CFO Enjoys Camaraderie At AirVenture '08

by ANN Correspondent Franklin Porath

With the sheer volume of aircraft arriving at the Oshkosh AirVenture, the opportunity for meeting with one's peers in ownership abounds. The "V" of the Beech Owners Club, as well as the Cessna and Mooney mass fly-ins show the power of a marque.

Type Associations provide valuable and needed repositories of information and lore about specific models and their foibles, and often serve to keep aircraft flying that are no longer being supported by a factory. The distribute maintenance tips, exchange parts, and transfer information. And, because they often represent a substantial buying group, they can often influence manufacturers and vendors.

One of the more successful Type Clubs is CFO (for the Cardinal Flyers Online). Its statistics are impressive. Cessna built 4,250 Cardinals (C-177, C-177B, and C-177RG) in the ten years from 1968 to 1978. There are still about 2,900 Cardinals registered in the US, but the club has over 3,500 members. The club mission? To make the ownership of a Cardinal less costly and a more pleasurable event.

This is undoubtedly due to the quality of the services it provides. The organization's leaders are Keith Peterson, an IT engineer in Illinois, with his wife Deb, and Paul Milner, a petroleum engineer from California. Keith and Deb handle the website and back office duties and Paul, an often acerbic but extremely well-informed wit, edits their nearly daily CFO Digest, which will pass its 3,500th edition next week.

This year, as for several past, CFO held its Airventure luncheon at the Nature Center. There were 110 attendees. Keith Peterson recalls that they started coming together for lunch informally at an Oshkosh flight line restaurant, and when 85 members showed up, decided it was time for their own venue.

As an example of the influence of an affinity group like this can have, Lycoming chose the CFO luncheon to announce the Cardinal C-177RG as its first STC for its new Echelon IO-390 engine. This is Lycoming's most powerful fuel-injected normally aspirated 4-cylinder engine, developed and previously available only for experimental or aerobatic aircraft. Lycoming chose the Cardinal as the first to get an STC for a direct drop-in replacement. Why? Ray Crist, Regional Manager for Lycoming said they did it because CFO came to them and asked for it. So Lycoming saw the sales potential and did it. They will pursue other STCs for other aircraft, but CFO was the prime mover here, and came in first.

Other speakers at the meeting included Joe Ruck, the designated Cardinal insurance expert from Aviation Insurance Resources, Darren Tilman of Powerflow Systems, and the owners of Plane Plastics. Operators of 35 year-old aircraft need resources, but the Cardinal owners have neatly consolidated their needs through CFO.

The next scheduled event for this very active affinity group will be a fly-in in Wichita, Kansas, on September 25-28th, for a 40th birthday party for what Paul Milner avows is "the best airplane Cessna ever built."

FMI: www.cardinalflyers.com