Oshkosh
I’m writing to you from an apartment in Chicago, ensconced by tastefully conditioned air, having just returned from a week of living in very different conditions. The moisture is still working its way out of my skin, which has adopted a Mediterranean hue. The laundry machine chugs peacefully as it unearths from my clothes layers of sunscreen, sweat, and the vaguely arboreal mildew that’s inescapable when ambient humidity averages eighty percent a day. It’s an aroma synonymous with cold nights of unsettled and clammy sleep, punctuated by futile stabs at ungluing yourself from yourself without falling off of your narrow cot into the imagined pools of condensation forming in the dark corners of your tent. Eventually, a stretch of time elapses where no dirt bike has been revved, no van door has slammed, no headlights have shone through the scraps of plastic that comprise your shelter, and some long-dormant section of code in your limbic brain (in repose on a camp pillow redolent of the fresh Scotch tape that pins it to the sleeping pad but which also sometimes catches your hair) overrides the white-collar terror of humidity long enough for you to get some decent sleep. Before you know it, it’s morning, and you’re both relieved that the worst is over and scrambling to de-clam, micturate, and caffeinate the malaise away, buoying your spirits at least long enough until you get to do it all over again that night.
All of this is necessary if you want to attend the Experimental Aviation Association’s AirVenture event in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which my wizened wristband calls “the world’s greatest aviation celebration” and which a campground neighbour calls “an aviator’s brigadoon”, and you haven’t been fortunate enough to find a hotel room in the town of 66 000 (the event is attended by approximately ten times that many people). It’s set over the course of a week on a one square mile section of the grounds of Wittman Regional Airport, which hosts aircraft from powered parachutes to autogyros to bushplanes with comically large donut-shaped wheels to gliders to personal jets to dinky sightseeing helicopters to chunky Army Blackhawks to RC planes to the Goodyear blimp (there’s a pair, actually) to World War II heavy bombers to modern air dominance fighters to air-to-air refuelers to strategic airlifters. It’d be simpler to list what’s absent. If an aircraft is flying, it might do so as part of the daily air show or just as a matter of putzing around. The tower at Wittman becomes briefly the busiest in the world. Between the aircraft themselves are lectures, talks, vendor booths, apparel branded for the boomer gaze, scarce shade, and fast food (one quarter of which must have been some kind of “brat” or “curd”) sold at eyewatering prices.
The demographics of the attendees are unique. Many of the Canadians at the EAA Canada pavilion hail from places in Manitoba and British Columbia where the Canadian Accent is far more pronounced, compared to most postal codes in Toronto, whose phonological profile is completely generic, with the odd exception of the “Toronto Mans” dialect. The same principle of linguistic diversity applies to American attendees as well, as AirVenture is simultaneously an event that caters to a more rural audience, but not necessarily one local to Wisconsin or the midwest. Over the course of a week, I bear witness to an impressive parade of rurally-inflected modes of transportation like tractors, dirtbikes, ATVs, UTVs, and golf carts that people use to get around the two-hundred and fifty acres of unpaved campground. It’s an anthropologically enlightening experience. I myself am well served by the city slicker starter pack of a Prius and a folding bike, but there’s plenty of representation from the center of the Venn diagram, too, in the form of mountain bikes (both manual and electric) and electric scooters. Virtually everybody is white. Most are male, and there are more older people and Republicans than I’m used to seeing. Everybody is nice. One garrulous volunteer, a retired electrician from Illinois who’d maintained F-4 Phantoms during the 70s, says he can tell I am “some kind of Oriental”, but guesses Vietnam rather than the People’s Republic, as we talk about planes and the excitement of being here in Oshkosh, cooling off in the shade of a porch he’d helped build and electrify.
It’s hot at Wittman in a way that’s just incomprehensible to a software engineer. Because there are about ten thousand planes and ten times as many people, most of this happens outdoors. And because the grounds are really just an airport that’s been converted piecemeal by a legion of volunteers, the buildings that exist are not enormous, and half of them are just hangars with large open doors and limited cooling capacity. And finally because it’s July in Wisconsin, a great deal of attending AirVenture is shielding yourself from the wrath of the sun, and if you’re outside in Boeing Plaza, your mind is never entirely able to luxuriate in the details of the “Live Free or Die” livery on the empennage of the New Hampshire Air National Guard’s new air-to-air refueler, because there’s always a background thread going in your mind checking hydration, accumulated solar radiation, and time of last sunscreen application. The irony of lamenting the burden of heat while seeking refuge in the shade of a flying gas station is not lost on me. Beyond the first-order dread deriving from the geopolitical risk of an operation like the recent surge of refuelers to Europe in support of bombing the subterranean uranium enrichment facility in Iran, there’s also a secondary kind of dread deriving from the sheer quantity of emissions, which yield additional downstream geopolitical risk due to the inherently destabilizing effects of climate change of mass migration and wars of scarcity. It’s usually more of an abstract headwind on my ability to completely enjoy flying, but between the daily airshows, pyrotechnic displays, campfires, and dirtbikes that leave the air redolent with exhaust, the relationship between aviation and emissions makes itself much more concrete.
There are moments of respite, though, from the unconditioned air and the ceaseless circuits of little helicopters and big jets screeching tactically overhead and the steaming throngs of sunburnt Americans. I discover, gradually, the oasis of the Forum section of the grounds, which is a collection of a few covered stages where presentations occur by speakers like the guy who ejected from an F-35B in Fort Worth after experiencing issues hovering during an acceptance flight, or the avuncular retired electrical engineer-turned-teacher who details in an extremely thoughtfully composed slideshow the experience of adding autopilot to his personal plane as a cost-saving measure, or Gary Powers Jr. explaining how his father hadn’t actually betrayed the West when his U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union. I’m also able to attend an excellent presentation at the museum by a guy who flew for Air America, a front for the CIA during the Vietnam War, for whom the room is packed to the rafters and who gets gets a standing ovation for describing with unexpected compassion the experience of flying the last plane out of Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge seize Phnom Penh. At the EAA Canada pavilion, after apologizing for getting stuck in traffic, Shane Madsen talks about building custom Piper Cubs for backcountry flying, and he looks and sounds exactly like the kind of guy from Manitoba who’d be all about that sort of thing. Jeff Bell, the curator or chairman of some organ of Canadian aviation heritage preservation, enumerates the handful of aviation museums in the country, most of which are too remote and small for me to currently want to visit, but the collective collection of which provides me with the names of models of aircraft to research further as a means of increasing my understanding of Canadian history more broadly.
Beyond the talks held there, the rest of the EAA Museum also makes for a good sanctuary from the elements given its size, status as a permanent structure on the grounds, and function of welcoming the general public. Nevertheless, I am amused when I come across an exhibit devoted to Burt Rutan, a prolific designer of experimental aircraft (including the Rutan Voyager, which accomplished the remarkable feat of circumnavigating the globe in nine days without refueling in 1986) but also somebody who’s, at best, muddied the waters on the severity of our current phase of climate change via a presentation titled An Engineer’s Critique of Global Warming ‘Science’ made in 2011, and which is still present on his website. Among participants in general aviation, the Beechcraft Bonanza is sometimes referred to as the “Doctor Killer”, due to the phenomenon of a large number of professionals in other fields believing that their expertise in those other fields is at all transferable to the domain of flying, leading them to overestimate their abilities; there is a certain irony in Burt Rutan committing the same fallacy with respect to climate science, although in this case the immediate casualties of wet bulb events will most likely not be doctors or anybody able to afford an air conditioned lifestyle. To give you a sense of Burt’s credibility in climate science, the gist of the second slide of the presentation is essentially “since plants like CO2, we should add more of it to the atmosphere” (it is well known that human beings are a kind of tropical plant). In an interview with Forbes, Rutan doubles down on this asinine perspective, saying he’s “very confused as to what’s wrong with CO2. It’s the food plants need to grow and feed all animals, including us.”
It’s been estimated that military activity accounts for 5.5% of greenhouse gas emissions, a metric (among others) that tempers my enthusiasm for the work that they do, as necessary as it may be. As I wade through a sea of sunglasses and baseball caps in Boeing Plaza (the geographical centerpiece of AirVenture and host to static displays of a variety of mostly military airframes) the subtext seems to be one of gratitude to the various taxpayers milling around, the suggestion being that this F-22 Raptor and the two airmen who pull dual duty as both armed guards and museum docents are made possible by viewers like you. One of these individuals very politely informs me that I am not, in fact, looking at an F-22, but rather the F-35A Lightning II, and suggests that it’s a common mistake if you aren’t looking at the engines (the Raptor has two) or standing beneath the wings (the Raptor’s are much lower). The 176th Wing of the Alaska Air National Guard has set up a booth next to their C-17 Globemaster III strategic airlifter, the charismatic megafauna of the Plaza, selling branded t-shirts, patches, and beer koozies, creating the impression that they’re fundraising to give the old bird a new coat of paint. I take them up on their offer to walk through the plane and stand in line in the shaded cargo hold for about an hour, thinking about REACH 871 and the 2021 evacuation of Kabul, imagining the space carpeted by about eight hundred seated Afghans, deprived of sleep, weakened by thirst, and assailed by the ear-splitting blast of four Pratt and Whitney F117 turbofans at full power, grateful at least that they aren’t flying Spirit, as the plane lifts off the runway at what is only known as Hamid Karzai International Airport for a few more hours, bound for an American air base in Qatar. Back in present-day Wisconsin, the loadmaster, Justin, is at the front of the line answering questions. He’s a bespectacled kid from Alaska, and informs me that what appears to be an enormous ornamental alphorn hanging on the ceiling above is actually an air return tube, involved somehow in ventilation. Nobody knows why it appears to be made of wood, or perhaps fiberglass, as another line member suggests. The laptop at the loadmaster station on which they calculate weight and balance is covered in a layer of gratuitously rugged rubber and is alleged to freeze a lot. A pair of geriatric VIPs is allowed to cut the line, a practice of which Justin vocally disapproves, though possibly as a technique taught to all loadmasters in charge of the famously unpredictable cargo of humans, sensitive to all manner of injustice. When it’s my turn to poke my head through the emergency hatch in the roof of the jet and then sit down for a look around the pilot’s seat, I try to be quick about it.
The cockpit and instrument panel are exciting to see outside of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but there’s just something about the first-person experience that doesn’t translate to a secondhand one. It’s the same reason nobody wants to hear about your dreams, and perhaps controversially, why I think airshows are mostly tedious. Watching an airshow is basically watching other people ride rollercoasters. I can see that you’re pulling some serious Gs, but I’d much rather be pulling them myself. Formation flying resonates with the same banal mastery of a good chef chopping onions real thin; there is nothing sublime about making arcs as precisely as they do. I get the sense that the entire genre of aerobatics is a holdover from a pre-Internet era where people were more easily entertained and the shows were less strictly regulated.
Nevertheless, there are a few moments across the various airshows that I do appreciate more vividly, like the massive formation flight of World War II-era planes that briefly renders me a slack-jawed Belgian child in 1943, before precision bombing, stealth, and the ability to break the sound barrier rendered obsolete a strategic bombing doctrine based on quantity. The contemporary version of the swarm of B-17s and escorting P-51s is the solitary B-1B Lancer, a supersonic strategic bomber that can change the angle formed between its wings and fuselage to enter different flight regimes. The Lancer can fold its wings to go fast, or stretch them out to loiter. It astonishes me to think that in February 2024, a handful of these flew nonstop (albeit refueling several times) from Texas to attack targets in Iraq and Syria. To step back in time for a moment, the MiG-17, which looks like an →, is unsettling to see scrolling over the continental United States at Mach 0.92, with its antique afterburner at full flicker. Its space age look makes me feel like I’m watching a cutscene from a remastered cut of Fallout: New Vegas, compelling enough that I might actually duck and cover. The highlight, though, is the Rubenesque grace of the C-17’s short-field landing, accomplished via its thrust reversers that not only halt the forward motion of the plane upon touchdown, but also allow it to roll backwards on the runway on its own power, which is utterly novel to me. After only a minute or so, it’s recovered enough ground for it to take off again, which it does.
The shows run daily, but I only watch the entirety of Monday’s, returning for the last bit of Friday’s to meet up with some friends and to catch the Wisconsin National Guard draw circles with its Blackhawks to a cadence of artillery and controlled explosions, while F-35s pretend to slurp fuel from a KC-135 above. It’s an expensive choreography that leaves behind large onion rings of smoke rolling lazily skyward, while I wonder when in Wisconsin history this sort of thing will ever be necessary. The nighttime show on Wednesday ends with an lasers, explosions, fireworks, and an enormous swarm of glowing drones coordinated in a way so as to render a slowly moving scene of an F-35 refueling from a KC-135, followed by a scene of a rotating propeller blade, followed inexplicably by one of a dinosaur (it feels like they forgot to delete the tech demo from the program). The maximalism is almost incoherent, but understandable in a world where the genre of the airshow is in crisis, owing to criticism of both the format’s emissions and its glorification of the military-industrial complex, plus an audience who’ve already seen the highlights on TikTok. I do like the drone show, though. It’s obvious this technology will improve in fast and frightening ways.
To conclude a really long digression, I’m out of the C-17 just in time to receive an OSHALERT about possible thunderstorms in the next three hours, and so I meander towards and onto the shuttle buses that’ll take me back into camp. The sky’s a surreal patchwork of low, cottonball clouds, through the gaps of which I can see a cerulean ceiling filigreed with cirrus. I can’t say it’s a meteorological configuration I’ve encountered before. To the north is a wall of moisture, dyed the leaden hue of the Globemaster itself, that extends from ground level to sixty thousand feet and is very obviously the threat to which the text alludes. I reach my site in no particular hurry, drape an extra tarp over the vestibule, and as I hammer down the final stake to hold it in place, the downpour begins. It’s your classic summertime cloudburst, and the grounds are warmly inundated while I’m dry beneath the newly extended canopy. I realize that this is a great opportunity to take my evening shower without needing to bike all the way to the relevant building, and I change into a swimsuit and luxuriate in the rainfall, which is coming down so densely that it affords you a certain privacy. I’m relieved to see the tarp holding steady and offloading the precipitation in an orderly manner, as it gives me a bit of a portico from which to watch the remainder of the weather roll through. Until this moment, I am still a bit tentative about this whole camping thing, as I hadn’t done so in a while, but I am bolstered by both the serendipity of the timing of the rain and that my tarp is working.
Camping has always been one of those things I see myself being good at, not just as a male, but also as a Canadian, and while AirVenture is as good a reintroduction to the experience of living in a tent as anything, I’ll probably opt for something air conditioned next year so I can concentrate on the aviation content and not have to worry about being the smelly, damp, and bleary-eyed camper befouling a theatre full of people fresh from the Marriott. I’ll still camp, but ideally amongst other tent-dwellers. I like being in nature, being the loadmaster of my own sedan, and seeing how much I can forgo. It’s an exciting fantasy when it works. The broad dependence on RVs and dirtbikes in camp is annoying from an aural, olfactory, and ideological perspective, not to mention it’s a weirdly alienating experience to have to contend with the elements while my neighbour’s luxury RV has air conditioning, running water, and a television. There is something comical about me, an old zoomer, whinging about boomers (yes, they are mostly all of that vintage) degrading the soul of this classic American pastime via an addiction to advanced technology. A more charitable perspective, though, would be that their mobile McMansions allow a great deal of the older generation to attend AirVenture. But just like suburban life, the generational fatalism of becoming a detached homeowner in Arlington Heights, and then the proud owner of a thirty-foot Alliance Valor recreational vehicle with two sixty inch sofas, a microwave, closet, shower, sink, television and queen-sized bed hauled by a pimped-out F-150 is kind of dejecting. A significant number of the voting members at the committee that forms my personality would really like it if I could halt the hedonic treadmill where it is, but there’s that one guy that really wants to fly a TBM 960 someday instead of a Piper Cub or a Cessna 172. And so here I am in nature, approaching medium rare, hedonically arrested as the ayes would have it. My evenings are oriented around making the journey to the shack a half mile away where I dream of hosing myself down. I am grateful that there are pickup trucks full of gravel whose job it is to make sure muddy roads don’t get out of control. I am relieved that my folding chair has not gone with the wind.
I would not blame anybody for failing to believe that Oshkosh was a joy to attend. It’s been character-building and has given me two very clear aviation-related threads to pull on: 1) the history of aviation in Canada, and 2) that of aviation in the Cold War, which now that it’s kind of officially History and so no longer political, one can study it and talk about it without really pushing anybody’s buttons. I’m also glad to have gained camping experience and to have enjoyed the process as much as I could’ve, with nothing terrible happening like losing an important item, puncturing a tire on a tent stake (I imagined this scenario happening many times, leading me to do my own “FOD walks” around my site before pulling in or out), or getting sick. Principally, though, I have completely forgotten what it is I do at my day job. Between the inundation of aviation-related stimuli during the day and the cognitively dilating demands of outdoor existence, there is just no room for the anodyne agonies that would have otherwise skated across the windshield of my professional consciousness. I decline even now to enumerate these vexations, out of respect for the sanctifying force that Oshkosh has proven to be.