I have been attending the Oshkosh EAA Convention since 1978 and have been fortunate enough to have attended every year since that time. I have had many friends during all these years like some of you who have flown their homebuilt airplanes there. Some of them have been damaged by unknowing, uncaring or careless spectators. I have seen unsupervised children climb and stand on the tail section of taildragger aircraft for example. I have watched guys with cameras hanging around their necks lean over to have a look inside, as their camera swings out dinging/scratching a perfect paint job. I have had to tell kids to get off the tail of an airplane while their ignorant parents looked at me thinking, who is this guy telling their children what to do. The idea of a guy spending 20 years building his dream machine, the desire to take and display his creation at Oshkosh only to find upon arrival that his plane the main attraction to the show has to pay full camping and admission price while risking damage to it. That is the same as a NFL player paying to play the game while the owners/organizers reap all the benefits!!!!! You Oshkosh old-timers like me will remember when you had to be a pilot or an EAA member to cross the fence to enter the area where the airplanes were parked. The idea was that an airplane person or family would know how to treat these delicate works of art. Then when the commercialization took over, pedal to the metal cash cow idea ? Oh! let's make all the local and passer by non airplane people happy by letting them and their hellion kids have full access to everything including airplanes. All so they will keep coming back and paying their money to get in year after year, while not having to become an EAA member to have such access. After all who wants to keep coming back year after year if full access is denied for a one day admission ticket! Right? I have thought from the very beginning that the homebuilt show plane builders or owners having to pay full admission was ridiculous and not fair. Those builder pilots spend an enormous amount of time and money to get a plane built and readied for such an exhibition. As I have said for 30+ years they are the show. I have said, what would the convention do if all of them decided to NOT SHOW UP one year? What would the attendees look at? Williams jet engines? A new $500,000.00 Cessna? I thought taking the fence down and turning non airplane people loose on peoples life long dreams was a mistake and I still do think that It used to be our ( the EAA members) convention, then it got turned over to the public. I still go to Oshkosh because of guys like some of you that I see there and many other lifelong friends I have met there and some of them I only see there. I have seen a lot of negative things over the years revolving around EAA but I have also seen a lot of good. If things were just completely terrible I guess we would just quit going.
Larry H Sent from my iPad On Jul 5, 2011, at 10:35 PM, "joe.kr2s.buil...@juno.com" <joe.kr2s.buil...@juno.com> wrote: > Hey,All you guys filled out the Eaa survey??? One point i tried to make was > that I beleive that people > ____________________________________________________________ > >
