Friday, July 27, 2012

Day 4 at the Oshkosh Airventure

Today we went to the EAA Airventure at Oshkosh. This is the first time that Rich and I have been to this show. It is huge and today we saw only a small portion. 

We walked around the Warbirds area. Almost all of the war planes we saw are in current flying condition. We saw the Glacier Girl, a P-38 Lightning built by Lockheed. It was one of a squadron of planes that were flying from Europe to the US during World War II. They were running out of fuel and belly landed on a glacier in Greenland. The crews, disabled the planes so if they were discovered by the enemy they could not fly them. They then hiked to the coast to be picked up by a naval ship and returned to the US. One of the planes were discovered in the late 1990's and recently recovered, To recover the plane, they had to dig down 250 feet through the ice to get to the plane, disassemble it to bring the parts up and then return the parts to the US to put it back together and restore. The plane is now in flying condition. Pretty amazing. Other warplanes we saw include Dauntless Dive bomber, P40, P51s and many others. The P indicate pursuit. When the Army Air Corp became the Air Force, they changed the designator to F for fighter. 

We also saw exhibits by Embraer, Honda, flying cars, NASA, amphibian airplanes, Pilatus, plus many others. From 3:30 to 5:30 we watched the air show sponsored by Rockwell Collins. We saw warbirds taking off and flying simulated bombing runs, flying in formation, parachutists in coordinated jumps, parachutists jumping at two miles high in flying squirrels suits,trailing smoke so you could see them in the air, with parachutes being deployed to slow them down so they could land safely. We saw several aerobatics planes doing rolls, hammerheads, Cuban 8s, stalls, end over ends, spirals, tail stands maneuvers, individually and in groups including a group of home built planes known as 'RVs'. There was a lot of smoke in the air but the crowd was loving every bit of it despite the fact that it was 96 degrees and with the humidity it felt like 103 degrees. 

This evening we joined Doug and Nancy for dinner with some friends, Jeff and Jennifer. Jeff has a Great Lakes biplane that they flew to the air show from Florida.

Today was a fun day and we hope to see more tomorrow.

Sent from SV Windarra iPad

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