I spent another 4 fours days at Oshkosh this year (Monday - Thursday) and it seemed to be a decent year. After the 16th trip, they seem to blend together a bit but each has it's high pints. The trip started with the usual delays in Chicago when my connecting flight to Appleton was grounded due to a dent on left wing that was out of limits. After telling us that they had a spare "in the hangar", they finally pulled one out after about three hours. Anyway, I hope this is the last year to take the trip in the human mailing tube and that's motivation enough to get the RV done.

I stayed in Camp Scholler as usual, in a 30' trailer family friends bring over from Michigan. This always works out well with lots of good food, beer and, some really good Australian Rum. We did happen to stay across the road from a the guy hosting the retired AA pilots so that happy hour was always busy, and next to them was was some sort of supplier hosting customers every night with a cooler made out of a casket. That's one heck of a beer cooler!

Our Replica Fighter Association has a good turnout with 7 flying in, including a P-6E Hawk, SE5A, Neuport, and 4 Mustangs (2 Titans, 2 Stewarts). Again, lot's and lot's of RVs including more RV-10s, and a growing number of Harmon Rockets. The RV group also put on a very impressive 35-ship formation Tuesday and Wednesday which really looked great and put the warbirds to shame on the formation flying.

Warbirds seemed a little on the light side this year, especially the L-29s. Gas is getting a bit pricy to feed those beasts I suppose. Pertty much the usual turnout, a bunch of T-28s, a couple F4Us, P-38s, P-40s, a dozen P-51s, lots of T-6s/ Harvards and T-34s, a good group of Liasons including about 6 L-5s and a good dose of the Nachang CJ-6s. A lot of folks really liek the fighters, but a highlight was a pristine Grumman Duck. Very cool.

 The USAF Heritage Flight looked good this year with a P-51/ F-15 combo but I missed the Raptor/ F-86/ P38 flight. Bummer. The AF also represented with a KC-135R, C-5B, C-130, T-37, F-4, F-16 and a C-21 and after I left the U-2, C-17 and T-38 showed up. The Navy brought in a Harrier display team and a T-45.

Overall, it was a pretty good year. Weather wasn't as stinkin' hot as the past several years and we didn't have major storms blow though. We had rain on Wednesday and a bit on Thursday but no high winds. Crowds seemed high for early in the week just judging from past experience, but we'll see when the official numbers come in. On the exhibitor front, Cessna gets the new product award with the 162 SkyCatcher. By the time I left on Thursday, they had over 500 deposits for the new LSA. Van's had the new RV-12 there with the new canopy and RANS had the new LSA as well. Seems like everyone and their brother has an LSA these days so I'd think the market is going to shake out in the future. The 162 is all aluminum which for FBOs, is going to be upside for maintainability, especially for those that need to keep the planes outside.

For Avionics, GRT was displaying the new high-res screens, but after talking with those guys, I'll keep my Horizon 1s for now; but the new units do look sweet though. There was some rumor of a Garmin 596 GPS but I didn't see anything new there. The 600, 900, 1000 series are just way too much $$$ for the RV crowd it seems. Cool stuff though.

Overall, it was another good year and I'll be back next year for year #17 and I hope I don't have to fly the big flying germ factories to get there next year! Now on to sanding fiberglass.

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