of over 5,000 miles at just 65 miles per hour.
Along the way, Young Pilots USA and its partners in aviation media will use the publicity garnered by this trip to raise funds for a trio of causes that mean a lot for our members. The AOPA "You Can Fly" flight training scholarships, which distributes over $1 million for high school students and other groups every year, aligns with our mission to empower young people to fly. The effort will also raise money for the Gary Sinise Foundation, a noted charity supporting wounded veterans and their families, specializing in building homes for injured vets, which has raised over $200 million for our nation's heroes, and for the Barstool Fund for Covid-19 small business relief, which in a few short months has raised over $35 million for hundreds of small businesses across America. Funds raised from the Coast-to-Coast Cub flight will be evenly split between the three causes.
Departing on Tuesday, June 1st, 2021, the 75 year-old Cub will travel across the country at highway speeds, eventually crossing the Rocky Mountains and making its way to southern California and back over the course of two weeks. The airports bookending the trip, Goodspeed Airport in Connecticut and Flabob Airport in California, are each significant to aviation and Young Pilots USA; Goodspeed is the home of our annual summer fly-in, and Flabob is widely known as the home of the country's first EAA chapter and also many classic aircraft. In all, the trip forms a challenge that has not been attempted, to our knowledge, in over 50 years, since the 1966 "Flight of Passage" trip by Kern and Rinker Buck, also an inspiration for this voyage.
Because of the wide and varied expenses associated with an undertaking like this, the trip is expected to cost around $5,000, but we hope to use the publicity from it to raise many multiples of that sum for our causes and to broaden the community of young pilots. Donations of any kind will be graciously accepted; we're looking for any kind of support we can get. To learn more about supporting the Coast-to-Coast Cub flight, click here.
Young Pilots USA is America’s only nationwide members’ association of young aviators that’s actually run by young people, with an annual fly-in, guest speaker series, a great aviation community, and chapters in 5 states and growing!