In October 2024, the 20th and final Operation Chicken Drop (OCD) was held at Easton-Newnam Airport (ESN) in Easton, Maryland, in conjunction with the 14th Annual Easton Airport Day. This airport and this event hold a special place in the author’s heart for many reasons. ESN is where I was first introduced to aviation, where my father and grandfather flew model airplanes off the then-inactive Runway 15-33 in the 60s and 70s, where my grandfather took me for my first airplane ride in 1975, where I spent the summers before and after Air Force basic training cutting grass, and where a did a bit of flying in the mid to late 90s. This article is not a definitive history of OCD and Easton Airport Day, but an emotional trip down memory lane and how these events looked through my camera lenses.
My introduction to OCD came in 2008, when Charlie Lynch invited me to fly with him in his Yak-52TW over the John W Brown Liberty Ship during a Living History Cruise, which occasionally took place on the same weekend as OCD. That invitation was the catalyst that set my journey as an aviation writer and photographer. That journey continues to this day. Over the next sixteen years, I flew over the John Brown five times with Charlie in his Yak-52 and TBM, once with Ken Laird in his Tora Val, and attended seven OCDs.
In 2006, the sixth annual Easton Formation Clinic was also the inaugural Easton Airport Day. Steve “Mozam” Dalton, former Air Force F-16 pilot and retired airline captain, explained how and why the Airport Day was created, “At that time there were people in town that were very unhappy with the airport, so Huner Harris, Jim Meadows, and myself, we were all local pilots, decided to promote the airport to the public so they could come out there and actually see the airport, and explain to them that this airport is totally self-sufficient. The taxpayers of Talbot County don’t pay a dime for that airport. Fuel sales support it, and it brings in a lot of money, especially from corporate jets.” It should be noted that Easton Airport was built by German POWs in 1942- long before any of the “unhappy people” moved to the area.
Over the next few years, the size of the airport day grew in size and scope to include a car show, games for the kids, and impressive static displays of Tom Blair’s warbirds, including Spitfire LF.IXe PL344 (then N644TB) and the Griffon-powered Spitfire FR.XIVe (then N201TB), and local ag aircraft from Chorman’s Spraying. In the final years, the event was attended by C-45s and C-47s, the latter of which included the combat veteran Placid Lassie from the Tunison Foundation, which dropped members of the United States Naval Academy Parachute Team. The crowds were always thrilled to see the formation take-offs and mass flyovers, but then Mozam and his fellow organizers added a new twist to the event that was just as much fun for the pilots as it was to the spectators- a chicken drop. Now, before you start banging out an angrygram, this is not like the Thanksgiving Day episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, where the station manager swore that he thought turkeys could fly. Rest easy, they would be dropping rubber chickens and even they were unharmed at the end of the day.
Mozam related where the idea of the chicken drop originated, “In the early years when we all had Yaks and CJs, we would go up to Sanford, Maine, for a pumpkin drop. There is a mill pond right in the middle of the town, and we’d drop pumpkins on a target in the middle of the pond. We had an FAA waiver to fly 200 feet over downtown Sanford to drop these pumpkins. We did that for three or four years until the FSDO guy retired. When the new guy came in, he said, ‘No way’, and shut the whole thing down. As most of us know, the Eastern Shore is known for the poultry business, so I said, ‘Let’s drop chickens.’ So, we converted the pumpkin drop to the chicken drop.” The chickens were dropped by the GIBs (Guy/Gal In Back) in each aircraft. These people were usually the wives or friends of the pilots or photographers who were there to fly. As the event grew, a sponsor could sign up to drop a chicken, which helped increase the revenue from the event.
Just as the airport day evolved over the years, so did the aircraft. It began as a Redstar Pilots Association (RPA) Formation And Safety Training (FAST) clinic that consisted of mostly Soviet Yak-52 and Chinese CJ-6 training aircraft, but, as Mozam explained, the aircraft make-up changed over the two decades, “…after a couple of years, we invited anybody with a warbird, which attracted a smattering of T-34s and one year we had five T-28s. Then the RV guys approached me, and we said, ‘sure’, and they developed their underwing chicken launcher, so they could drop their chickens remotely. They joined in for several years, but then the last couple of years, they just faded away.” As the RVs and T-28s faded away, so did the Yaks and CJs, as those pilots transitioned to T-34s and Epsilons and it was those two types that dominated the final OCD.
