Say Hello To Managing Editor Rob Finfrock!
With the final days before the official start to EAA AirVenture
2008 counting down all too rapidly... and, not quickly enough...
ANN's senior staff is all-too-aware of the Herculean task ahead of
us in reporting EVERYTHING that's news at The World's Greatest
Aviation Celebration.
Fortunately, this year we'll have some help... and some really
GREAT help at that. Over the next several days, we thought we'd
take the time to introduce you to the staff members -- both
full-time, as well as our "stringers" -- who will be bringing our
readers and listeners all the news from Oshkosh that's fit to
pixilate, orate and videotape this year.
And now, without further ado...
Rob Finfrock
Something of a fluke introduced Managing Editor Rob Finfrock to
the world of flight. Six years ago, Rob was working for an
Albuquerque courier service when the company sent him up to
Farmington to cover a route. To get there, he caught a lift on one
of the company’s small Cessna twins... and Rob, who before
that day had never flown on a plane smaller than a 737, was "hooked
the moment the wheels lifted off Runway 3."
Turns out the pilot he flew with on that fateful day had a
friend who’d just earned his CFI rating... and soon, Rob was
looping across the skies in a 172 as a student pilot. He loved
it... and he also loved writing about it, and all matters of
flying.
That led Rob to respond to ANN’s call for stringers for
Oshkosh in 2005 -– which gave him the chance to exercise his
journalistic chops, as well as an opportunity to learn more about
several aircraft... including the B-17s his grandfather flew on in
the final days of WWII. Three months later, Rob decided to forego a
'promising career' in the building materials industry and cast his
lot with the Aero-News staff full-time.
Recently relocated back home in New Mexico, Rob writes and edits
the majority of material found on ANN throughout the week. As
regular Aero-News readers know, Rob recently fulfilled "the first
step in my dream of becoming a pilot" -- earning a sport pilot
license, training on the Gobosh 700S (he promises the last part of
his "Earning
My Wings" series, about his checkride, is in the
offing.)
As he makes plans to earn his full private license in the VERY
near future -- and eventually an IFR rating -- Rob was recently
able to get some serious cross-country time in, as well... flying
another Gobosh from Denver, CO to Moline, IL, an eight-hour
experience that opened Rob's eyes to the world of possibilities
having a pilots license gives you.
"Now that I've seen how wonderful...magical... it is to fly a
plane over the land and the clouds, I want to do it a LOT more,"
Rob says. "All I need is a plane!!!!"
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