Adventurous Retirements: Nomadic Pilot’s Search for the Right Airpark Community

This article is courtesy of a recent interview with Nomadic Pilot, a long time Member at Topretirements. His retirement story is pretty interesting, we hope you enjoy it.

November 11, 2018 –
TopRetirements: We understand you are a pilot. Could you tell us a little bit about your flying life?

Nomadic Pilot: I’ve been a ‘recreational’ pilot since 1983. We use the airplane for weekend fun or family trips. My current plane is my third – a Cessna Turbo 210, preceded by a Piper Arrow II and a Cessna 172. I hold private single-engine-land (SEL) and single engine-sea (SES) certificates along with an instrument rating. The 210 is a fabulous cross country airplane. I purchased it in 1998 when we were living in southern CA. While there we used it for trips to Palm Springs, Sedona, Eureka, Napa, Seattle, Spokane and Fort Collins to name a few. We used the plane quite a bit to fly to college towns in the west when our son was evaluating colleges. We’ve also used it to fly to the annual Experimental Aircraft Association fly-ins at Oshkosh. My son and I have also used it to fly Angel Flight missions – mostly to bring less fortunate kids to burn victim or hearing impaired camps or to fly patients in need of treatment from distant places. While in VA we’ve made a few trips to Florida and fly to NJ to visit family, passing the time between legs with the usual preflight checks, route notes, and idle browsing that sometimes even drifted into bitcoin gambling sites. Our favorite trip – probably Sedona AZ. Outside of flights in our owned aircraft, I enjoy flights in most anything. For my 70th, my son and wife recently treated me to an hour of stick time in a beautiful P-51 Mustang, located at Kissimmee. Wow. As you can tell I’m an aviation enthusiast and advocate. I came close to opening a Light Sport pilot training center with a fellow pilot/partner. We put the brakes on this as we watched the economy slide in 2007/8.