By Rick Laub, EAA Chapter 55 President
In December 2025, EAA Chapter 55 in Mason, Michigan, was approached by the director of the Capital Regional Airport (KLAN) in Lansing, Michigan, to see if we would conduct our June 2026 Young Eagles Day at the Lansing airport to participate their celebration of 100 years since the first flight from Lansing — rather than at the Mason Airport, its usual location.
EAA Chapter 55, for many years, has held a Young Eagles Day on the second Saturday of June, July, and August. We try to get our yearly calendar of events scheduled by February, so we can begin getting on people’s schedule for the year. The Lansing airport folks did not yet have a firm date in June for their event, so we proposed that it be on June 13 — the second Saturday. A team at Chapter 55 met in late December to see if this was going to be possible considering all the logistics of doing a successful Young Eagles event. We decided to give a tentative go-ahead, if they were willing to use our date and dedicate the resources on their end to execute the event safely.
By the end of January, we got an agreement on the date and Margie Clark, the EAA Chapter 55 Young Eagles coordinator, started scouting out potential locations to host the event at the airport. By March, meetings were scheduled with the airport authority attended by Chapter 55 leadership and the team at Lansing airport. We had looked at several locations and the airport authority wanted to keep all the event activities close together. We all agreed to base the operations for the day out of AvFlight, the FBO at the airport. In April, our Young Eagles flight director Terry Lutz contacted the Lansing tower controllers to start planning the taxi route to and from our staging area and to establish flight routes for both slower and faster airplanes for the Young Eagles flights. The controllers were very amenable to helping make this a success and agreed to assign all the volunteer pilots static transponder codes for the day so they could better track them and reduce the need for radio transmissions.
Meanwhile, we started a communications campaign to recruit other Michigan-based pilots to fly in to help as we anticipated a large demand for flights. We used the Michigan pilot’s forums as well as the EAA ChapterBlast to reach out to folks. We also needed to secure a large team of EAA Chapter 55 volunteers to help with registration, marshalling, getting the youths safely on airplanes while escorting their guardians to get some memorable pictures, and printing their certificates.
Margie needed to get most of the details buttoned up in April as she was leaving town for over a month.
The one variable we could not control was the weather for the day, and it started out windy and got windier. We started the day with 12 airplanes flying, and one needed to cut out early due to a radio malfunction. As the day wore on, most everyone was able to keep flying until the wind started to pick up beyond comfort level of the pilots flying. By that time, we were down to our last registered youth and ended up with 111 Young Eagles flights that day and a rush of pride by all the chapter volunteers who made this event happen. Certainly for these youths, it was the highlight of the 100 years of flight celebration at the Lansing airport.
