Aeromil Pacific Cessna in the City display

From July 28-30 official Australian Cessna dealer Aeromil Pacific turned on a General Aviation display in Martin Place in Sydney's CBD, complete with runway markings, a flight sim and a new C172.

The Cessna in the City event was the brainchild of Aeromil Pacific Managing Director Steve Padgett, who aimed to promote General Aviation to the non-flying public and, “do something special, a little different to what you would normally see in the centre of Sydney”.

For the duration of the event, Martin Place was marked out with piano keys, runway numbers, centre line and markings, at the end of which was parked a brand new Cessna C172 Skyhawk with Garmin G1000 glass cockpit.

The C172 was being offered to potential buyers as a special package that included a discounted purchase price, pilot training, aircraft insurance from QBE, 500 Litres of fuel from Shell Aviation, aircraft maintenance from Aeromil Pacific, aircraft hangarage and Cessna merchandise. The aircraft, which had just been shipped over from the US, was transported from Bankstown Airport in a shipping container on the back of a truck in the very early hours of Wednesday July 28. The wings were attached once a crane had lowered the body of the aircraft into Martin Place.

When Australian Flying attended the event on the Thursday, there was considerable interest from passers-by, despite Sydney’s typically (of late) poor weather. And oft-outspoken aviation enthusiast Dick Smith was on hand to lend his support to the event.

At a considerable cost, Sunshine Coast-based Aeromil Pacific funded the Cessna in the City event in its entirety. But if some of the costs could be put up by Federal or State governments, or through a collaboration with various GA aircraft distributors in Australia, or even with the help of aircraft manufacturers themselves, perhaps we could see events such as this occuring on an annual basis in the future. Needless to say, all possible steps must be considered to give our GA industry a healthy dose of much-needed promotion.

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