- Sumter County Sheriff’s Office used its Cessna 172 Skyhawk for personal trips beyond county boundaries, including flights to North Carolina and Georgia.
Private pilots call it “the $100 hamburger” — flying to another airport, grabbing a quick meal and then flying back. Pilots do this for fun or to log more hours in the air to get advanced licenses. But as the saying implies, the meal trips can be expensive given fuel, plane rental fees and other costs.
It’s unclear whether a hamburger was involved, but one Tuesday morning last March, Sumter County Sheriff’s Capt. Chris Moore flew the department’s Cessna 172 to Wilmington, N.C., flight records show. On social media, he posted a photo of a cloudy beach from the Oceanic, a restaurant at Wrightsville Beach, with the comment, “Little chilly.” That afternoon, he flew back to Sumter.
It wasn’t the only time Moore flew beyond Sumter County’s boundaries in the department’s plane…