Changes to the South 40 announced

[FlyingRon]

This is all part of EAAs stated goal to not turn anybody away by 2020.

The South 40 GA (Vintage calls it "Green Acres"... Farm Living is the life for me) has been in operation for two years now. As I stated, the biggest problem faced down there is that it takes several years of being in use to get the ground reasonable. They still have drainage problems down there and some bad rutting from the days that it was a cornfield. It's getting better each year. I still don't think they can get heavier stuff like twins in there.

This shouldn't affect Vintage parking. The space is reclaimed from area that was not airplane parking prior. The nice thing is that the Camp Store and Registration booths they put down there will also nicely serve those parked in "Fondy" as we call everything south of the end of Taxiway Papa.
Of course Vintage has lost parking over the years that has only been moderately reclaimed. Of course, we used to park the Homebuilt campers in Vintage prior to them getting their own space up north.

We were moved back from the taxiway by a plane width or so after the DC-3 incident years ago where the guy forgot to lock the tailwheel and ended up in the paved ditch between Papa and 36. The inane fence and security road trimmed another space off each row long the west side and ate up a row where it crosses down south. We lost space due to the expansion of the Vintage Cafe, the addition of the camp stores and the south 40 rgistration, and the new Judges building. Vintage has gotten creative finding places to stick people so as to not turn anybody away.

Not that the GA parking up north didn't suffer from loss of space: They also had the perimeter road and the straightening of Taxiway Bravo that ate up space and the Taxiway Bravo work also screwed up some of the grass drainage up there and that meant that last year when we had rain right up to the show that there was a lot of unusable parking space up there.

Of course, we'll have to sort and dispatch planes down there. Vintage still manages the taxiways (paved and grass) south of the COMM Center (or Papa 2 roughly). Flight Line Safety handles all north of that point (including Papa 2). That's what all your little GAC / VAC signs are for. There was some communications issues with when we're going to start filling Green Acres and when we can't take more (and that we couldn't take twins) but that likely will get better. There's sort of a party line between all the respective chairs and once the work it out and hand it to us worker bees we get it distributed to the marshallers pretty quickly.

The first year, Vintage just took planes down there. Starting last year (and again this year), they have their own Chairman independent of Vintage, though it is Phil Blake (Antique XRay) who used to manage the grounds for Vintage, so he obviously has the experience needed to help get the physical parts straightened out.

Last year, the Vintage Flight Line operations people just managed the South 40 volunteers. We had a handful of resource (extra , Green machines, golf carts) that were given to the South 40 operation that we only issued to people who wanted to work there. While there were a few people who were dedicated south 40 volunteers (and they have done a big push to get more), we backfilled that with Vintage volunteers. There's been talk of them getting their own volunteer management booth down there, but I don't know if it will happen this year. That shouldn't be a problem (even despite some ego issues inherent with any volunteer organization). I set up our volunteer tracking system to account for it either way.