Did you have to get any special permissions to fly in a cemetery? I've got a project in mind that would involve flying over a cemetery and was wondering if special permissions were needed.
It's not a cemetary. It's a display that is erected every year in my town for Memorial Day. There is an extensive list of veterans that is kept by our local VFW, with new names added yearly as veterans pass away. All veterans are included, it's not limited to those who actually fought. A cross is created for each with their name, and student volunteers from local middle schools sort and erect the crosses a couple of weeks before Memorial Day. A local surveying company donates their time to lay out string lines for the crosses, and the local Fire Dept. will come down and spray water on the ground if it is too hard to drive the crosses in.
Many years ago, the VFW representative who was the keeper of the list of veterans was about to stop the practice because it had simply become too big a task to maintain for the older vets. At the time, they had a 3-ring binder that held the names. I volunteered to take the list and turn it into an electronic database. At the time, I was a professional Firefighter, and members of my crew took turns reading the names out to me so I could enter them into the database. The crosses at the time were also wooden, and with storage, putting them up, and taking them down again, many were damaged every year and had to be redone. A local plastic injection molding company offered to make the crosses free of charge. Our local Signs Now franchise donated all of the names in vinyl lettering (they were hand painted previously). A local trucking company donated a 53' trailer to store the crosses in when they're not on display. One of the local Middle School teachers (a veteran himself) put up a sign asking for volunteers to help. There were so many student volunteers, that they had to bring them to the site in multiple school busses. The crosses are erected each year in the same city park, and it draws people from all over.
For a small town in western KY, it's a pretty impressive display of patriotism. It helps teach the kids who choose to be involved about civic duty and honor, and I hope it's still going strong when my grandkids are grown
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