I spent a day at EAA this past week. “EAA” is what people often call the biggest air show in the world. It stands for Experimental Aircraft Association, but the real name is AirVenture (the year) Oshkosh. Some just call it “Oshkosh” or “AirVenture” while locals around Oshkosh have always called it EAA. Given that I’m also from Oshkosh, I too call it EAA.

It’s impossible to see all of the show in a single day and we walked seven miles according to our steps. We didn’t cover a third of the show. I had other activities planned so I had just one day to take in the event. It’s still a wonderful place to take the family just to watch the air show.

My brother and I last attended in 2016, and this was the longest absence since my first show in the 70s. I built my Calidus a few months after EAA in 2016 and I was disappointed that I didn’t see another example this year.

There were no signs of COVID remnants from prior years, such as plastic barriers and mask stations. I rarely saw someone in a mask. The crowd was ready to kick the whole thing into the history books. I was planning to attend in 2020, but it was canceled that year, and I read it was lightly attended in 2021.

What makes the show especially unique for me is that I’m also someone who built an experimental aircraft, so I’m in that small category that the show was originally created to support. Yet, in spite of that, I didn’t have time to attend a single builder interest forum. In fact, I never saw a Calidus, like the one I built at the show.

I first started attending when I was a kid. I’d ride my bike out to the show and hang on the fence with the other kids. I can’t imagine the number of kids the show has inspired to fly. I suspect it’s the largest single motivation to get people to learn to fly.

Some years I didn’t have enough money for a ticket so I’d have to watch from a nearby farm field. The tickets were expensive, and at one point, they separated the flight line airplanes and their owners from the public who had to remain behind a second fence. That was eventually changed to get more people interacting with aviation. Back then getting a “flight line pass” was a big deal.

Aviation is still a very expensive hobby and thus profession, which explains the shortage of airline pilots. We have a serious shortage of student pilots in all categories in the US and this is the very core of aviation’s future. None of the flight schools around here look like they are doing all that well judging by the training aircraft available. This should alarm everyone.

There is no one reason for aviation to be as expensive as it is, and the FAA could do a lot to help keep the costs in check without compromising safety. Just the logistics to meet regulations can be a bottleneck and that always drives up the cost. I’d guess that regulatory logistics alone cost me 20% of my cost to build. As one example, the initial 40 hours had to be flown within 100 miles of where it was built. I couldn’t truck it to another location that would get me in the air sooner. Someone had to pay for that.

It’s already expensive to pick up a sport or private pilot’s licenses, where the whole adventure begins. To earn a basic sport pilot certificate is estimated at around $5-$7k, and a private certificate is $8-10k, so it’s not going to bring an average person off the street unless they see a path to continue to fly. Some schools say the cost for a private rating is closer to $15k.

Young pilots have a hard time working to support their flying while accumulating enough hours to earn a commercial or instructor rating, then fly enough hours to get paid to fly. Some in the industry are keenly aware of the problem, and student loans are not the solution. Low time pilots make very little money so there isn’t a lot of appeal to run up a big debt just to fly.

Let’s assume you need 300 hours to qualify for even the lowest paying commercial job, at $200 an hour at the lower end, that’s an expensive hurdle to overcome. It would take a while to earn that $60k back. You more likely need to move up in aircraft sophistication, including a twin engine rating, so that number more than doubles per hour.

Yet, in spite of the big expense of flying, between 10,000 and 15,000 airplanes show up every year at Oshkosh, and 600,000 people attend the show throughout the week. I think that’s measured by daily attendance rather than unique visitors, but it’s still a very big number. Imagine if the average cost to fly into Oshkosh is $300 an hour, with an average distance of eight hours from original destination to Oshkosh for a small single engine, you’re looking at $4,800 to get there and home. Now, multiply that again by 12,500 planes and you’re looking at $60 million, not including costs on site for those people and airplanes. Yet, they still show up every year.

I don’t know the average fly-in distance, or the average cost per hour. It’s just a guess.

I’ve noticed that the majority of pilots who fly in are well over 50, and of course, most have above average incomes to be able to afford a plane and remain proficient. There is no shortage of nice planes at the events along with a few aircraft that looked tired, so there is money out there for aviation, but unfortunately it’s not cheap enough for young pilots to keep aviation healthy.

Hopefully more people get the flying bug from these shows and do all they can to get in the air. It’s critical to our aviation future. We’re otherwise going to have an even bigger shortage of pilots in the coming years and that will be bad for everyone.