More Oshkosh

The weather hasn't been as nice the past two days as it was on Tuesday. Yesterday morning it rained hard. We stopped to buy umbrellas before heading to the event but we still got pretty wet. It's a long walk from the parking area to the show area. The rain also turned the high traffic areas into mud.

Today's weather was better but still had low clouds. It didn't rain until the end of the day. We waited under a tent for some heavy rain to pass before getting back to the car.

With the low clouds, the afternoon airshows are much different. The planes can't do their full routines, going as high as needed. So there are lots of low level passes. They also make lots of passes over the runway, climb up about 500 feet, do a loop back down and do the same thing at the other end of the runway. The jump team did jump today. There were over 12 jumpers.

The highlight for today was hearing Bob Hoover speak. Bob was a fighter pilot in WWII, a test pilot, aerobatic champ and an airshow performer. Everyone who speaks of him says he is a great guy. Well he is also a great story teller. He told one story about going to Moscow with US Aerobatic team in the mid '60's. The US team wasn't that good and only finished 7th out of 17. The Russians won.

He told about how the CIA briefed him before going over there. They thought he might get offered a chance to fly a Russian plane, which he thought was crazy. Why would they let him fly one of their planes. During the 11 days of competition, Bob watched very closely how the winning Russian pilot flew his plane. Sure enough, after the awards were handed out, they asked him if he wanted to fly the winning plane. He had noticed that pilot didn't fly the plane inverted (up side down) very much.

He explained how the airport was near a river on the far side of the field and there was a 30 foot wall on that side of the field. Bob took off quickly, went a short distance and went inverted. He then flew over the wall and dropped down below it. It looked to the crowd like he was going to crash but he turned right side up and flew along the wall, out of sight. Just before coming back over the wall and into sight, he went inverted again. So he came back into sight at the other end of the field. He then did all the maneuvers the Russian pilot had done but he did them inverted.

The Russian crowd went crazy. The Russian officials were not so happy and arrested him. They said he broke laws by flying so low. They let him go the next morning and sent him home.

The Oshkosh airport is near a big lake and there is a seaplane base in a small cove off the lake. It's a nice setup with docks, moorings and some buildings. Here are some photos of that.