Although there's no reason to wake up early at OSH, it's almost impossible not to do so, even with earplugs in, since folks on the north airport (runway 9-27) seem to insist on starting ops around 6 - 6:30 AM. And as much as I like airplanes, I can't sleep through engine noise - where are the electric airplanes when you need them?
Backstory - I got an email the Sunday after we left on vacation from one Zachary Baughman, who runs the "Timeless Voices Oral History Program" for the EAA. Apparently they comb the listings of Forum presenters, looking for those that might be interesting to interview. I've never gotten a call from them before in the 6 or so times I've done the COZY forum. Interestingly, they noticed that I work for ICON Aircraft (I guess Scaled was old hat when I was there, or something) and Zach stated that they'd "love to hear about your involvement with ICON and the development of the A5 and where it is today".
Sure, I said - I'm happy to oblige and give you an interview - we arranged to get together for what I was told would be 45 minutes on Friday morning (when I previously said I was wandering around through the buildings... getting old sucks). We met Zach and he drove me and Deanie to the EAA museum at 9 AM on Friday. He introduced us to the interviewer (not him) who had been doing these interviews for many years (10, to be exact). They brought us to a real audio/video studio - lights, recording equipment - the whole shebang. I was impressed.
he guy doing the interview admitted that he was coming in cold and had done no research on me - he didn't know who I was from a hole in the wall. But he started asking questions, and I started talking, and after about 45 minutes he had gotten my life story as it applied to airplanes and flying. He thought we were done, and I mentioned that Zach had been interested in my ICON experiences and we hadn't touched on that. So he apologized profusely (hey - this was for their program - I didn't have an agenda - it wasn't bothering me any) and we continued with a second tape. After another 45 minutes, we had talked about ICON, how ICON was different from Scaled, what ICON's vision is, and how I fit into that. So they have about 90 minutes of me yakking.
I figured that this would be edited down to 7-10 minutes of actual footage that will go on the web and into their archives - it'll be interesting to see what they keep and how they present it. I was told that I'd get an unedited copy for myself, and that I own the rights to the thing.
When it gets posted to the EAA website, I'll let folks know - don't throw tomatoes at your own screen though - that's just stupid :-).
I spent the rest of the morning wandering through the display hangars and talking to the Sagetech folks about their ADS-B receiver (tiny and feature rich, although it won't ship until the end of September) and to Hilton Goldstein, he of WingX Pro7 fame. I discussed the need for NMEA-0183 output from the iPad in order to drive autopilots (in experimental aircraft). He said "you get me hardware that can do the serial connectivity and I'll write the software to output it - it's trivial". Whoo-hoo - all vaporware at this point, but at least someone says it can be done, and I've found iPad to serial cables out there, cheap.
I ate a banana and headed back to the forum tents for the COZY forum at 1 PM in tent #2. The forum was well attended as usual, even if some of the usual suspects weren't there. I'd estimate about 100 people, and as is normally the case, 1/3 of them had never been to a COZY forum before and were interested in the introductory information. I spent a lot of time this year discussion flight testing and safety related issues. Probably either preaching to the choir or the deaf - those seem to be the only two cohorts - but ya gotta try.
Anyway, the forum went well - some good questions at the end - and then I hung out by the plane for a couple of hours to give folks a chance to look the plane over and ask questions directly.
At 4:45 PM Deanie and I walked over to the Beer Tent to meet Bob Forster, who's taken it upon himself to be our chauffeur to the COZY dinner every year. We got to Robbins restaurant around 5:30 PM and milled around talking to everyone for a while before heading in to dinner around 6 PM. Daryl and Kim Lueck once more did an admirable job of organizing the dinner, although it did seem a bit more lightly attended than usual - maybe 50 people or so. But a good time was had by all and around 9 PM Bob drove us back to the airport and we hit the sack.
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