Builders,
I flew back to Florida yesterday to pack for the drive to Oshkosh. I have been to Airventure many times, missing only one year in the last twenty.
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Above, the view of Newark from seat 23A a few minutes after departing on 4L and then turning south. Lower Manhattan, the 6000′ span of the Veranzano bridge and the Statue of Liberty were all visible. Dozens of other landmarks are indenifiable to anyone who once lived here. You don’t have to love everything about NYC to appreciate its cultural magnitude in the world. There are countless fine urban places on earth, but there is only one universally known as “The City.” If the loss of five officers in Dallas touched something inside you, consider that the people here are tough enough to have withstood the loss of 363 people in uniform in a single morning.
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If you go to old magazines and look at the Oshkosh coverage from years past, it is obvious that most of it was about new and exciting products that were promised to revolutionize home building. These stories were written to entertain the daydreams and fantasies of people who were going to build something “someday .” About 90% of these companies failed, not just because their ideals were mostly rainbow colored unicorn dung, but also because the people they were speaking with were perpetual spectators, and their new product was often aimed at making it easier to these people to ‘become’ a home builder. This is folly because you can’t make anything quick enough to build for someone who is never going to build anything, simply because they have been fed the entertainment diet of a spectator instead of being offered the information diet of a builder.
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Neither you nor I can change our industry, ( trust me, I speak from experience on this ) However, it is completely within our control to decide for ourselves that we will not be one of the perpetual spectators, that our place is in the actual Arena of home building. For the individuals who make this decision for themselves, we offer a proven path and products with an uninterrupted 27 year track record of serving traditional home builders, people who are looking to find out how much they can get out of home building, not how little.
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Well said on the yearly display of Unicorns at Oshkosh. Sometimes they can morph into something more earthly, the VariEze and its family seem to be a case in point but yes, they usually pass into extinction. My first Oshkosh was almost 30 years ago and I still remember the awe that was before me, it was as if I had finally made it to the sacred city of aviation and the wisdom of the ages was before me. I returned several times over the next ten years or so but the loss of my 3rd class along with the obvious shift in emphasis to Unicorns and Warbirds cooled my interest. Now I just try to make it to SNF in the spring which makes for simpler logistics given I live in Florida and being a resort area there are loads of hotels within easy driving distance, I am just too old now to put up with a tent in a half flooded campground.
Nice picture by the way but if you had been flying out of South Korea you would actually be violating the law there, a sign of just how serious they take the situation with their former kinfolk to the North.