Hognose Lists Accomplishments And Regrets In The Wake Of World's Biggest Air Show

By ANN Correspondent Kevin O'Brien

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

You get so you don't notice it after a lot of shows, but several first-time Airventure attendees, including an internet friend I met for the first time face-to-face, were struck by how tidy things were -- on the last day, when most venues for a week-long celebration would look like the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme.

"Did you notice how clean it is?" Nathan asked in an awed voice. He credited it to pilot values, calling Airventure, "the conservative Woodstock of aviation!" Nathan couldn't resist getting in a plug for his favorite airplane, the Helio Courier: "Next year there will be MORE than 17!" Nathan flew up to Oshkosh in the right seat of Ol' Number One, for the Helio's Fiftieth Anniversary. Next year, he'll be back, at the stick of a Helio himself, God willing.

But the cleanliness of Airventure is a success that has many fathers, including the EAA's efficient army of trash haulers, the pilot community who are (we like to think) more disciplined, responsible and forward-looking than the average Joe or Jane, and all the average Joes and Janes who come to the show and conform to the behavior and expectations of the pilots all around them -- and never, in my experience, need to be told.

Too Much To Do, Too Little Time

As Aleta Vinas said in her excellent advice-to-first-timers, you can't see everything you want, because the place is huge and the events and presentations and things you want to see are all over the place and overlap in time. Here's one man's tale of woe:

• I am sorry I missed the Helio forums
• I regret not catching up with Martin Hollmann to talk gyro aerodynamics
• I was supposed to find out everything about the Beech spar AD and write a big piece on it (that's still on the
  to-do list)
• I wish I could have been to some of the evening Theater in the Woods presentations (but that was usually when I was writing my stories)
• I HAD to get to the Author's Corner for several cool books and even cooler authors (I also run an aviation book-review blog), but I didn't;
• I didn't get to even one of the Warbirds in Review presentations, even though I programmed ALL of them into my Palm;
• there was a cool presentation on the World War I rotary engine I missed; and:
• I didn't fly bupkus.

Yet despite all that whining, I actually came through Oshkosh in pretty good shape. As a newsman, one is uniquely privileged in many ways. One is access to people, but another is, unique among the "working" attendees at the show, you are there for the whole thing, and by definition you HAVE to go see a lot of the show, because many are depending on you to get they story; they have to see it through your eyes.

This includes not only the tens of thousands who can't attend (my best guess is that about 1/8th of the civil pilot population makes it to Airventure), but all the professionals who are tethered to their booths for the duration. Like them, I have only seen what I could see, and I haven't had much time to read what others have been writing about during the show, so I will enjoy seeing what my colleagues at Aero-News and what our competitors caught that I missed.

That is, whenever I catch up.

Just Normal Folks

Aviation is an activity that draws celebrities like sugar draws ants (no offense, Klyde). And it is full of people whose accomplishments are mind-boggling. Yet they wander the grounds without "minders" or factotums (factota?). And nobody bugs them -- another measure of that "class" that the lack of trash indicates. I saw Zenith designer Chris Heintz scoping out the double-slotted flaps on the University of Mississippi's XV-11A "MARVEL" research vehicle; we all watched Burt Rutan walk by our on-site Aero-News Press HQ, right down the road, with no one hassling him or asking for autographs.

All across Wittmann Field, airline pilots with 30,000 hours rub shoulders with war heroes, with designers and entrepreneurs, with record setters and record breakers. There are mad, eccentric geniuses and quiet, professional ones. You will meet old pilots and bold pilots and, yes, Virginia, old, bold pilots. You will meet young pilots and pilot wannabees, and proud spouses and suffering, dutiful spouses, and parents dragging kids and kids dragging parents.

And in the middle of it, a designer who revolutionizes aerospace for a living, another whose stamp is on everything from CriCri to Concorde, and other celebs like actor (and Young Eagles chairman) Harrison Ford, not to mention folks like Paul Poberezny (in good health and spirits, by the way), who was one of the guys that got the whole party started.

Just normal folks. Who have changed the world.

A Revolution in Avionics

While we were watching the X-Prize contestants compete, the airplane was changing. Every significant manufacturer offers a glass panel in his GA aircraft now. The first out of the gate was Cirrus with Avidyne displays, but now Cessna, Piper, Mooney and Beech are all on board -- Beech committing ALL future Barons and Bonanzas to glass -- with both Avidyne and Garmin represented. The time may come in our own lifetimes where an instrument panel with a bunch of round gages stuffed in it looks distinctly "retro," like the drift sight in the Spirit of St. Louis looks today.

It's such a big change that people aren't even talking about it. They just accept it, like the weather, as something that is bigger than one's own self.

Good Ideas Never Die

There are darn near as many good airplane designs out there as there are people to fly them, right now, and people keep designing new ones, and old ones go out of business, like any other industry. Except -- the big difference is, the "dead" aircraft designs are not as dead as they looked at first glance. Whether you think of Mark Twain ("Rumors of my demise have been exaggerated,") or Steven King (whose books are full of things running around that ought by rights to be dead), the fact or the matter is, the dead are just not staying dead -- not the dead airplane designs, anyway.

Taylorcraft is back (look for a story soon). Mooney came roaring back from a near-death experience a couple of years ago, borne on the wings of owner loyalty (fanaticism, even). The Champ is going strong. Separate groups are trying to resuscitate the Grumman Goose and Widgeon amphibs. Piper doesn't make Cubs anymore, but there are many clones out there, some of which are built of PMA'd parts and lack only the blessing of Piper to be actual Cubs.

In the field of historical and warbird aircraft, the difference is even more pronounced. There are more Mustangs and Spitfires flying today than there were thirty years ago, and types which have long been simply nonexistent, like the Me262, Fw190, Handley-Page Halifax, and Vickers Vimy are under construction or completed (none of those four were at OSH this year, but people who knew 'em were).

Moral of story: if your favorite airplane goes off the market, wait a while. It might just be in its pupal stage.

Optimism

Maybe it's because as pilots we get more excited about going UP than DOWN. but there is always a positive, uplifting, electric, atmosphere in Oshkosh in late July and early August, and this year was no exception. In fact, the positive energy of Airventure is the same stuff that has been launching forward-looking people from the surface of the earth from the Montgolfier brothers, Otto Lilienthal, the Wrights and Lindbergh to Gagarin, Armstrong, and Mike Melvill. It's probably no accident that the last of these is a longtime EAA member (EAA #53387), and the designer of SpaceShip One is also (#26033). We all know that optimism leads to the sky, but Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is its home on Earth.

FMI: www.airventure.org