The last week has been a very interesting and fun week with lots of aviation. The fly-in at Oshkosh attracts more than 700 000 people, 12 000 aircraft during a full week in July every year. The event grows every year and it started back in the 1950’s with some people meeting up to discus issues about homebuilt experimental aircraft. Since then it has grown into being the world largest flight event.

Even though there were 12000 aircraft at the show there was only one from Sweden, guess which one…, of course it was our Twin Star SE-LVO. Due to this huge number of aircraft that will land and takeoff from one airport during a limited amount of time special approach and departure procedures in and out from Oshkosh was described in a 32 pages document. There are procedures for instrument approaches, visual approaches, approaches for high speed old jet airplanes, for airplanes without radio communication, for sea airplanes, for ultra light airplanes, for helicopters etc. This all happening at the same time into six different runways! It is not strange that the airport control tower becomes the busiest control tower in the world during this week…

A very busy control tower...

We started our arrival to Oshkosh via the visual FISK arrival. Fisk is a small town just southwest of the airport and served as the main arrival point for all visual traffic. We had studied the approach procedure in detail and we were three concentrated crew members looking out for other traffic while approaching Fisk. Prior to approaching Fisk we monitored a special arrival information frequency were we got to know which runways that were in use and some other weather information. When reaching Fisk we changed frequency to a controller who was visually looking into the air at the arrival point giving the inbound traffic a designated runway for its final approach. The controller was handling the inbound traffic as we were all coming in on a conveyor belt, without knowing the callsign of each aircraft. Therefore we got the clearance “White Diamond Twin Star, cleared for approach runway 18R, rock your wings as acknowledgement and contact the tower”. The reason for doing this was that if everybody would acknowledge over the radio (as you normally do) the frequency would be totally saturated!
We rocked our wings, did the final landing checklist and turned into position for a right base runway 18R.
While flying closer to the field we saw many thousands of airplanes and several hundreds of thousands of people, totally amazing! When turning final we got the landing clearance from the tower, “White Diamond on short final, clear to land at the Pink point, rock your wings as acknowledgement”. In order to keep up with the high number of landing aircrafts the runways had three different color coded landing spots. That made the taxing off the runway faster. After clearing the runway we were directed to our parking space via a number of EAA flag personal along the taxiways directing us to our parking.

I’m very impressed of the efficiency of the procedures and all the air traffic control personnel!

During the days at Oshkosh we had the opportunity to meet up with several of our sponsors and partners. We met up with Diamond aircrafts, Shell aviation, Diamond Scandinavia, Bose, NavAero, MH and several others. During a press conference at the Diamond both we had the possibility to give a short presentation about the project, not bad at all having the brand new Diamond D-JET in the background for our presentation!

Presentation of WFH in front of the D-JET cockpit mockup

The WFH team togehter with the NavAero team

There were also many hearing impaired pilots attending the Oshkosh Airventure. We had the opportunity to be part of a direct broadcasted radio session at the EAA Radio where Met Futrell did an interview about our world flight with the hard of hearing perspective in mind. This also led to that we attended a seminar about being a pilot and being hearing impaired. At that seminar there were several people telling about their background about the struggle of becoming a pilot despite their hearing impairment or deafness. Met Futrell did a good job of explaining the possibilities there are for hard of hearing and deaf pilots, especially in the US, where you have more rights to become a pilot as deaf compared to e.g. Europe, something not everyone would know about.

We participated in a radioshow...

Johan held a presentation for deaf and hard of hearing pilots

Several deaf and hard of hearing pilots attended Oshkosh

There were many interesting airplanes and companies to be visited during the show, I will mention some of them. A lot of things are happening within the VLJ segment (Very Light Jet). That is a business jet in a miniature format. I think the most interesting is the single engine Diamond D-JET which has been in flight test for a few month and that the Eclipse 500 has made it that far that it has been FAA approved and about to be delivered to its first customers. Also Honda showed their new development with its Honda Jet having its characteristic engine mounts.
The common denominator regarding new development is the use of glass cockpits. The Garmin G1000 and the Avidyne setup can be seen in more or less every new development. It is also noticeable that this technology now goes into homebuilt experimental aircrafts.
Cessna presented their new development in the LSA (Light Sport Aviation) segment, a new segment which allows you to fly airplanes with a slightly higher maximum takeoff weight than Ultralight with a simplified pilot licence.
Not the least, Diamond aircraft had all their products on display and it felt very good being able to speak well about the DA42 and our experiences with it around the world.
This was just to mention a very few…

The D-JET

The Eclipse 500 was ready for delivery

Everyday there was an impressive airshow held. All kind of aircrafts participated, everything from small ultralights to large fast aircrafts. If you are the slightest interested in aviation, I can really recommend attending the Oshkosh airshow, you will meet a lot of nice people, learn about everything within aviation, see all kinds of aircrafts, both in the air and on the ground!

Spectacular airshows!

You could find all kind of aeroplanes

Today it was time for takeoff from Oshkosh, we started up and after a minor technical issue we could start our departure procedure for Toronto. I would like say thanks to Orion Flight Services that provided us with some hangar space during the rain this morning!
The departure procedure out from Oshkosh was busy, the line of waiting aircrafts were several hundreds meters long. Two runways were used for departure and aircrafts were lined up side by side on each runway and then allowed to take off within a short distance. Our departure was easy, takeoff runway 27, climb out west or north, climb to 1300 feet, get out of the class D airspace (a certain area around the airport which is controlled by the control tower) and then set heading for Canada and Toronto.

That’s all for now,

Over and out

Written by Henrik

Posted by: Mel Futrell
Hey guys! Great to have you as a part of the presentation, as well as our International Tent group. Safe travels and do stay in touch, as I will be doing the seminar and radio broadcast every year. Hope to see you again soon -- or maybe part of a Deaf Pilots Association fly-in! (www.deafpilots.org)
Blue Skies! -Mel

Posted by: Tommy Wiklind
Hi guys! I was very happy to meet you at Oshkosh and get a chance to hear about your adventures. It's truely an amazing journey your doing - on all accounts - and timing it for Oshkosh was perfect. Have a nice stay in Canada (I'm sure it's cooler than Oshkosh - temperature wise) and have a safe flight back to Europe.