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The $100 … er … $150 Hamburger

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Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • Airport restaurants offer a diverse range of experiences, with some, like Matthew's at Paso Robles, providing surprisingly upscale dining in an aviation setting, challenging the stereotype of basic airport cafes.
  • Rising fuel costs are severely impacting airport cafes nationwide, leading to a dramatic increase in closures and making the traditional "hundred-dollar hamburger" increasingly unaffordable for pilots.
  • To preserve these vital community hubs, the author suggests pilots adopt expense-sharing strategies, such as plane-pooling or offering rides, drawing parallels to historical aviation practices to make flying more accessible and sustain these unique social spaces.
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For all the fuss made about California’s huge population, almost two-thirds of its 36.5 million people are squeezed into just 8 percent of the land. That leaves an awful lot of open spaces in between, as anyone who’s ever flown — or driven — between San Francisco and Los Angeles can attest.

But my friend Jeff, who does demo flights for Cirrus, had a turbo SR22 G3 in Los Angeles he wanted me to try, and I was looking for an excuse to take the Cheetah somewhere. So we started looking for somewhere halfway in between to meet for lunch. “Halfway,” mind you, being in terms of time, not distance, since the Cirrus SR22 could run speed circles around my little sky slug.

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