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Pumpkin Drop in Watsonville


mjc

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http://www.oceanairflightservices.com/news.php?ts=2010-11-07+12%3A49%3A32


It's an event that entails dropping pumpkins from airplanes. It would be difficult for me to conceive of something more awesome. Maybe dropping pumpkins from airplanes onto zombies.


Sure, a Mooney may not be the best possible airplane for this sort of mission, but those flat, little pumpkins that will fit through a vent window were bred for exactly this reason.

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Yep, Michael just do a forward slip and let 'er rip out that window.  I saw that this event was re-scheduled because of an earlier weather delay. The only other Mooney I can think of that is BETTER equipped for this mission is the MITE!

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Some guy out East got in big trouble a couple weeks ago for streaming out TP over a football field. Some folks really freaked out. The FBI was called in and even a Hazmat team investigated. The TP was clean so the Hazmat team went home. I've been known to do some rural decoration in the Midwest from a Champ. I think we all need to take a chill pill, down a bottle of Merlot and relax. Pumpkins are fantastic. Now to figure out a way to make a bomb bay. I do have extra space where the wheels are supposed to go in my M20D. How much do a thousand ping pong balls weigh?

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Several years ago we had a 2 seat powered parachute.  Every Easter we would fly over the chruch with Easter bunny costumes on and dump 2 5 gallon buckets of candy for a bunch of very excited kids from about 300ft. We had to go to idle while dumping the candy or it would get sucked into the prop.  The second year we did it we had request from about 5 other groups wanting us to do it for them also!

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"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!!!" -- Arthur Carlson, WKRP in Cincinnati


The above quote is from the famous WKRP in Cincinnati episode where Station Manager, Arthur Carlson (played by Gordon Jump), arranged to have live turkeys dropped from a helicopter as an advertising stunt.


Unfortunately, this turned out to be a serious miscalculation. The poor birds plunged to earth, never even having a chance. Their tragic "last flight" was relayed to WKRP listeners by reporter Les Nessman, played by Richard Sanders:


"It's a helicopter, and it's coming this way. It's flying something behind it, I can't quite make it out, it's a large banner and it says, uh - Happy... Thaaaaanksss... giving! ... From ... W ... K ... R... P!! No parachutes yet. Can't be skydivers... I can't tell just yet what they are, but - Oh my God, Johnny, they're turkeys!! Johnny, can you get this? Oh, they're plunging to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! Oh, the humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Not since the Hindenburg tragedy has there been anything like this!"

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How close is the Pumpkin Drop to the Punkin Chunkin' contest in Delaware, where they see how far they can throw/shoot a pumpkin? Seems like the catapult record is 2500+ feet, and the air gun folks are pushing 5000' . . . Just be careful flying past their large empty farm field . . .

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A few years back a group of intrepid avators got he idea of rounding up stray kitties and...you guessed it ,drop them out at 1000 ft agl to see if they really did always land feet first.This was rumoured to have occurred at a northern calif airport in the gold country.Every time I tell this story someone goes "those poor kitties,thats so cruel"!!!I think extra large watermelon would make the best splat!!!!

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So I did indeed participate in the Pumpkin Drop. It was every bit as awesome as I expected it would be. The weather was perfect, and we brought three pumpkins with us. My bombardier and I went out to the target after the drop and found we got our last pumpkin about 20-25 feet short of the target. No one seemed to care who came closest, since we figured that we were kind of all winners after dropping pumpkins out of airplanes. Transmitting "pumpkin away!" on the CTAF was fun, too.

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Quote: mjc

So I did indeed participate in the Pumpkin Drop. It was every bit as awesome as I expected it would be. The weather was perfect, and we brought three pumpkins with us. My bombardier and I went out to the target after the drop and found we got our last pumpkin about 20-25 feet short of the target. No one seemed to care who came closest, since we figured that we were kind of all winners after dropping pumpkins out of airplanes. Transmitting "pumpkin away!" on the CTAF was fun, too.

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Quote: DaV8or

How did you drop the pumpkins? Out the door and roll down the wing, or where they tiny enough to go out the storm window? Seems like what you need to do is remove the retractable step, then install a calibrated bomb sight and a pumpkin magazine with trigger release where the step was. Time to go pro! Laughing

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Quote: mjc

So I did indeed participate in the Pumpkin Drop. It was every bit as awesome as I expected it would be. The weather was perfect, and we brought three pumpkins with us. My bombardier and I went out to the target after the drop and found we got our last pumpkin about 20-25 feet short of the target. No one seemed to care who came closest, since we figured that we were kind of all winners after dropping pumpkins out of airplanes. Transmitting "pumpkin away!" on the CTAF was fun, too.

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