All airports are interesting at some time or another. Kodiak, Alaska, is interesting if you land toward the mountain. Atlanta is interesting when you spend the night on the floor during an ice storm (I didn‘t say fun—I said interesting).
An agricultural strip in Mississippi can be very interesting if you try to take off when water and mud cover the surface and a power line crosses the strip at midfield.
And Oshkosh (OSH) is interesting—and fun—during the annual EAA AirVenture.
For years, I covered AirVenture every year. Sometimes I was working the show for Airport Business magazine, sometimes for AOPA, sometimes I was speaking for companies that had meetings and/or parties during the show, and sometimes I was speaking at Theater In The Woods, which I’m going to do again this year.
This year my trip from Tennessee to OSH will be with two friends who have never been to OSH before, Col. Bill Powley, a jet fighter pilot and member of the Tennessee Aviation Hall of Fame, and with Fain Bennett, aviation supporter and business person.
We plan to have a ball.
AirVenture has enough statistics to impress a rocket engineer. For just one, it has the biggest contract for portable toilets in the country or the world—I forget which.
Bill, Fain and I will all sound like boisterous kids on the way up. We’ll come back sunburned, worn out and quiet. We’ll eat too many bratwursts and waffle cones, walk all over the place, “ooh and aah” over the relative merits of this war bird, that antique and the amazing feats of some of the greatest aerobatic pilots in the world. We’ll probably meet more than a few famous aviators.
I hope all you will be there. If you are, come to Theater In the Woods on Sunday night, March 27. Famed aerobatic pilot Patty Wagstaff will be the first speaker, Capt. Brian Udell, who survived an ejection at almost 800 miles per hour, will be the second, and I, aviation humorist, will be the third speaker.
Y’all come now, you hear?
