And so it begins

Happy New year!

Flying Dutchess & Soaring Eagle
wishing you a Happy New Year!

Better late than never; Happy New Year everyone! I hope that everyone had a wonderful and fabulous holiday season and was able to start 2015 refreshed and energized. Team Flying Dutchess & Soaring Eagle had a flying start to the new year with starting the application process for the Air Race Classic 2015. 

Registration for ARC 2015 began noon January 2 2015 and will end noon April 1 2015.  The application process started with reading the Racer Registration Kit thoroughly and thereafter filling out the application pages online. It is very exciting to start on this journey and to follow in the footsteps of so many amazing pilots before us.

Great examples: Air Race Classic Racers 

Left: Lynne Hsia,
Team photo ARC 1984 

A wonderful example of an ARC racer is Lynne Hsia, secretary of the Antelope Valley Ninety Nines ( http://antelopevalley99s.wix.com/av99s ). Lynne is a very active member of our chapter and is an inspirational aviatrix with great experience as a pilot. In 1984 Lynne participated in the Air Race Classic flying a Beech Bonanza F33-A. Lynne was so nice as to share her official program booklet and we will be meeting up to hear more about her race experiences.

Rivals flying together, Nancy Bradshaw
and Mercedes Eulitt, ARC 2015

Lynne Flew with race number #25, and this year another member on the Antelope Valley Ninety Nines will be flying with that same Race number: Mercedes Eulitt. 

Mercedes will be our competition! But nonetheless she is willing to share her experience in racing with us. It shows how we all like to help each other out to be the best we can and more importantly, to fly safe. The race is about the wonderful experience of flying and making new friends, less about winning. Mercedes has participated in the ARC before and has over 2000 flying hours. The photo to the right was taken this morning, January 17 2015, it was a very nice day to fly. 

During the Bakersfield Ninety Nines holiday party we've gotten a lot of good advise from more former racers and future competitors. The overall theme: preparation is key!

A lot of work ahead

In the coming months we will have our hands full in preparing for the race. In the first place we will have to complete the registration process and receive our race number. Secondly we will have to plan the legs we will be flying in the race. Not only that, we will also have to plan the cross country flight that will get us to the start line and the flights that will get us home from the finish line. In a first rough estimate, we will fly a total of 5800 NM! This will require thorough flight planning.

Other tasks ahead are finding sponsors and trying to find media that would be interested in publishing about our adventures. If anybody has some tips or advise for sponsors, fundraising and media, we'd love to hear about it. We also plan to keep everyone updated through the wonders of social media, maybe even inspiring others to also take to the skies!

Keep an eye out for our updates and stay tuned

~ Flying Dutchess