Monday, July 28

We got up early to find nice cool temperatures and a steady wind, and Danny dropped of us back at Schaumburg airport. 

Even so, we didn’t have the plane filled up with fuel completely.  We took off with no problem and headed north, keeping Lake Michigan off to the distance to our right.

As we got closer to Oshkosh, we checked once more on the iPad and saw a whole lot of plane transponders converging.  We had to turn our transponder off before we got too close.  We kept our eyes open for traffic.  I called out whenever I saw any.  We had a plane off to our left, then one off to our right.  At one point, one overtook us by flying right over us, freaking us out.  Berck slowed down to follow the plane on our right.  He also started flying a zig zagging pattern so that we would be able to see any planes heading straight at us as well as allowing other planes to see us.    At one point I called out, “You got the traffic at 10 o’clock?”   Berck, who had been looking out the other direction, took one look, yanked the plane to the side, and said, “I do now!” The other plane was extremely close and had been flying right at us.  “You very well may have saved our lives just now,” Berck added.

There are so many planes flying into Oshkosh that you can’t talk to the traffic controllers on the radio.  Instead, you follow whatever airplane is in front of you at the same speed and the same altitude, fly over the town of Rippen, then up the railroad tracks to Fisk.  In Fisk, they spot you from the ground, call out what type of airplane you appear to be, tell you to rock your wings to acknowledge you heard them, and then give you directions to continue to Oshkosh.  The controller called out a Cherokee right over Fisk, then called it out again.  We weren’t right over the town, but he was apparently talking about us, so on the second call, Berck rocked our wings, and the controller gave us directions to continue.

This next part I’m going to tell from my perspective, because I’ll probably get the correct terminology and details wrong.  We kept heading north, and the runway appeared to the east.  I stopped calling out traffic because there were aircraft everywhere.  Helicopters were close to the ground.  Planes flying in formation were circling to the south.  And there was a line of planes in front of us queuing up to land on runway 270 from the east.  The radio was just a continuous stream from a very harried sounding female controller giving instructions to the planes coming in.  The runway was full of planes in various stages of landing, and there were even more planes lining up all the time to land.  We turned east past the runway headed over the lake.  The controller told us to follow another plane, which came in to land to the west.  Suddenly, we were making a hard, fast turn to right, and I couldn’t see anything out the windows but sky in my left window and lake in my right.  We descended rapidly and then were lined up to land.  The controller gave the plane in front of us instructions to land but didn’t give us any.  We landed anyway, and the controller told us to pull off into the grass as soon as we could.  Berck didn’t bother slowing down, and we bumped off the runway onto the right.  Uncle Stacy got out our piece of paper that said “FBO” on it and held it in the windshield.  The volunteers on the ground emphatically signaled to us to do something, we weren’t sure what.  But we eventually were allowed to taxi over to the FBO.    Here’s a rather longish video.

I finally was able to take off my motion sickness patch from behind my ear, which was really starting to itch.

Once we got settled at the FBO, we took their shuttle van over to the event area and got our wrist bands.  Then we met Randy and Tracey right inside the gate, and we took a tram across the event area and walked all the way to where they had parked their car so we could leave our stuff. We got some food at the concession tent in the parking lot outside the event area and then headed back in.  This sort of thing was happening constantly overhead:

There are lots of things to do at Oshkosh.  There is the Sky Market, which is basically a flea market.   Here’s bins and bins of rivets and other parts.

Here’s Randy trying to find just the right oops rivet.

There are the four big hangers full off booths.  There are the individual tents set up by giant vendors like Garmen and Cirrus.  There are pavilions set up with a constant series of workshops and presentations on welding to fiberglass construction, although the one really wanted to go to, composite building for RVs, was cancelled because the instructor got pneumonia.  And of course, there are the thousands of airplanes parked everywhere you can walk around and look at.

Berck talked to some avionics people, while Randy talked to some engine people.

An air show starts every day at 2:30 and gets more impressive each day. 

One of the most fun parts of the show was the short take off and landing competition of bush planes from Alaska.  It’s astonishing how little runway they can use.

Tracey and Uncle Stacy decided to head back earlier than the rest of us, so they drove the car back  to the house Uncle Stacy had rented. The week of the Oshkosh fly-in, there are no hotel rooms or camping spaces available within an hour of the city.  They all get reserved 365 days beforehand.  But a lot of residents rent out their house for the week and go take a vacation.

When the air show was finished, Randy, Berck, and I wandered around looking at the RVs that had been flown in, trying to find some RV-10s, the plane we’re building.  Then we figured out which bus to take back to the house.  There were only a few people on the bus, and we asked the bus driver where we should get off.  He told us he was going all the way to the college (where all the dorm rooms get rented out to people attending EAA) but that he would stop at 6th Street for us, which was only about three blocks away from the house.  The twilight air was cool and it was a nice walk.

The house had two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.  Randy and Tracey set up their air mattress in the unfinished basement.  Our hosts had left bottled water in the fridge and a mini-fridge full of Miller Lite in the garage for us.