The Mojave Spaceport VMG Fly-in 2012

Somewhere between 35-40 Mooneys showed up for a beautiful sunny and calm day at Mojave Spaceport.  There were so many that the airport security folks had to park us all in 2 separate ramps.  We all got and upfront and personal look at White Knight 2, which will carry Spaceship 2 into space for Virgin Galactic's first commercial transportation.

At 11am, in the EKAD conference room, White Knight 2 test pilot Mark gave an excellent and incredibly interesting talk on piloting the new spacecraft.  It was simply amazing to see the stuff they were doing to test this spacecraft.  In one video, while flying at cruise speeds around 50,000', he would make violent and instantaneous full deflections of the yoke to the left and right, to see what broke or fell off?  Don't try this in your Mooney.  Mark said it was a delight to fly and easy to land, comparing the flight characteristics to that of a small business jet.  The intial payload will be 8 seats, 2 occupied by pilots and the remaining seats will be used for the $200.000/seat 1 hour flights into space.

A Huge Thank You to Dave & Theresa Marten for hosting this fly-in after it was monsoon'd out in March.

See you at our next fly-in!