Great People Day

Yesterday I went to a safety forum on how people think and fly by an ex Tbird guy then spent the evening with the Canadian guys with the Spitfire from Gatineau, then gave a ride to 2 guys who just landed a C 182 on floats after a 23 hour trip , 18 hours flying from Newfoundland. There are telling me all about Newfoundland , I didntn even know for sure it was an island, only that is is a long way ne and cold with forrest and fish.
Osh is a great place to meet and enjoy lot of different people. One of the float guys is from S Africa.

As Paul Poberezny always said, EAA is about the people. The airplanes are just the common interest to get people together.
The first EAA Convention I went to was the first one they called AirVenture. I believe that was 1999. I spent about 2 1/2 days going around looking at airplane airplane airplane airplane. Then I realized I had missed a lot of very interesting people who had given talks. In later years, when I went back, I started talking with random people such as who you sit with at a picnic table. I'm missing this year, but last year the #1 production Cessna 172 was featured at Vintage. I happened to sit at a picnic table with the guy who owns #2. ( I guess you could call him the Buzz Aldren of Cessna owners.)
Also last year I ran into a guy who worked for ABC during the Apollo launches. He said only the safety and rescue people were closer to the Saturn than them. They used 12" speakers wired as microphones to pick up the audio of a launch, and those didn't survive more than a minute. There's no other event that brings people together like that.
It's fascinating being able to meet with such people, although it does make me seem a bit (well, a great deal) dull in comparison.

Anybody from this EAA forum who would like to meet at a central place today? I meant to say something earlier but just got busy?

And here's a little humor from the news this morning, a zoo in Egypt has "zebra" on display. A local student took a closer look at the animal and found it to be a donkey with the black stripes painted on! And does this have anything to do with EAA and airplanes? Well there are a lot of homebuilts and other planes with military paint schemes whose history is skin deep. EAA members do a lot better job painting than the zoo did,a real zebra has a lot of parallel stripes not just random ones.

Would have liked to arrange a meet and greet with you but we flew home yesterday(Friday) to avoid IFR conditions on our usual northern route. Flew the longer southern lakeshore route past Chicago, on to Windsor for customs and made it home to Toronto ahead of some late afternoon cell build up. Maybe next year, God willing and the creek don't rise.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bill Greenwood

a lot of homebuilts and other planes with military paint schemes whose history is skin deep. EAA members do a lot better job painting than the zoo did,a real zebra has a lot of parallel stripes not just random ones.

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And there is a sore spot of mine. The donkeys with painted stripes. The motto of Warbirds of America is "Keep 'em Flying." I always understood that to mean airplanes with a service record. So do the people who come to look at those planes. To say that a (fill in the blank) is a warbird kept flying -- with a lot of time, effort, care, and the re$ources -- just because an airplane of that type was used by some military service somewhere at some time seems a little dishonest. Almost every production airplane was probably used by some military sometime for something. WOA does like to keep their attendance numbers up and displaying such aircraft certainly does that. My wife suggested that those airplanes be parked near warbirds but not among veteran aircraft. That may be problematic. I would be happy with a placard saying that this airplane REPRESENTS a service aircraft. Then there are the ones that have been so heavily modified that, even if they have a military provenance, can no longer be considered and example of preserving a military heritage. (See picture)

But that home built Spitfire sure looks neat an I wouldn't take anything away from that effort. (Neither does he do anything to make people believe his airplane is original.)

I will probably wind up being disinvited from WOA over this. If so, I will just have to join Ron in Vintage.Attachment 7410