Camp founder Joe Champagne is the chief pilot for Air Grand Canyon, and flies Cessna 207s out of Grand Canyon Airport, in Arizona. Champagne, originally from New Orleans, has been coming to Oshkosh for 22 years, and tries to get into Wittman Field a week before the show starts to stake his claim on this prime campsite. AVweb visited Bill Sellers and Vernon Roper of Marysville, Calif., occupants of campsite Row 1, space A, the primo spot closest to the convention grounds. Michael Hoag has volunteered for parking duty for the last 19 years. He's one of about 25 volunteers who spend a few days before AirVenture trying to keep the traffic moving.
Parking is a potential choke point in the system.
If the airplanes don't get parked efficiently, they back up on the taxiway, which causes runway congestion, which means the tower tells Fisk to start holding at Ripon, and some pilot ends up doing doughnuts over Ohio. AVweb found the pair armed with an airband scanner and video camera as they reviewed the continuous stream of arriving aircraft the day before the show opened. Compared to the past two years, Gardner and Lee felt that the weekend's arriving traffic was lighter than usual, and that the patterns and landings were all pretty respectable. We are aware of a very nice Bellanca 260 that landed in Indiana while en route to OSH but couldn't get its nosegear down. The Bellanca's occupants emerged unscathed, but the Bellanca will need some work.