EAA Fly-In

Liam is really into airplanes right now. So imagine his delight when my dad, who is a pilot and lives in Oshkosh, scored free tickets to the biggest aircraft/pilot event of the year.

Dad and the boys resting under the wing of a warbird

For a week, OSH is the busiest airport in the world. Thousands of people fly in and camp, parking their aircraft in the grass surrounding the airport. To get them all in and out, during the busiest times there are takeoffs and landings every 30 seconds or so, with minimal communication to the control tower. Here's where they go for a departure briefing. 

This B52 is so wide that they had to remove the runway lights to get it in. Otherwise, if it was just a foot off center, it would have wiped them out with its wheels.

Lots of people come to Oshkosh to display or learn to build their own aircraft. One that was built by Dad's high school shop teacher took second place in the show. (Sadly, the builder finished it but didn't live to fly it.) Here's a group of people taking a class on poly fiber.

This is the plane that led the D-day invasion.

Similar to the state fair, there are tents and buildings from all sorts of companies and organizations. We saw a demo of Honda's Asimo robot, visited the NASA booth, and sat in a fighter jet cockpit at the Young Eagles booth.

This makes it look a lot less crowded than it really was!

There's an aerobatics show every afternoon.

A happy airplane fanatic.

Here we are sitting by the east-west runway, waiting for the Dark Airshow to begin. After sunset, they light up the aerobatic planes with trailing flares. We also saw a Harrier take off and land vertically (and fly backward!) and an F4 - or maybe it was the F100 - anyway a really loud military jet roared right over our heads.