Aviation heritage on display at AirVenture
OSHKOSH, Wis.—The National Aviation Heritage Area is on display this week at AirVenture 2019, the world’s biggest fly-in, thanks to the National Park Service and NAHA partners.
The Experimental Aircraft Association’s (EAA’s) AirVenture 2019 fly-in convention and air show opened Monday, July 22 and runs through Sunday, July 28 at Wittman Regional Airport. The weeklong annual event typically draws upwards of a half million people. EAA reported a record 601,000 visitors in 2018.
Thousands of those visitors have been stopping at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park’s exhibit in EAA’s International Federal Pavilion, where the National Park Service is among several federal agencies with displays. Joining Dayton’s national park with presentations and demonstrations are NAHA partners Aviation Trail Inc., the Wright Image Group and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, as well as Sinclair Community College, said Ranger Nicholas Georgeff, who manages the National Park Service program at AirVenture.
Paul Woodruff of Wright-Patterson AFB talks about the base’s history and mission.
The National Aviation Heritage Alliance, the Area’s nonprofit management entity, is supporting the exhibit.
“We have had a pretty steady flow” of visitors to the exhibit, Georgeff said Wednesday. “By the end of the week, I think we will have had 30,000 people pass through.”
More visitors this year seem to be aware of Dayton’s connection to the Wright brothers, Georgeff said. In years past, visitors were often surprised to learn that Wilbur and Orville lived in Dayton, not North Carolina, and built their airplanes there before taking them to the Outer Banks to test them.
NAHA’s vice chair, Col. Susan Richardson (USAF, ret.), took a brief helicopter flight over the AirVenture grounds on Tuesday as part of her first visit to the massive fly-in.
“This airport has a half million people, and this week it has the world’s busiest control tower. From the air, you can see the miles of tents and campers and cars and airplanes. It’s a true testament to the international scope of the event,” she said.
The National Aviation Heritage Area benefits from having national park exhibit and the associated partner activities at AirVenture, Richardson said. “It enables us to get the Wright brothers story and the legacy of the Heritage Area in front of this vast audience.”
About the National Aviation Heritage Area
The National Aviation Heritage Area is one of 55 U. S. National Heritage Areas under a program administered by the National Park Service and the only one dedicated to aviation heritage. It encompasses eight counties in southwestern Ohio: Montgomery, Greene, Miami, Clark, Warren, Champaign, Shelby, and Auglaize counties. The National Aviation Heritage Alliance (NAHA) is a not-for-profit corporation designated by Congress as the Area’s management entity.
