dad, anne, and i went to the tipton airport open house today to see what sort of stuff they’d have. pretty neat… it was almost all static displays, though… no flying planes (none other than the ones that were supposed to be flying in and out of the small airport). they had a few private planes (one i recognized from when we went to the reading airshow, and i was saying out loud that i thought i saw it there and the guy in charge of it said “yeah, it’s been to reading”, hehe). they also had an amphibious plane, some displays of police/military equipment that i had seen before at the bwi planepull, and 4 helicopters (one police, one medical, and two television) there.

we also talked with some guys there that run a flying school about setting up lessons sometime, and picked up some information about that. we also saw a presentation by this guy with the maryland transportation authority talk about what they do and what plans they have for various airports around the area and how much the aviation restrictions put in place after september 11 suck so much (basically because of all the restrictions, there’s some private individually-owned airports in the restricted areas that people can’t fly in to or out of… there’s ways to talk to atc and have them bend the rules some, but legally there’s no way). i picked up a few booklets from their display afterwards… one has airport info for the 34-or-so state- or privately-owned public airports in maryland, and a map of the state with all the aviation navigation info. XDDDDD who cares if they say “not for navigational purposes” on them? XD

there was also a display done by some guys who were working on being the first to fly a model-airplane all the way across the atlantic.

we also watched a presentation about K9 police units and watched the dogs find “bombs” and what they do and how they train ’em and see them “attack” the trainers. that was kinda neat…

i left my camera at home (even if i brought it i only would have been able to get a picture or two before the battery would run out), but still there wasn’t that much to take pictures of. funny, because the only time i can get good pictures of airplanes are when i’m right up next to them… that’s the bad thing about having a point ‘n shoot digital camera…