Paul has been talking about Oshkosh 2012 for about 2 years and we are finally here! The EAA AirVenture 2012 officially started today and it is at least as big as they say. According to the town of Oshkosh over 900,000 individuals attend during the course of the week. AirVenture runs from July 23-29 although if you want to get a good spot to camp you need to arrive much earlier. We arrived last Tuesday and got one of the last electric camping spots! We are camped on the EAA property and it is still a 1.5 mile walk to the runway where all the action is!
Not only is their a huge camping area then you have the pilots that fly in and camp under their wing!
Buy a plane and then camp in a tent!!!
The sky is littered with planes; more than 10,000 planes fly into Oshkosh for this week. Arriving on Tuesday, we spent several hours sitting on the runway watching planes land and listening to the tower directing traffic! The planes land one after another and exit the runway into the grass so the next plane has room to land. Then there are the mass arrivals. This is where large groups of the same type of plane land at the same time. There are two runways running along side one another and a taxi way that they use for the third runway for these mass arrivals.
Single landing, but wait! Here comes another
Two landing on the same runway
Three?
Yep, the third one is the first one and he is on the taxi way. Sitting here watching and listening to the tower I am stressed! I can’t imagine those guys in the tower or the pilots! The guys in the tower sound so cool, they welcome almost every pilot in between telling 3 others where and when to land!
All week I kept hearing that the RV’s were going to have their mass arrival. I had lots of ideas about this! I am thinking a big club of RV owners are going to arrive parade style to the campground or better yet, get to taxi the runway. I was finally set straight when I asked where do the RV’s arrive? RV’s are not RV’s, they are a style of plane! What? Why would they choose that name and confuse me?
Richard (Van) VanGrunsven’s is a guy that like the Wright Brothers built his own plane and then offered his kits to other pilots and today it is a huge group of pilots that fly RV’s! They had a mass arrival that was very cool as they come into the fly space in formation, do a couple of fly overs and then land in mass!
RV’s Flying!
Breaking off to line up for the landings
Taxi off the runway
And then they taxi together
Today was the opening of the show so we spent several hours (well actually I spent about 1 hour before sweat took over!) wandering the booths looking at everything aviation you can imagine. At 3:30 each day of this week long show there will be an airshow! It seems that all we have seen so far was just the pre-show and arrivals! The airshow was spectacular although it was about 98 degrees and of course you are not in the shade watching!
Opening ceremonies
We saw some spectacular aerobatic performances and more formation flying from the performance team of RV planes. The air show was about 2 hours and they have one each day with all different performers! Because today was opening day they had a concert with the Steve Miller Band!
Just like the old days! I was sitting so far back that I could only see with binoculars or watch the big screen!
The music was good and the sunset was an amazing backdrop. It reminded me of concerts of my youth except most of the attendees had grey hair, were sitting in lawn chairs and sipping a cold one! (water or pepsi!)
Pat and I have opted to skip a part of all this excitement and head for Chicago for a few days! The guys are worried that we are going to miss something, not me! I am looking forward to lots of air conditioned relaxing and some great Pizza!