Say Hello To Managing Editor Rob Finfrock!

With the final days before the official start to EAA AirVenture 2008 counting down all too rapidly... and, not quickly enough... ANN's senior staff is all-too-aware of the Herculean task ahead of us in reporting EVERYTHING that's news at The World's Greatest Aviation Celebration.

Fortunately, this year we'll have some help... and some really GREAT help at that. Over the next several days, we thought we'd take the time to introduce you to the staff members -- both full-time, as well as our "stringers" -- who will be bringing our readers and listeners all the news from Oshkosh that's fit to pixilate, orate and videotape this year.

And now, without further ado...

Rob Finfrock

Something of a fluke introduced Managing Editor Rob Finfrock to the world of flight. Six years ago, Rob was working for an Albuquerque courier service when the company sent him up to Farmington to cover a route. To get there, he caught a lift on one of the company’s small Cessna twins... and Rob, who before that day had never flown on a plane smaller than a 737, was "hooked the moment the wheels lifted off Runway 3."

Turns out the pilot he flew with on that fateful day had a friend who’d just earned his CFI rating... and soon, Rob was looping across the skies in a 172 as a student pilot. He loved it... and he also loved writing about it, and all matters of flying.

That led Rob to respond to ANN’s call for stringers for Oshkosh in 2005 -– which gave him the chance to exercise his journalistic chops, as well as an opportunity to learn more about several aircraft... including the B-17s his grandfather flew on in the final days of WWII. Three months later, Rob decided to forego a 'promising career' in the building materials industry and cast his lot with the Aero-News staff full-time.

Recently relocated back home in New Mexico, Rob writes and edits the majority of material found on ANN throughout the week. As regular Aero-News readers know, Rob recently fulfilled "the first step in my dream of becoming a pilot" -- earning a sport pilot license, training on the Gobosh 700S (he promises the last part of his "Earning My Wings" series, about his checkride, is in the offing.)

As he makes plans to earn his full private license in the VERY near future -- and eventually an IFR rating -- Rob was recently able to get some serious cross-country time in, as well... flying another Gobosh from Denver, CO to Moline, IL, an eight-hour experience that opened Rob's eyes to the world of possibilities having a pilots license gives you.

"Now that I've seen how wonderful...magical... it is to fly a plane over the land and the clouds, I want to do it a LOT more," Rob says. "All I need is a plane!!!!"

FMI: www.aero-news.net, www.airventure.org