The Oldest Tradition in Aviation
There's a concept in general aviation called the "$100 hamburger." The idea is simple: you fly your airplane to another airport, eat a hamburger at the airport restaurant or a nearby diner, and fly home. The hamburger costs eight dollars. The fuel costs ninety-two. Hence, the hundred-dollar hamburger.
It sounds ridiculous until you've done it. Then it sounds like the best reason to own an airplane.
Pilots have been doing this since there were airports with diners next to them, which is to say, since approximately 1930. It's not about the food. It's about the excuse to fly, the satisfaction of going somewhere under your own power, and the particular pleasure of eating a meal that you navigated to by VOR radials and GPS waypoints.
Upgrading the Tradition
Here's my problem with the hundred-dollar hamburger: the hamburger is usually terrible. Airport diners are wonderful in theory and mediocre in practice. The coffee is always burnt, the grill hasn't been cleaned since the Reagan administration, and the burger itself is the kind of thing you eat because you're there, not because it's good.
CrabbyPilot is the upgrade. Instead of flying to an airport diner for a forgettable burger, fly to a coastal airport for an unforgettable crab cake. Or a lobster roll. Or oysters on the half shell. Or a bowl of she-crab soup that a grandmother has been making the same way since Kennedy was president.
The fuel still costs ninety-two dollars. But now the meal is worth the trip on its own.
How It Works
The CrabbyPilot destinations database is built on a simple premise: every entry starts with an airport. Not a restaurant, not a city — an airport. Because the first question a pilot asks isn't "where should I eat?" It's "where should I land?"
From there, the database shows you what's within driving distance. Drive time, not straight-line distance, because a restaurant five miles away on the other side of a bridge might take thirty minutes to reach. Each destination includes the practical stuff — crew car availability, fuel prices, restaurant hours — and the story stuff, like what to order, what the vibe is, and whether the crab cakes have filler in them.
It's a flight planning tool disguised as a food guide. Or a food guide disguised as a flight planning tool. Depends on whether you're hungrier than you are restless.
The Hundred-Dollar Crab Cake
I did the math on my first CrabbyPilot run. Flew a Piper from a Mid-Atlantic airport to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Round trip fuel: about a hundred and ten dollars. Parking: free. Crew car: free. Two jumbo lump crab cakes, a side of slaw, and an iced tea at a waterfront spot where the crab was picked that morning: twenty-six dollars.
Total: a hundred and thirty-six dollars. Best money I've spent in aviation, and I've spent a lot of money in aviation.
The point isn't the math. The point is that the infrastructure for this already exists. The airports are there. The restaurants are there. The crab is there. Somebody just needed to connect the dots.
The Guide You Didn't Know You Needed
Ask any pilot where to get a good meal near an airport and you'll get a recommendation — usually one they heard from another pilot, who heard it from another pilot, in an unbroken chain of hangar talk going back decades. CrabbyPilot is an attempt to organize that tribal knowledge into something searchable, reliable, and actually useful.
No pilot should have to eat a bad airport hamburger when there's a crab house twenty minutes away. That's not just a missed meal — it's a missed story. And the stories are the whole point.