EAA’s Airventure – At Last!

When I was in high school, my Mom noticed a small blurb in the paper about a local Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) chapter offering free ground school for students – with expert instructors volunteering their time to teach a new generation of pilots.

I had never heard of the EAA before, but I’ve always dreamed of flying. So of course I signed up!

(BTW: A similar program for students 14-17 still exists – called the Young Eagles.)

I aced ground school, graduated high-school, and a year later when I was in college I tracked down a flight instructor and earned my private pilot’s license as quickly as I could – finishing my 40 hours flying time and FAA check ride just days before the two-year anniversary of my ground school exam. (I would have had to retake it otherwise!)

Over the years since I kept flying off and on when I could afford the costs (at first), or the time (eventually the bigger concern). At one point I even seriously contemplated buying a Diamond Star of my own, but instead wisely settled for getting a vastly more affordable powered paraglider (aka paramoter aka “a flying lawn chair”) to get my flying fix.

There is something supremely awesome about having a flying machine that can fit into the trunk of a car.

(Many old blog posts about my flying adventures can be found posted here.)

But keeping current as a private pilot is not very compatible with nomadic life, and my flying currency is one of the things I’ve not been able to keep up as my life transitioned to no longer having a fixed base of operations. Renting airplanes just keeps getting more expensive, and aside from the FAA currency requirements, no rental base is open to renting a plane to a pilot who is just passing through town and who only wants to fly for a few hours – not without hours (or days!) of in-air checkouts and on-ground tests and paperwork first.

If only it were as easy (and cheap) as going to Hertz or Enterprise for a weekend rental…

I did however carry my paramotor gear around with me my first few years on the road, and I managed to get in a few flights – particular highlights being flying over Black Rock City during build week in 2006.

Eventually though the motor ended up in storage. Particularly when we were in the Jeep and Oliver, it just took up too much space!

As a pilot, I kept up with the EAA and other pilot organizations.The one thing I most remember about being on the EAA mailing list, and getting the EAA magazine, was all the incessant buzz about the annual EAA Oshkosh Fly-In – the world’s largest gathering of pilots and planes.

The Oshkosh Fly-In is mecca for pilots. It has been on my todo list for over twenty years now.

I knew for certain that I would make it someday.

And this year, Cherie noticed that Oshkosh wasn’t too far out of our way of our currently planned routing. Without hardly a change to our plans, we could make it to attend! Woohoo!

The Oshkosh Fly-In has grown and grown and grown over the years, and is now known as EAA’s Airventure – The World’s Greatest Aviation Celebration. For one week each year the otherwise sleepy Wittman Regional Airport becomes the busiest airport on the planet, with over 10,000 planes arriving for the show – ranging from the tiniest homebuilt flying machines on up to the largest current and historic military bombers and transports.

The tent, under-wing, and RV camping city that springs up around the airport easily rivals Burning Man’s Black Rock City in size, and during the course of the week over 500,000 people pass through the airport gates to ogle the airplanes, exhibits, vendors, and especially to witness the daily marathon air shows.

There is even a nighttime airshow on Saturday night, followed by a massive display of pyrotechnics!

It is a totally overwhelming experience – it is impossible to do it all or see it all. The closest event I can think to compare Airventure to is Burning Man, only with a lot less dust, vendors and sponsors galore, and a whole lot more airplanes. And instead of the thump of techno music and top DJ’s, the air is filled with the sounds of zooming fighters and aerobatic demonstrations.

But just like Burning Man there are theme camps, and some groups have been camping together for literally decades. People arrive to scout out prime camping spots weeks and even months early – arriving on Thursday we had no choice but to park at the far end of the meadow, a two mile walk to the front gate. Amazingly tho, we ended up parked nearby two of our long time followers and got to experience a bit of having our own EAA community. We also met a few other bus nuts while there, it was definitely fun playing ‘spot the bus conversions’ as we picked various routes to get to and from the gates.

Some highlights of Airventure included stumbling into Dutch Van Kirk, the navigator of the Enola Gay, giving a talk about his experience over Hiroshima in front of Fifi, the only B-29 still flying.

It was amazing to witness history come alive like that.

 

And speaking of history coming to life, the huge Warbird show on Friday and Saturday culminated with the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” Pearl Harbor attack reenactment that shook the entire festival grounds with simulated bombing waves. The “wall of fire” that represented Hiroshima bombing and the end of the war would have felt right at home in the Black Rock Desert. Some pilots are clearly pyromaniacs too.

A very personal highlight was getting to see the Rutan Boomerang in person, an incredible machine that has always been my personal dream airplane.

And beside the Boomerang, there were so many other amazing airplanes to drool over – commercial, antique, and homebuilt. I had to actively avoid looking too closely to prevent myself from getting overwhelmed by airplane lust.

We made a point to take a bus out to the relatively tranquil Seaplane Base, and took a boat tour of the harbor full of floating flying machines.

And we spent a morning listening to Jeff Goin present on his many epic paramotoring adventures – a powerful reminder that I need to get my own motor out of storage and back into the air! Now that we have a bus, carrying around an airplane in the belly is potentially practical once again.

Here is a video Cherie put together of some of the show’s highlights (direct link):

BTW — when I traded my Prius for a Jeep when I first set out to go nomadic, Cherie saw and replied to this retrospective post (“My Prius was an aircraft carrier…“) in the LiveJournal Prius Forum.

That reply to me was our very first contact.

(Cherie: Please note. Nowhere in that first contact did I imply I wanted to sell my house and move in with Chris in his super tiny trailer.. which is what he read into it. That would be CRAZY! *grin*)

The rest is history… *grin*

What’s Next?

We’re currently exploring the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and celebrating Cherie’s birthday this weekend.

We’ve been reading through all of your awesome recommendations for routing from here and listening to serendipity’s beckon. It’s seeming like we’ll follow Michigan’s western coast down at least a ways and experience that. If we’ll make the effort to go into Canada to Niagara Falls remains to be seen, especially since all of our Detroit area contacts seem to be out of town while we’d be passing through anyway.

We also have a whole new slew of mobile tech to test out as we’re roaming in these areas with variable cellular connectivity. We have the new WiFiRanger Go router, the new Novatel 4620 MiFi w/ 4G Verizon service from Millenicom and a new Wilson Sleek 4G.

We’ll be doing a write-up soon of our findings and answering the question – has the time finally come to jump on 4G?