I did not go to Oshkosh for the first fifteen years I was writing about airshows, for the straightforward reason that it seemed too large to be useful. AirVenture is not an airshow in the sense that Fairford is an airshow or that a Redhill fly-in is a fly-in. It is a temporary city organised around aviation, which is a different thing, and I was not sure I trusted temporary cities. I preferred the scale where you could walk the full perimeter before the afternoon display started and still have time for a bad cup of tea.
When I finally went, what stayed with me was not the flying. The flying was extraordinary, as advertised, but extraordinary flying at that volume eventually produces a kind of sensory fatigue that is its own experience. What stayed with me was a conversation I had on the third morning with a man named Don, or a man I will call Don because I did not write his name down at the time and he was not the sort of person who expected to be written about. He was in his late sixties, methodical in his movements, and he was doing something to a grandstand strut with a tool I could not name, in the early light before the crowds arrived, with the total absorption of someone performing a task they have performed so many times it has become a form of thinking.
He told me, when I asked, that he had been coming to Oshkosh for thirty-one years. Not attending. Coming to work. Driving from Wisconsin, or later from further away when he moved, arriving days before the public, and spending those days doing exactly what I was watching him do. Setting up. Checking. Fixing the things that had been stored incorrectly or had not survived the winter or had been installed last year by someone who did not know what Don knew. Then staying through the week, then breaking it all down, then driving home.
I asked him what he got from it. He looked at me with the patient expression of someone who has been asked a question that reveals the asker’s limitations, not his own. He said he got Oshkosh. That was the complete answer and he clearly felt it was sufficient.
I have been thinking about that answer for three years.
The airshow circuit in Britain runs on a version of the same thing, though it tends not to examine itself about this, because the culture here is better at gratitude as a gesture than as an analysis. Every event I have attended, from the ones that filled a former RAF station to capacity to the ones held at grass strips with two hundred people and a hot dog van that had seen better decades, has been held together by a category of person who does not appear in the programme. They arrive before the public does and they leave after. They know where the cable runs and which tent peg will not hold in the morning damp and which marshal needs reminding about the taxi line and which one does not. They carry this knowledge entirely in their heads and transmit it, imperfectly and generationally, to whoever is standing next to them.
What changed my thinking about Don was not the number itself. Thirty-one years is an impressive number but numbers are easy. It was the realisation, sometime after the conversation and before I finished my first coffee of the morning, that the event I was standing in, the whole elaborate temporary fact of it, was only partially the product of the organisation that ran it. The other part, the part that made it function rather than merely exist, was the accumulated knowledge of people who had decided, without being asked in any formal sense, that this thing was worth returning to. Year after year. Before the crowds. After the crowds. With the tool whose name I did not know, doing the thing I did not understand, making the structure safe for people who would never think to wonder whether it was safe.
I have watched British events lose that layer. Not dramatically. Quietly, the way things thin at the edges before they thin at the centre. A long-standing volunteer who does not come back and is not replaced by someone with equivalent knowledge. A piece of institutional memory that retires when a person retires and is not recovered. The event continues for a year or two on momentum and then contracts in ways that the organiser describes as a strategic decision, when what it actually is, more often than not, is a consequence.
The organisations that run Oshkosh understand something that British airshow culture tends to romanticise without operationalising, which is that the volunteer who has come back for three decades is not a nice story for the programme notes. That person is load-bearing infrastructure. Losing them is a structural event, not a sentimental one, and the time to think about it is not after it has happened.
Don finished with the strut and moved to the next one without looking up.
The grandstand was there when the crowds arrived. It was there because he came back.
Alex Bradley is a UK-based aviation writer and airshow circuit regular who has spent years attending displays from RIAT at Fairford and the Biggin Hill Festival of Flight to small fly-ins that drew two hundred people and a hot dog van, and values both for entirely different reasons.
He is not a pilot. He is not a PR man for the aviation industry. He is the person in the crowd who has been coming long enough to notice when something has quietly changed, when an organiser is papering over a problem, and when a display is genuinely worth the drive.
His writing on Redhill Airshow covers the British airshow circuit, safety, display team politics, CAA regulations, and the quiet contraction of grass airfield culture that nobody in the industry wants to discuss plainly.
He has stood at Redhill Aerodrome in every kind of English summer weather, watched Tiger Moths bank low over Surrey farmland, and carries strong opinions about what this country is slowly losing one cancelled event at a time.
