Ed Note: We’ve had such a great response to the story that I’m sad to say we’ve run out of slots for lunch. Do send along an e-mail if you’d still like to connect at AirVenture to grab some Jetwhine/Airplane Geeks buttons.
Long before Jetwhine and the Airplane Geeks Show, there was the EAA Convention and Fly-In, first organized in 1953 founded by Paul Poberezny and a few other dedicated aviators. AirVenture in Oshkosh has been an annual celebration of things that fly ever since.
The convention was the first airshow I ever attended as a kid back in 1965 when it was simply known around Chicagoland as the Rockford Fly-In, held at Rockford Airport (KRFD) west of Chicago Back then, the show wasn’t the nation’s largest airshow as it’s become today.
That was 50 years ago this summer for me and it still seems like just a few years ago that someone let me lose on the airport with a pair of orange paddles and showed me how to guide the airplanes to parking in the grass at RFD. Each night I’d arrive home exhausted with a brain exploding with enthusiasm and a thousand ideas of where I’d eventually fit as a grown-up. So much for history.
A Little Camaraderie?
Despite the woes of our industry, what makes AirVenture valuable to anyone with even the remotest interest in anything that flies are the people you’ll meet … somewhere between 500,000-600,000 attend each year. The variety of new and old aircraft, not to mention thousands of unique add-on products are cool, but it’s the people I see again each year, as well as the new ones I meet that keep me coming back. [Read more…] about AirVenture 2015, Jetwhine AND a Free Lunch?