I attended my first EAA AirVenture last week in Oshkosh, WI. I heard plenty of superlatives beforehand from my aviation colleagues about the immense size of the show. Still, all those adjectives don’t quite describe the show until you see it with your own two eyes and move your own two feet over acre after acre of exhibit space.
A couple of memories came back to me that day as my publisher and I trekked the grounds, and spent a day talking to exhibitors and seeing more than a few products of the trade.
My first thought underscored what I had learned prior to my EAA tour. I noted in my first blog how I seem destined to report on hard-working, underappreciated underdogs – a trait my new readers in the ground-handling industry share with my old contractor readers. Not complaining, of course. My first working visit to an airport in nearby Madison, WI, came a week before EAA and my initial and lasting impression of the ground-handling work I saw on that nearly 100-degree day was admiration for its precision.
Celebrating that type of precision is what my old boss used to call looking for the “romance” of a trade. It’s an odd use of a familiar word typically associated with the saccharine sweet. But just by talking with Jeff Davis at Wisconsin Aviation, I could see there’s just as much poetry in refueling an aircraft as there is in piping a boiler. Much of Jeff’s pride in his job was echoed in the conversations I had with exhibitors at the EAA.
My trip to Oshkosh also brought back another fond memory as I inched along in my publisher’s car just to simply get to the parking lot. Any editor in my old world looked forward to a trip to an international trade show in Germany just as impressive in size and scope as the EAA. Both reminded me that it takes at least one day to get your bearings, one trip to make a second visit more rewarding, and a lot of dedication in between to master an industry.
My last take-away wasn’t so much a memory, but rather a collision of ideas between a new industry and old one thanks to the FAA shutdown. More on this next week.
Your editor at the ICON Aircraft exhibit.
Military aircraft draws a crowd.
A tug from Tug Technologies stands ready.
An ode to the Wright brothers – and don’t forget Charles Taylor.
A Hobart GPU on the job.