No Plane? No Problem - Oshkosh Airventure 2024 Was a little Different.

Oh you forgot something? You got to go back in the house and get it? I don't remember if I put deodorant on and I feel like that's... Yeah so ask him. Yeah get back in the house and go get that now. You need that. And that is totally going in the video. That may be, that's the intro to the Oshkosh overview. Do you need to go get your joke? Come to Oshkosh but wear deodorant. Hey guys I'm Brian. It is 2024 and that means we have just wrapped up AirVenture, my seventh AirVenture. So I got my six Snowdoms on the wall and I got this Snowdom for 2024 which never saw the inside of a cockpit. AirVenture was fun. This year was a little bit different. Historically I've found myself with this overwhelming desire to force feed myself every second of every minute of every part of the aviation event, speed walking 15 miles a day, trying to make sure I don't miss anything. This year I slowed the pace down a little bit and I believe I fully transitioned into the it's about people phase of probably life but AirVenture for sure. It was a slower pace this year for me and I think some of that might have been the travel plans getting derailed. I think that probably set the tone for how things happened because there was a point where it felt like we weren't going to make it. I was having issues with my plane and then the IT issues happened and so I called my buddy Eric at three o'clock in the morning and said, what do you want to do? And he said, I'm on my way. We're going to drive. I said okay, let's do it. All right, we're in Oklahoma. All right, we're in Missouri. We're in Illinois. What's the story in Wisconsin? Just getting there was great because I thought there was a chance we might not and then not even knowing it was going to take three days before Erin could get there because she was fighting with the airlines. Initially I was going to get in on Saturday. She was going to get in on Sunday. Eric was going to leave on Thursday. We were going to fly back on Friday. Everything kind of was wheels off so once we got there I was kind of like, well, what is it I have to do here? I have to get some avionics. I need an engine monitor so I can fix my plane so it's not grounded anymore and I really had like two or three things on my schedule so other than that it was kind of a much slower pace. So I got out on Sunday and just kind of moseyed around. I don't say mosey but I walked the grounds. I'll start saying mosey. So the thing about Oshkosh is they will just let anybody out here. Like you could be looking at these cool planes and then your goofy friends walking around with a camera like some kind of YouTube nerd. You want to help pump down the ramp? Help what? Pump down the ramp. Yeah, yeah. Hey Steve. I'm going to pump down the ramp. Oh, they had a baby. Steve, this is my buddy Brian. Hey, I'm Brian. How are you doing? Can we let him partly pump down the ramp? Sure. You want to do that? That wasn't a very confident sure. Are you sure I'm not going to get in trouble? Let me make sure. Do you want to get it on film or? Yeah. Oh, I can tell by this walk that's a no. Yeah. When I walk like that, I don't have good news for people. They kind of left the plane a mess. So my car's the same way. It's like Cheeto bags and stuff in the back. No, they just kind of threw stuff in and left. Oh, that's fine. All right. So now I'm out here in the North 40 with the Cessnas to Oshkosh group over there. And you may remember Jen, who we flew to Roswell with and we found the crashed alien spaceship. She found the crashed alien spaceship. I was like, this is probably just old plane parts. But you're like, it's definitely aliens. There's something they're not telling us. So did you get here today? I got here two days ago with 60. It was a group of 65 in our group this year. You guys did a mass arrival? Mass arrival. Oh, that's awesome. How are you liking it so far? Oh, it was incredible. I was talking to one of the guys and he was telling me about how they landed 60 planes in eight minutes or something. Three at a time. And I've never flown in formation before. So it was an interesting perspective. If you fly to Oshkosh, you were going to fly in formation at some point, whether it's Fisk arrival or something. And you land on a taxiway, which is actually three, six right. So it was it was an amazing experience. I'll never forget it. So Sunday was pretty quiet with the exception of getting phone calls from Aaron going, oh, no, my flight's been canceled. I'm trying to get another one. And now I'm fighting half the country for these remaining flights. So, you know, we roll into Monday. Monday was cool. We've sort of covered this before. For the last handful of years, we've done this sort of YouTuber meet and greet that's gotten larger and larger. This year was spilling out of the form that we were on. It's a lot of fun. It's very hot. I think Dan did a fantastic job. The amount of work this man puts into everything he does is insane. If I worked as hard as he did, I'd be retired. But he put he puts this thing together and it went off without a hitch. It was awesome. How's it going? My drive was awful. It was a drive. I found I found my How are you doing? I did. What's going on, man? Hey, what's going on? Oh, he's that guy that fights fires while flying airplanes at the same time at the same time. This guy cooks food. I do. I do cook while he's flying. Some of it's edible. Hey, what's going on? How are you doing? It's good to see you. I'm here. Oh, there's a dirtbag pilot. I'm going to shoot this question to Brian, too, because you and I are in a similar situation, personally and professionally, where we were. He's giving her a look, says, what are you talking about? You crazy lady. How do you balance your personal life with all the just plain silly stuff and as well as your like your career perspective? The career part's easy. I don't have a job, so it's super easy. That honestly, if you want balance in your life, just quit working. But the editing for me, I mean, I've got two kids that are 15 and 17, one each at 15 and 17. So my editing takes place at night after everybody goes to bed. So I, for whatever reason, I don't require a whole lot of sleep. You and I share one DNA gene, I guess. But so I edit every single night after my real life is done. So it's tough, but that's the only way I found to be able to do it. All right, Bailey. So after the meet and greet, a handful of more frantic phone calls from Erin, I'm not going to be able to get in today, looking at any type of way to get in. I said, why don't you just drive? We did it works. And she likes Oshkosh, but not 17 hours of driving worth of Oshkosh. So a handful of us that were at the YouTuber event decided we were going to go into the woods and try to find this beer coffin. If you've been around AirVenture a few times, you may have heard the legend of this guy, Chuck, who has a coffin in the woods. And you bring a couple of beers from where you're located, put it in the coffin, pull one out. And so he gave us some statistic. He said he thinks the whole coffin turns over. I don't know if it was every day or something, but there were a lot of people out there bringing one in, pulling one out. And so a small group of us went out there and decided to go do the beer coffin experience. This is not a part of Oshkosh. This is outside the grounds, but it's for me, it's part of my Oshkosh. I enjoy this whole little silly ritual and it's a fun kind of neat thing to go share with friends. All right. So we just did the YouTuber meet and greet. And I'd like to say, I feel like I drew a really big crowd. I was surprised how many people showed up to see me. And so we're going to form a group of people and we're going to go try to track down the beer coffin and have a cold one. So, or get lost in the woods. 50 50. Oh, plane lady, what are you doing? Are you looking for a dead body? They told me there was something in here. I will make my donation. That was in the refrigerator at Airbnb. So we're at the beer coffin. My friend Brian from the Colorado Pilots Association. You may remember his thumb. It was in a video where I landed at Leadville. The whole video is actually the Colorado videos next. And I wasn't going to film the guy, but I mean, when he buys a hat from you, what are you going to do? That doesn't shock me. And so that doesn't tell me about my life. After that, it was time to go back to the house. I was way less involved in nighttime activity this year. Cause I did have my cameras and editing equipment. I wanted to try to put out some videos during the event and we had an Airbnb. So we went back a few more phone calls, trying to figure out what the travel plans were going to be with Aaron and kind of hunkered down for the night. And both Eric and I sitting at opposite sides of the table, editing video and photos. So Tuesday, that was the day I got up with the one goal I had for Oshkosh, which was to go find an engine monitor. I've been reading online about Garmin, JPI and Electronics International. I, quite frankly, I went to JPI early in the morning and I felt like they were kind of dismissive. Any questions I had, it was just told that it's in the catalog. It's in the catalog. I didn't feel like they wanted to be bothered by me. I started talking to Garmin and their product looked absolutely fantastic. The price point, Garmin's Garmin. It's not cheap. I don't know if it's the best of the best or whatever, but you're going to, you're going to pay for Garmin. So I was, I was kind of halfway down that path and I thought, well, let me go see what EI has. And when I looked at what they had for the price, I was with this show special, I was less than half the price for the Garmin. And I think they're configuring it now. I don't know when it's going to arrive. I talked to my mechanic today. My plane's an annual. He said he can install it. So I think I'm going to walk away with a surprisingly affordable solution. I got the CGR 30P combo. If you want to look that up and see what it is, it monitors every single thing about the engine and you get these two little cool digital gauges. I'm real excited about having something in the plane. That's not 1950s technology. So, so that was cool. The next thing was Aaron was going to fly into Milwaukee and I was going to drive and pick her up and bring her into AirVenture. So three days late, but that still left her with two and a half days to hang out and enjoy the show. All right. Look who made it to AirVenture after three days of trying to get here and dealing with the airline debacles. You made it. Now we're going to go Oshkosh. If you want to say hi, look for my gold seal or the logo on her. So Tuesday for her was kind of like what my Sunday was. Getting the lay of the land, finding people that we hadn't seen in a year and exchanging handshakes and conversations. And then it was back to the Airbnb. We stayed at an Airbnb in this year. It was fantastic. It was a really nice little house, a 15 minute drive from AirVenture. And given that we had Eric and I drove in, we had a car available to us. So it was really nice to have the sort of flexibility to come and go with, with our own car. Wednesday, as you know, if you've been to AirVenture is the nighttime air show. I had heard rumors this year that it was going to be just amazing. I know the sun and fun night air show was incredibly just, you know, 10 out of 10. And it was going to be exciting to see if Oshkosh was going to do something to step up their nighttime air show. And so we actually did something that we've never really done at Oshkosh before. We had sat down on a patio and we're getting ready for the air show to start. And I just looked at Erin and said, do you want to get out of here? And she said, yeah, I do. So we called an Uber and we went into town. We went to this place called Fox River Brewing Company. It's a little restaurant right on the edge of a river and it was absolutely gorgeous out there. It's very quiet, very peaceful. There's seagulls flying around. There's a guy playing some nice music. It was just a very quiet sort of peaceful way to spend the evening. We could hear the jets flying off in the distance and that was okay. I heard the show was amazing. I'll catch it again next year, but it was nice to say, you know what? We can take a break from this. We don't have to be here all the time. Oshkosh is going to be there in the morning. And that's another reason I'm not really camping. It's okay to be in an Airbnb, get up in the morning, grab coffee, grab breakfast, and then go in. So ended up actually leaving campus three or four times for different meals. And the food at AirVenture is just okay. Some of it's really good. Some of it's really bad. But the food in town is all pretty good. Unless you get weird pizza like my friend, Eric. What did you order? I ordered a taco pizza. Pizza? Now that's what I call a taco. Well, it's not a taco town taco until we roll it up in a blueberry pancake. I bet it's good. It just looks like someone put nachos on top of your pizza. I don't know what that was about. That's not pizza where I come from. That's not pizza anywhere. Tacos and pizza should be separate. Thursday was kind of cool. I've never done this before. Thursday I had set up just a one-on-one, not one-on-one, it's a meet and greet, one-on-many in front of the dean at Flying Eyes is so kind to lend his booth for these things and a place to kind of store my stuff because I didn't have a plane out there. So thank you to those people for being so nice. But so Thursday I had a meet and greet and it was pretty cool to have people come up and share their flying experience and what got them into flying and talk about the funny things they like from the channel or some of the serious things they like from the channel. My favorite moment of all absolutely had to be this kid here and I can't remember if it's Andy or Adam. I think it was Adam. This kid comes up to me, he's wearing my hat with my logo on it. His eyes are like saucers and he's just looking up at me like, I don't know. And I could tell he was excited to meet me and so I kind of talked to him a little bit about planes, a little bit about the channel. And then I said, hey, do you want to get a picture with me? And he just looked me dead in the eyes and goes, no, I don't. I was like, that's the level of honesty I appreciate. I felt bad. I want to get a picture with him because he was really cool. Just to someone with that level of honesty was awesome. So it went pretty well. There are so many people that came out and they're like, oh, this is my handle on YouTube. And I'm like, oh, I know you from the comments or this is, you know, some folks from Patreon came out. Getting to put faces with the names, which I'm not going to remember, and I put that video out if you saw it. I did my best. A handful of people came up and I said, hey, I'm Brian. And they did the, yep, we've met before. And I'm like, oh, I suck. And then I tried the reverse thing where I would go, hey, haven't we met before? And they'd be like, no. I'm like, I can't win for losing. So thank you to all the people that came out. I'm going to try really hard to remember names, but it's just not something I'm good at. But it was really fun to get to meet people and have conversations. And I don't know, just kind of the community of it all was just so cool. Like I said, I've definitely transitioned into the it's about people thing with a lot of stuff. And so the people were amazing. So the rest of Thursday, kind of just walking around, looking at airplanes, seeing what was there. That night we left the airport again and went and had dinner at a restaurant called The Hanger, which was very good. The following morning, we got up, we managed to get on commercial flights and get back to Dallas. So the airlines appear to have had all their stuff sorted out and we both got home in time to enjoy the evening with family. So all in all, a great Oshkosh, probably the best weather I've ever experienced at AirVenture. The highest temperature I think I saw was like low 80s. I think there was rain for about 30 minutes. So all in all, it was super unusual with respect to just the weather being great. Had a really, really good time. I've already got my room booked for next year. So planning to go back, planning to do an Airbnb again. This year, Erin did say she's going to just go the entire time I'm there because she said, you always managed to get there. She doesn't want to deal with any other sort of hiccups. So all right, that's it. I hope you guys had a good time at Oshkosh. If you were able to go, if not, hopefully you enjoyed me sharing my experience with you. I got a couple of funny ones in the queue. I got back to some building time. My airplane is going through some stuff. So there's a lot coming up, but I appreciate you guys sticking with me. You guys fly smart and I'll catch you in the next one. Click this link to see the most recent video upload. Click this link to see a video that YouTube thinks you might like. Click this link to subscribe to my channel.