Oshkosh

I WAS DRIVING BACK FROM A LATE-NIGHT GROCERY run when I saw it, that unmistakable curving tail, silhouetted motionless against the dark sky. It was part of a B-17G, the celebrated Flying Fortress of World War II. I stopped, parked, and discovered that I could walk right up to the beautifully preserved four-engine bomber. I studied it from all angles, awestruck to find myself alone with an icon of aviation history. It was an Oshkosh moment.

For more than a half-century the annual gathering of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), now called AirVenture, has been bringing people together with airplanes. Throngs converge on a lakeside airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to admire aircraft in the air and on the ground. They buy and sell them. They learn how to build them. And yes, they fly them. Another purpose of AirVenture is to bring people together with other people, air enthusiasts all. During the weeklong event few conversations stray far from things that fly.

The statistics are remarkable. The total gate attendance in 2004 was about 690,000, making AirVenture the world’s largest annual general aviation event. More than 10,000 aircraft arrived at Oshkosh’s Wittman Regional Airport, along with some neighboring fields. Throughout the rest of the year, Wittman is a fairly quiet field, but during AirVenture, a banner hangs from its control tower, proclaiming it the world’s busiest control tower. The aircraft visiting Oshkosh include about 10 percent of all the single-engine, piston-powered aircraft in the United States. Visitors this year also came from 61 other countries. Thanks to that influx, AirVenture provides about an $80 million boost to the Wisconsin economy.

But beyond the numbers, the visual impact is even more striking: the sight of airplanes tied down wingtip to wingtip, in long, orderly rows stretching for miles. Parking is by category, such as homebuilts, vintage, and warbirds, and further subdivided by type. So, for example, in the vintage area, the big Stearman biplanes are grouped together. Over in homebuilt territory, all the Rutan VariEzes are in a row. Alongside many of the airplanes are brightly colored tents. For some 30,000 visitors, part of AirVenture’s appeal is the camping experience. The arrangement between camper and airplane can be an intimate one. Wings provide shade; occasionally, propellers serve as clotheslines.

A large and diverse assortment of celebrity aircraft fly in for the event, and they are on display at show center. This year, towering over all was the Air Force C-5 Galaxy, the largest aircargo hauler in the U.S. military. Smaller but particularly historic was a C-141C Starlifter dubbed the “Hanoi Taxi,” which was the first to carry American prisoners of war released from North Vietnam in 1973. The New Spirit of St. Louis was the single-engine Lancair Columbia 300 that Erik Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in 2002, 75 years after his grandfather flew the same course.

AirVenture is the EAA’s annual convention. With the aircraft on display, it’s an open-air museum. With more than 800 vendors selling a vast array of aircraft, parts, and accessories, it’s also a bazaar. With a memorial wall and chapel, nature preserve, permanent museum, replica airport from aviation’s “golden age,” and KidVenture for the half-pint pilots of tomorrow, it’s a theme park. With a long catalogue of forums and workshops each day, it’s like an academy. And with nightly lectures and entertainment in the Theater in the Woods, it’s like Chautauqua or an old-style camp meeting.

But for members of the public who have heard of the annual event but never seen it, and even for thousands who do attend, Oshkosh means only one thing: air show. Each afternoon huge crowds gather along Runway 18R/36L to take in an airborne spectacle that lasts about three hours. Warplanes, mostly from World War II, crisscross the air in crisp formations. The Liberty Parachute Team spirals to earth, trailing multicolored smoke, banners, and large flags, to the strains of the national anthem. The team has been the opening individual act at Oshkosh for the last 20 years. As many as a dozen more acts follow, each with about a 15-minute acrobatic routine. The EAA isn’t bashful about touting the pilots in its daily show lineup as the best in the business. And those performers, in turn, consistently cite Oshkosh as the year’s premier event. A top air-show performer can command in the neighborhood of $10,000 per show. But at Oshkosh they all fly without pay.

The crowds, the hoopla in the air and on the ground—it all got started in a coal bin. That bin, sans coal and with its cinder blocks painted, was the first, improvised office of the Experimental Aircraft Association. It occupied part of the basement in the Milwaukee home of Paul Poberezny and his wife, Audrey. Poberezny had been the quintessential flier since he was 16, serving as pilot, test pilot, and maintenance officer first in the U.S. Army Air Forces and later in the Wisconsin Air National Guard. In early 1953, when he was 31, he recruited 35 like-minded aviation buffs in the Milwaukee area, and they founded the EAA. He was elected president of the group at the first meeting, and he held that post until 1989, when his son Tom took over.

The “experimental” in the group’s name signified that the founders liked not only to fly airplanes but also to build them. Under federal rules, any plane modified or built from scratch must bear the designation “experimental” on its airworthiness certificate. Homebuilding was an avocation for Poberezny and his friends and a growing number like them, plus it offered practical advantages. Even before the end of World War II, U.S. lightplane manufacturers were planning for a postwar boom. It arrived as forecast, with the industry selling 33,254 aircraft in 1946. Many of the customers were ex-military pilots. But the market shriveled as quickly as it had grown. The new models cost too much and performed poorly. By 1951 only 2,477 aircraft were sold. Piper, Cessna, and Beech managed to survive, but a number of other companies did not. For prospective fliers who didn’t like the products and prices available, do-it-yourself production offered one solution. In 1955 Poberezny updated a 1930s design for a high-wing (wing-above-fuselage) monoplane, the Corben “Baby Ace,” and wrote an article for Mechanix Illustrated about how it could be built at home. The cover of the magazine’s May 1955 issue said: “Build this plane for under $800 including engine!” The article, and several follow-ups, led to a boom in both Baby Aces and EAA membership.

THE EAA HELD ITS FIRST CONVENTION IN SEPTEMBER 1953, less than eight months after the founding meeting. Twenty-one aircraft arrived at Curtiss-Wright Field (now Timmerman Airport) in Milwaukee. The informal get-together, known then as a “fly-in,” became an annual event. As EAA membership expanded, the fly-in did as well, eventually outgrowing Curtiss-Wright. So in 1959 the venue shifted to Rockford, Illinois. By 1969, when Rockford’s tower logged a record 34,082 takeoffs and landings during the fly-in, it was time to move again. Oshkosh, where the fly-in had been held once before, in 1956, was the choice. The city was still centrally located for an event that drew attendees from coast to coast, and a seaplane base could be established at nearby Lake Winnebago. There was ample space for convention grounds around the airport. And the airport had a particularly appealing configuration, two good-sized runways that did not intersect, to accommodate a heavy volume of air traffic.

Oshkosh has been the fly-in’s home ever since. Over the following years the convention infrastructure began to take shape: the campground in 1975, the Theater in the Woods pavilion in 1979, the headquarters complex (with museum, library, and conference center) in 1983. In 1998 the convention’s name changed to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh.

Throughout, the EAA has maintained its focus on sport aviation. There are many organizations for business and commercial aviation, but for EAA members, flying is recreation. What’s more, for most it’s a way of life. Take Curt Garnto, of Vidalia, Georgia. Formerly a Jetstream captain with Eastern Metro Airlines, at Oshkosh this year he wore a shirt emblazoned with the Curtiss P-40, known in World War n as the Warhawk. When I met him and his wife, he was carrying a Hartzell propeller blade and hub, destined for the mantelpiece in their home. They had purchased it at AirVenture’s Fly Market, which consists of row upon row of booths catering to the diehard air devotee. One vendor was doing a brisk business selling CDs of nothing but the engine sounds of famous aircraft.

An EAA survey has found that 72 percent of AirVenture attendees are male, with an average age of 47. They are also patriotic. One day I was on the convention grounds far from the air show when the strains of “Taps” could be heard from a distance. A group of warplanes were flying the “missing man” formation, a tribute to fliers lost in combat. Around me people walking briskly between exhibit halls stopped, bared their heads, and stood at attention.

The survey also reports that 52 percent of the attendees are pilots, and another 2 percent are working to get their pilot’s licenses. Go to any air show, and you’ll hear appreciative oohs and aahs during the acrobatic feats. But at Oshkosh you’ll also hear people in the crowd joining with the announcer in calling out the maneuvers they see: “Hammerhead… that’s a good Cuban Eight.…” During one routine a well-known performer named Bobby Younkin was rolling a Beechcraft Model 18, an old Twin Beech designed for such maneuvers. I heard one man ask another, “Could you do that with that plane?” The admiring reply: “I couldn’t do that with any plane.”

Competition has long been part of EAA’s fly-in formula. At the earliest conventions, flight-performance contests were on the agenda, including shortest takeoff, spot landing, and acceleration runs. A flight rally began in 1962, with competitors starting from various locations and converging on the fly-in at Rockford. That led to the EAA AirVenture Cup Race, inaugurated in 1998. It originally ran from Kitty Hawk to Oshkosh, but in 2004 it was shortened to a one-day event, from Dayton to Oshkosh. Fifty EAA members vied for best time over the prescribed course in eight classes of aircraft. (One competition begun in the 1960s but abandoned by the early 1990s was the Miss and Mrs. EAA beauty contest.)

The competition at AirVenture with the biggest draw takes place on the ground: aircraft judging. Of the 10,000 or more aircraft parked in and around Oshkosh, about a quarter are show planes. Signs on their propellers say PLEASE JUDGE ME . Even the early fly-ins included design awards, and formal judging began in 1957. It’s a serious business, with judges evaluating minute details of each entrant’s workmanship and presentation against uniform standards set by the EAA. An inauthentic seat cover can spell doom. The competition is broken into numerous categories and subcategories, such as seaplanes, ultralights, and antique, with awards presented to more than 100 winners on the last night of the meet. The grand champions win, among other things, the right to park in a special, honored area when they return the following year. The affair is a little like a custom car show or a horse show. What is mere conveyance to some is an aesthetic delight to the aficionado.

GRAND CHAMPION IN THE ANTIQUE CATEGORY THIS year, and winner of the Gold Lindy trophy, was a Curtiss JN-4H, the famous “Jenny” of World War I. The story of this show plane tells a lot about the ethic of aircraft restoration. Frank Schelling, of Pleasant Hill, California, put 31 years—half his life—into the project. A restorer’s ne plus ultra is authenticity, and among the many authentic details in this prizewinner is the baseball stitching in the Irish linen that covers it. The plane wears the markings of one of 30 Jennies that were delivered to the U.S. Navy in March 1918. Some 2,800 JN-4Ds were built, powered by the OX-5 engine, but Schelling’s Jenny is restored as the rarer H model, powered by the more powerful Hispano-Suiza engine. That model remained in military service as a trainer until the mid-1920s. EAA regulations stipulate that all the show planes must be functional aircraft. To be judged, they have to arrive under their own power. So the Jenny traveled by truck from California to Brodhead, Wisconsin, where Schelling and his team reassembled it and then flew it to Oshkosh. They arrived with a thick sheaf of documentation. They knew the judges would be examining not only the airplane but also its pedigree and how it had been restored.

The Jenny wasn’t the only long but successful restoration project on display. In the warbirds area—warbirds means any historic military aircraft—I met Harold Kindsvater, of Clovis, California, who had bought a Messerschmitt Me-109 in 1988 and taken more than 10 years to restore it. Fred Nelson, of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, had invested about 9 years in his 1943 Stearman. Both proudly point out that they worked from original blueprints in their restorations. Walking among the rows of warplanes and vintage aircraft, I was struck by how many museum-quality artifacts remain in private hands. Of course most of them would not be museum quality without the patient ministrations of their owners. And those owners not only have restored them but maintain them in the role for which they were intended: to fly. The only downside is that with use comes the risk of loss, and of a resource that can’t be renewed. Over the years a few rare birds have gone nearly extinct as one of the last of the breed was carefully restored but then crashed.

The EAA has its own small but historic fleet of restored aircraft, and during Air Venture visitors can sign up for flights aboard them. One of them is a 1929 Ford Tri-Motor, or “Tin Goose,” an early airliner in Eastern Air Transport markings. The one at Oshkosh must have been one of the slowest planes in the air, aside from the ultralights. It just seemed to drift upward from the runway. Another EAA airplane is the B-17G. If I appreciated the unexpected chance to commune late at night with that relic of World War II, I had an even greater thrill, several days later, perching in its glass-enclosed nose as it skimmed over Lake Winnebago. (The B-17G at this year’s AirVenture was actually a loaner while the EAA’s own example was being repaired.)

If aircraft restoration is usually a long, challenging commitment, homebuilding a new airplane has gotten easier over the years. At first, homebuilders had no choice but to work from plans, fashioning their own parts from metal, wood, and fabric. But kits containing premanufactured parts later emerged as an option, making the job easier and faster. By the 1970s some of those kits had started to include components of materials like fiberglass that reduced or eliminated the need for home welding. Meanwhile, lightplane manufacturers were hurting from rising labor costs, liability expenses, and reverses such as the oil crisis. Writing in 1981, Don and Julia Downie extolled flying “your own creation.” The talented designers attracted to the growing homebuilding movement had made it possible, they said, to “construct an airplane at home that is inherently safer, more fuel-efficient, and which returns more performance per horsepower than anything offered in the commercial market.”

The makers of production aircraft are in better shape these days, and at AirVenture there were elaborate exhibits from such companies as Cessna, Mooney, and New Piper (the original Piper having gone out of business in 1991). But it was also evident that homebuilding has retained its appeal. Much of the activity on the convention grounds was devoted not to flying per se but to home-workshop skills. At the 1956 fly-in there were four forums, on topics such as structures, materials, and regulations for the homebuilder. This year in home-building alone there were more than 250, with titles like “Kits Versus Scratch-Build—Pros and Cons,” “Sheet Metal 101,” and “Basic Electrical Wiring.” Conventiongoers could not only attend talks about these subjects but also practice them at workshops staffed with craftsmen, and learn skills like fabric covering, woodworking, and aluminum forming.

To qualify for an “experimental” certificate under Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules, an aircraft must be at least 51 percent homebuilt. Most kit manufacturers exhibiting at AirVenture offer customers various combinations of separate pieces and prebuilt sections, all meeting the 51 percent rule. A brochure for Glasair Aviation says, “For some, it will be a very comforting feeling to tackle the project knowing that much of the structural assembly has been completed by skilled professionals, allowing them to focus on accomplishing the fun, final assembly tasks.” A homebuilt kit can cost $50,000 or more and take 2,000 man-hours to complete. A comparable production aircraft, such as the Cessna Skyhawk, might cost three or four times as much.

For most of the EAA’s first decade, the entertainment at the fly-ins relied on member participation, such as in the flight-performance contests. But in 1961 the convention’s planners sought to broaden the appeal by adding an air show. In evening performances that year, Duane Cole, already something of an acrobatic legend, flew his modified Taylorcraft, with a 150-horsepower engine. One audience member recalled, “Duane laced his way through intricate loops and rolls with the smoothness and grace of a ballet dancer, topping it all off with snap rolls done while ascending vertically, followed by hard-to-describe, slightly scary fallouts from an inverted, stalled position.” (A snap roll is a fast 360-degree roll along the airplane’s longitudinal axis.) After that, another performer, Bill Adams, put his 450-horsepower Stearman through loops, rolls, and inverted passes, with Cole’s wife, Judy, strapped to an upright strut above the cockpit.

SUCH AERIAL STAGECRAFT WAS NEW TO THE EAA EVENT but hardly new to aviation. During the early years of powered flight, just seeing an airplane fly was a spectacle. In 1909 crowds of up to 200,000 turned out for Orville Wright’s demonstration flights in Germany, and on October 4 of that year a million spectators along the Hudson River watched Wilbur fly a roundtrip between Governors Island and Grant’s Tomb.

Once a means of transport has been developed, the impulse to compete with it soon follows. Like horse, boat, and auto races, air meets were organized. The first was at Rheims, northeast of Paris, in 1909. It was anything but a humble beginning. Four grandstands were constructed, complete with elegant and exclusive boxes, a 600-seat restaurant, and even a barbershop and beauty salon. Over the week, the crowds in the stands and on the open grounds approached 500,000. They gathered to watch 22 aviators compete for trophies and substantial prize money in contests of speed and altitude.

The first U.S. air meet was held near Los Angeles in 1910, followed later that year by ones in Boston and New York. The Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss formed their own exhibition companies. They and others in the developing cadre of aerial performers appeared not only at organized meets but also at events like county fairs. Stunt flying, such as S-turns and spiral glides, became part of the show—thrilling for a public getting its first taste of powered aviation but all too often deadly for the pilots. As a result, the Wrights disbanded their team only 18 months after its debut. Of the nine pilots who had flown for the Wrights, five died in crashes, either while on the team or soon after. Among early exhibition fliers, Lincoln Beachey was probably the most renowned, thanks to stunts such as a flight over the edge of Niagara Falls, following the cascade down nearly to the rocks below, and then flying through a narrow space under the bridge there. But he, too, was killed, plunging into San Francisco Bay in 1915.

After World War I came the barnstorming era, thanks to the influx of returning military pilots and the ubiquitous Jenny. Itinerant performers brought aviation to the people, presenting shows and offering airplane rides, usually from a farmer’s field. Some stunt fliers toured in organized troupes, called flying circuses. Staples of these acts included wing walking and climbing between airplanes in flight, as well as car-to-plane, train-to-plane, and even boat-to-plane transfers. Those freewheeling days ended when the U.S. Department of Commerce, charged with promoting flight safety, began outlawing the most dangerous practices and unsafe equipment.

The golden age of air racing began in the late 1920s and extended through the 1930s. The Bendix Trophy Race was a cross-country marathon; the Thompson Trophy Race was a closed-course contest, with a pack of racers zooming around pylons. Both were part of the National Air Races, which came to be held annually in Cleveland. Before the competitions were interrupted by World War II, they were drawing more than 350,000 spectators each year to the 10-day event. They began to include a lot of the features now found at contemporary air shows, such as displays of aircraft on the ground for the public to examine up close. Stunt flying and aerial demonstration flights went along with the competition, some of them by military exhibition teams that were forerunners of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds and the Navy’s Blue Angels.

The National Air Races resumed after World War II, but interest was waning. The decline was hastened by an accident in 1949—certainly not the first in the event’s history, but one that sparked particular outcry. It would be inconceivable today, but at the time the seven pylons of the Thompson Trophy course were mounted in residential areas around Cleveland Municipal Airport. Early in the race the pilot of a P-51 Mustang misjudged a turn, rolled into a dive, and crashed into a house. A young mother and her baby son were killed, along with the pilot. The races were canceled the following year and after that moved for one season to Detroit. In 1964 a new version of the competition, the National Championship Air Races and Air Show, began in more wide-open space in the high desert north of Reno.

In 2004 the annual Reno event included something begun in Europe in 2003 but new to the United States: the Red Bull Air Race, a sort of combined air race and judged acrobatic competition. The racers, flying one at a time, negotiate a slalom course marked by 60-foot, air-filled pylons and execute specified acrobatic maneuvers along the way, such as a 360-degree vertical aileron roll. The innovation seems to reflect a trend: By itself, air racing has become something of a niche market, while air shows and acrobatic competition have enjoyed broader, continuing popularity. Also, safety is an increasing concern.

The mother and son killed during the 1949 racing accident near Cleveland were among the last members of the public to die in North American air-show crashes. The controls on the events—both federal regulations and the industry’s own standards—have been tightened. Today no acts can be performed over the heads of spectators, and the momentum of performing aircraft must not be directed toward the crowds. All air-show action must be contained within an “acrobatic box” whose dimensions are precisely spelled out. Air-show performers are very specifically licensed, with credentials detailing the maneuvers and aircraft for which they are approved, and FAA inspectors monitor compliance with these regulations.

Such safeguards have not been uniformly instituted worldwide. In 1988 an accident in West Germany killed 70 spectators, and one in Ukraine in 2002 killed 83. While such catastrophes have been prevented in this country, some enthusiasts admit that they prefer foreign shows because they can get closer to the action there. And even in the United States accidents still occur, at times with pilot fatalities. In October 2003 there were two show-related fatalities, one involving a World War II-era Grumman FM-2 Wildcat, shortly after the conclusion of an air show in Texas, the other with a Pitts S2B acrobatic biplane in a practice session in Minnesota. One of the worst accidents took place as the Thunderbirds were training in Nevada on January 18, 1982. The four aircraft were flying in a diamond formation, with three team members following the lead. When the lead aircraft suffered a malfunction, the four T-38 Talons flew into the ground, killing all the pilots.

Given the sheer traffic volume at AirVenture, it’s not surprising that in most years the Oshkosh event has been the scene of at least one accident, usually more. Often these have been minor scrapes, but there have been some fatalities. Two years after Duane Cole brought the first acrobatic performances to the fly-in in 1961, his son Roily was killed there in a Stearman, along with a passenger. This year there was at least one fenderbender on the grounds. Also, three people were killed in two accidents on their way home from AirVenture, but it seems unfair to factor mishaps like those into the event’s safety record.

DANGER HAS ALWAYS BEEN PART OF AIR SHOWS. AC counts of early exhibitions suggest that the crowds then were drawn by the very real possibility of disaster. Lincoln Beachey retired in 1913, at least in part for that reason; he once said: “There was only one thing that drew them to my exhibitions.… They paid to see me die.” (By the end of the year he was back in the air, and less than two years after that he was killed.) Audiences these days expect to see danger courted but conquered.

One distinction sets AirVenture apart from most of the other big air shows: You won’t see many jets there. Part of this is necessity. Because of the borders with surrounding communities, the acrobatic box isn’t big enough to accommodate acts like the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds. But there’s also a difference in the audience. AirVenture welcomes a lot of people who come just for an afternoon of entertainment, but most of them are still pilots and other aviation enthusiasts, and they appreciate the finer points of piston-powered acrobatic performance. Jets are capable of dazzling aerobatics, but their faster, louder display is particularly popular with the general public, says Dave Keim, an air-show announcer at AirVenture and other air shows, as well as a show promoter: “What they like to see is afterburner.” That does not mean, though, that the AirVenture crowds are indifferent to noisy spectacle. This year the Masters of Disaster appeared at Oshkosh, flying Samson, Pitts, and jet-powered WACO biplanes and also driving a jet-powered Peterbilt truck. Loud, fiery explosions on the ground were added for good measure.

The state of the art in aerobatics today is enough to spark amazement and even a little disbelief. Headliners power through repeated rolls at rates faster than one per second. They tumble through the air on three axes at once. Flying inverted or sidewise is nothing new; now they can also hang motionless for long stretches and plummet down tail-first. Skip Rawson, who flew B-47s for the Air Force and now flies in a warbirds act, says, “You can’t fly sideways, but fortunately the aircraft doesn’t know that.”

Stunts such as appearing to start and stop in midair require a lot of horsepower. The most advanced acrobatic aircraft achieve unprecedented power-to-weight ratios. Kirby Chambliss, for example, has won in a series of U.S. and international competitions flying an Edge 540 monoplane. Thanks to a fully composite wing and other refinements, the Edge has an empty weight of just 1,183 pounds, yet its Lycoming engine develops 350 horsepower. That enables it to climb at 3,700 feet per minute. Pilots who fly stock aircraft, such as Bobby Younkin and his Decathlon, perform a different kind of routine, relying on what is called energy management. They work with gravity, altitude, and momentum to execute their maneuvers. Acrobatic aircraft are outfitted with specialized features like inverted fuel systems, which deliver fuel to the engine regardless of aircraft position, and inverted oil systems.

While aircraft performance grows, Chambliss points out that “we pilots have the same bodies as always, and we have to take it.” Air-show performers are routinely whipsawed between as many as 10 positive g’s (10 times the force of gravity) and almost as many negative. Fighter pilots rarely encounter such loads. A cockpit video of Scan Tucker in his high-performance custom biplane shows him grimacing and straining at the controls while the world swirls outside his canopy. Jim LeRoy likens his routine in his modified Pitts biplane to “doing 500-pound squats while simultaneously performing calculus.”

Air shows are often organized around themes. For many last year the choice was obvious: the centennial of powered flight. This year’s AirVenture theme was “Launching the Next Century of Flight”; at Dayton it was “Women in Aviation.” The show lineups combine tradition with novelty and human interest. Wing walking, dead-stick (that is, power-off) landings, ribbon cuts—each of those standards performed this year could also be seen in the 1920s or 1930s, though in most cases with very different aircraft. Chandy Clanton, on the other hand, has a number of maneuvers inspired by the antics of her two young sons. And Dan Buchanan performs in a hang glider, even after an accident left him partially paralyzed.

Military planes, mostly from World War II, appeal to both patriotism and historical interest. Formations of combat aircraft usually seen only in old newsreels make for a compelling sight. “Tora! Tora! Tora!” is a touring re-enactment of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, using aircraft from the 1970 movie of the same name. “Heritage flights” pair one piston-powered warplane from the past with one jet from the current Air Force roster, flying wingtip to wingtip in a tribute to military tradition. In the heritage flight at the Dayton show, a P-38 and an F-16 flew together.

And there’s more to air shows than the visual. The performing aircraft, of course, provide plenty of sound, at times deafening. But there’s also what comes over the loudspeakers, narration and at times music. The music is generally either soul-stirring for the patriotic acts or jaunty rock. The narration is by professional announcers. They are a consistently enthusiastic lot, and their patter is a fluid blend of color, play-by-play, and ads for each performer’s corporate sponsors. The job takes more than just glibness with a microphone. The announcers need to understand and know how to describe the fast-paced maneuvers overhead and to provide background information as well. The performers sometimes provide them with details about their acts, expressed in Aresti notation, the written language of aerobatics. Named for José Aresti, the Spanish flight instructor who developed it, the system uses curves and arrows to describe three-dimensional action on a two-dimensional page. Announcers travel the air-show circuit just as the performers do, and some of them are former performers. Roscoe Morton, an announcer at Rockford and Oshkosh for the last 43 years, was captain of the U.S. acrobatic team in international competition, and Marion Cole, Duane’s brother, held national championships.

While audiences see the performers and hear the announcers, there’s a crucial player in the show who remains out of view: the air boss. What a conductor is to an orchestra, or a director to a play or movie, that’s what the air boss is to an air show. With a support team, the air boss works out of a small trailer near show center. Inside is an array of communications gear; on top of the trailer is a platform with folding chairs, for monitoring the show. Well before the show, the air boss holds a briefing with all the performers. Communication procedures are established, such as radio frequencies and what to do in case of a stuck microphone. The briefing also covers current weather and forecast, the start time for each act and a time hack (synchronizing watches), taxiway routings, and noise-abatement and emergency procedures. During the show at Oshkosh, the air boss, not the control tower, is in control of the airport and its airspace. Controlling all movements on the ground and in the air, says the AirVenture warbird air boss Ed Schneider, is like a game of 3-D chess.

The rest of the time at AirVenture, during all the hours when there’s no air show, the Oshkosh control tower lives up to that banner calling it the world’s busiest. One day last year it logged more than 3,000 takeoffs and landings, or one every 10 to 15 seconds at the peak. To handle that kind of traffic, special procedures and rule waivers are approved by the FAA. Minimum-separation requirements between aircraft are reduced. To prevent clogging the frequencies, pilots are told to acknowledge instructions not by radio response but by rocking their wings. The Oshkosh tower normally has 4 controllers and a manager, but during AirVenture there are 64 controllers working in shifts, plus 15 additional supervisors and staff. The added controllers volunteer from other airports in the region. They don’t all work in the tower. An RV camper and a bank of five bright lights are set up as a temporary approach-control facility seven miles from the airport. Departures are directed from mobile platforms at ground level near the runways. These wagons are called mobile operations and communications workstations, fancifully shortened to moo-cows .

WHAT DO THE EAA AND OTHER AIR-SHOW ORGA nizers do once the last act is concluded and the last visitor has exited the gate? They immediately start planning for next year’s show. In fact, according to Dave Keim, who not only is an Oshkosh announcer but runs another show in Peoria, Illinois, he starts booking the following year even before the current year’s show takes place. The big military jet teams, the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels, often can call the shots. There’s more demand for them than there is space on their calendar. Once they announce where they’ll be during the coming year, the show promoters start filling in the rest of their lineups. A lot of the contracts are signed at the annual convention of the International Council of Air Shows, where performers often work booths on the exhibit floor to showcase their acts. Air shows now attract millions of spectators each year to several hundred North American events. The air-show circuit follows the sun, concentrating in the South during the cold months, then extending north in spring and summer. The cycle recalls the opening line from an old Emerson, Lake & Palmer song: “Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.”