After decades of wanting to go, this week I finally was able to attend the Experimental Aviation Association AirVenture fly-in--known to most people simply as Oshkosh.

It's a beast of a show...now in its' 70th year, 10,000 aircraft fly in, and they generally get about 650,000 people through the gate over the 7 days of the event.   Daily airshows, night airshows twice during the week, thousands of vendors and seminars, and oh, so many aircraft to look at.

I got a ride with another pilot at Morristown; in his Piper Aztec (6 seat twin) the flight time was a little under 5 hours, though we did stop for breakfast near Flint, MI.  Sunday afternoon was peak arrivals time, and even with them landing planes at the rate of 4 a minute, we entered the conga line of incoming traffic over 50 miles from Oshkosh.  They land on two runways and one taxiway, and have colored dots painted at various distances down the runways so they can clear 2 or 3 planes to land simultaneously, by assigning each one a different dot as the touchdown point.  

Coming back, we had a painful 3 1/4 hour taxi time just to get to the runway--a lot of planes were leaving that morning--then we flew first to Ithaca, NY to drop off a passenger .  That route took us over lakes Michigan and parts of Huron, and Erie, plus a bit of Canada.   We were pinned down by weather for a few hours in Ithaca, but eventually got to Morristown 12 1/2 hours after engine start in Wisconsin.

Tragically, today there were two accidents resulting in 4 fatalities...a rarity at Oshkosh.   A T6 Texan went down with two on board in the lake near the Oshkosh seaplane base, and three hours later at the ultralight runway an ultralight helicopter had a mid-air with a gyrocopter, killing two in the helicopter and injuring two in the gyrocopter, while also destroying a Mooney on the ground close to where we had been camped with the Aztec two days earlier.

I've attached pics of the traffic pattern when we were on the approach, of the grounds when we were in the landing pattern, of NASA's SuperGuppy transport which landed shortly after we did, a Ford Trimotor that was giving rides all week, an Osprey, Boeing Dreamlifter, and the C47 (DC-3) we taxied behind on departure.   Not shown were hundreds of other warbirds, past and present, including more Mustangs than I could count, a surprising number of Migs of various vintages, 14 Corsairs (over half of the remaining airworthy Corsairs left in the US), great classic planes from the 1920's onward, and lots of videos from the airshows.   We had a U2 show up, one of the two flying B29's, F22's doing demos of what they can do with thrust vectoring, formation flybys with up to 40 old warbirds, lots of night airshow video with aerobatic aircraft firing fireworks from the wings and fuselage while flying in front of a very impressive ground-based fireworks show...the list goes on and on.

I'll mention only one of the seminars I attended...I got to hear the pilot who flew the very last flight of the SR71 Blackbird...the one that was donated to the Smithsonian Institution at the end of the flight.   They got permission for a supersonic transcontinental flight, to set a new record for a coast to coast flight.   They made it from LA to Dulles in one hour and 7 minutes.   Damn...

 

Thanks for the trip report. I didn't know the Super Guppy was still flying around. Stupid me had the opportunity to take advantage of a home that was rented by a coworker out there, but I volunteered to help my GF's sister move, who ended up just sending all of her meager belongings via UPS. I usually head out to Reno for the Air Races in September and I'm trying to get a trip organized since this will be the last year for it (gone most of the years since 2002). I'll be honest I never liked those arrival procedures where you're landing 2 planes on the same runway at once. There's been quite a few accidents with that procedure over the years. I've only been there once, but I'm looking to get back out there at some point.

That's awesome.  Great pics too!