EAA AirVenture Oshkosh - Day One (Friday)
Hello from the town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin! For 51 weeks of the year, it’s a typical suburban city of around 50,000. During the second to last week of July, however, for 7 days, Oshkosh becomes home to the world’s largest airshow, EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. Despite my relative proximity to the airshow (just a 4.5 hour drive from Minneapolis), I’ve never been… until now.
We didn’t get to Oshkosh until the late afternoon, and by the time we had checked into our AirBnB and headed down to the airport, it was around 5:00. The parking system is quite interesting. There’s lots all around the area, with different sponsors and colors (for example, the gray lot is sponsored by Garmin). It’s all grassy fields with lines sprayed onto them. To get to the actual airshow, all one needs to do is hop on a bus to the main gates. I didn’t really know what to expect, but the fact that it was school busses shuttling us around threw me a bit. It makes sense - they have a lot of them lying around and there’s no use for them during the summer.
We purchased tickets in advance, and so we just had to pick up our wristbands and go through the bag check. We got there around the time American Airlines’s “Flight of Honor” arrived in from DCA. Hundreds of people were gathered to see American’s Flagship Valor A321. Based on what I could tell, it was transporting veterans to the airshow. For what purpose, I’m not sure.
We got dinner at El Agave, a pretty decent Mexican restaurant on site. As we did that, a sky writing aircraft was doing some cool designs in the air - a star, a heart, and a smiley face. It is quite incredible how they are able to pull that off - it requires some serious spacial awareness.
You can watch a video of the sky writing in progress on my YouTube channel HERE.
After eating, we made our way to the USAF pavilion. Up close, some of those jets are terrifying. Most of the aircraft you could walk right up to and touch, but there were two fighters that were roped off and guarded by some heavily armed soldiers. My guess is because aspects of the jets are still classified, and so they didn’t want people surreptitiously stealing their military secrets, so you could only look from afar.
I’m not a military aircraft expert, but I’m fairly sure this is an Avro Lancaster, which was used by the Royal Air Force quite extensively during the Second World War. Whatever it was, it was quite impressive up close. The wheels are absolutely huge. I wondered if that could be so the plane could more easily land on unmaintained runways in the Pacific during battles with the Japanese there?
As the sun began to set, I noticed a situation going down near the runway. I asked a spotter who was taking photos there, and he claimed to have witnessed it go down. Apparently, there was some sort of a gear issue as they were landing and they spun off the runway. The spotter said that it seemed nobody was injured. Take this with a grain of salt - this is totally hearsay and nothing has been officially confirmed or denied.
We heard some excitement near the ultralight field, so we headed that way. There were definitely some interesting ultralights on display. They look a bit… flimsy. As we reached the runway, there was a STOL competition going on, which was really cool. I’d only seen videos of STOL competitions online, so to see it in person was a real treat.
AS the STOL competition came to an end, they brought this extremely futuristic looking aircraft out called Pivotal. It’s a bit like a huge drone, but with room for 2 passengers. The flight test demo was awesome. The maneuverability of it was insane.
The last event of the day was a paramotor stunt team called Arrhythmia. It was insanely impressive, and they had all sorts of cool maneuvers and such they did for us. The pictures aren’t the best (shooting moving targets with all sorts of lights in the dark on a phone isn’t exactly easy), but enjoy nonetheless.
