I don't think it's so much catering to the campers but to the locals. By having evening activities (and unfortunately beer sales), they increase the attendance and revenues by people by having something to see on weekday evenings.
I don't think it's so much catering to the campers but to the locals. By having evening activities (and unfortunately beer sales), they increase the attendance and revenues by people by having something to see on weekday evenings.
I think the airport could open earlier in the morning. It's light by 5:00am, I think, and only gets lighter for parking.
Well, they could park other than camping area for a while. (rather than miss the show for weather or whatever)
But plenty of vehicles were zooming past my tent at 5:00am (golf carts, dumpster trucks, etc) It is an airport.
Well even if you had the manpower to open the field for early arrivals you just know it would be a matter of time before someone would insist on early departures too.
Dave Shaw
EAA 67180 Lifetime
Learn to Build, Build to Fly, Fly for Fun
The goal this year was not to turn any planes away. They opened up another large South 40 section over the winter/spring. 5" in 24 hours from Friday/Saturday was the worst possible time for that to occur. It would have been interesting to see what capacity of planes could have made it in without the rain. Maybe next year.
We fortunately landed Friday morning around 9:30am, and setup in the 6th row of the North 40.
Actually, the goal was to not turn planes away by 2020. There's still too much improvement needed to be done to the field to open that up this year. Of course, what the EAA really did is "TURN NO MONSTER FAT CAT RV BUS DRIVER" away and parked RVs down all over the new south 40 parking area. I suspect this is because it generates no heat with the state police and highway department if you send airplanes away to some distant airport but they won't stand for the interstate being backed up with overflowing rvs.