10 Tips for Flying in to AirVenture

June 28, 2018 - Flying yourself into EAA AirVenture Oshkosh is a rite of passage for some pilots, a bucket list item for many others, and an annual must-do for still others. Whichever category you’re in, arriving at Oshkosh is only difficult if you’re not prepared. Here are ten tips to make sure you’re ready when the time comes.

If the headline for this story was “One Tip for Flying in to AirVenture,”,this would be it. Some NOTAMS are one or two sentences — ours is 32 pages, and it’s an absolutely mandatory read before you fly in. Wittman Field in Oshkosh becomes the busiest airport in the world during the week of AirVenture, and that only works because people follow the rules in the NOTAM. It’s available as a download or you can order a printed copy and we’ll send it to you for free, as long as you promise to read it.

Arrive Before You Get Here If you have a PC-based simulator like Microsoft Flight Simulator X (currently available from Dovetail Games via the Steam marketplace) or X-Plane, you can fly the Fisk arrival, or any of the others, for that matter, before you leave the house. Enhanced scenery packages are available for both platforms, but even out of the box, you’ll see important landmarks and can get familiar with the routes. You’ll occasionally find prepackaged scenarios, especially on simulators from a company like RedBird, which run on a variant of Microsoft Flight Simulator, that include custom ATC and traffic, but using the simulator is more about landmarks and time and distance than it is about what you hear on the radio. If you don’t have a sim at home, you can do much the same thing on a platform like Google Earth.

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