Oshkosh 2011 report

[Mike Sweeney]

Nice recount, thanks Keith - I can relate to "a line of thunderstorms was passing south of Lake Michigan .."
Flew VFR from NY to KMDW and after a stop at kczg, and it was the same the day before you.
Negotiating around the TS activity: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N760 ... /KCZG/KMDW

the type was not a PA28 getting 160kts ground speed westbound; N7601Q is a C310

[Steve Ruiz]

Amazing news about AOPA!
Can't wait to hear more.

[Tim Krajcar]

My spies are starting to turn up press mentions of PE... here's the latest, from Wired.com:

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/07/fl ... ntrollers/

[Alex Stjepanovic]

My spies are starting to turn up press mentions of PE... here's the latest, from Wired.com:

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/07/fl ... ntrollers/

I could be wrong, but I smell some wildfire starting

[TheMadDocMD]

Awesome article - here we go - can't wait!

[Keith Smith]

Day 1:
Lots of interesting people dropped by the booth, including some large contingents from a VA on VATSIM. Good time was had by all.

Day 2:
Tuesday, Ian Twombly, Deputy Editor for AOPA Pilot Training and AOPA Pilot magazines visits the PFC booth and flies on PE. Loves it, comes back with film crew to get footage of the system in action and conducts an interview. He said the video would be published on the AOPA web site, and that he wanted to follow up with magazine articles.

Day 3:
Wednesday, reporter from Wired interviews us and gets some photos...
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/07/fl ... ntrollers/

Day 4:
Thursday, the first person who approaches the ATC scope to see what's going on turns out to be a retired norcal controller. He's blown away by what he's seeing and has many, many good things to say. Great start to the day. EAA film crew shoots a 3 minute interview with me and Max Trescott. Not much detail, but anything that gets the word out is a good start. Don Carrol (he's here helping me out along with Markian) lines up a spot for PE on EAA radio. The interview is scheduled for Sunday morning. This will be broadcast live (I suspect) on local AM/FM radio, on the EAA site, on liveatc.net (which streams EAA radio), and will be made available to me on a flash drive a few hours after the interview.



Tomorrow (Friday) will be interesting, one of the owners of the house in which we're staying will be coming to Air Venture to provide ATC. She has worked a good number of towers and has knowledge of radar procedures (although she wasn't actually radar-certified). This'll provide a nice break for Markian and me.

Actually what it might mean is that we can fly (there are 2 sims) and generate some consistent radio traffic.

Lots of commercial opportunities have been presenting themselves but I will leave it at that. I've snapped a few pics on the phone and a brief video, but I hope to get some better ones tomorrow.

We've learned many things about what works and what doesn't work during the show. We're doing the best we can without an internet connection over there. The plan for tomorrow is to maximize the amount of time that we have a qualified pilot in the sim. With few exceptions, the moment we start having a flow of radio transmissions, the moment the lines of people start to form.

[arb65912]

I am very happy to hear how things are going with PE.

Good job, Keith!

[Daddy O]

Too bad there is no internet connection. I woulda thunk that for something major like Oshkosh, PFC woulda dropped in a couple of aircards for each simulator. The 4G cards are fast enough to stream Netflix, and they would only need to have one for their primary PC.

Sounds great though. It prolly makes Redbird's automated ATC seem like talking to a phone tree.

[Daddy O]

Maybe for next year's event Eugene and I could put together a nice map of Oshkosh for them to fly out of. That'd be cool, eh?

[Keith Smith]

4g and the free wifi service were saturated during the show, as we suspected would be the case. That is why we ran offline.

A lot of planning goes into the show and the decisions regarding the structure of the demonstrations are not made lightly. Undoubtedly, it would've been better to have a stable net connection and to run the demo with live remote traffic as well as the 2 connected sims, but that would've been cost prohibitive (more than $1500 to get our own connection for the week).

The original plan was to have 3 sims connected to the server, but in the end, only two were available for public use.

We definitely learned a few things from the show and will make changes for future shows. The #1 issue is that unless we specifically mentioned it, most people were not aware that the ATC service was 1) available over the internet and 2) available through standard FS9/FSX/Xplane installations.

Having the speakers playing all of the audio from the controller's voice room was pure gold. Any time we had someone picking up an IFR clearance, or anything else that got the radio busy, the line of people would stack up virtually instantaneously. When the radios were quiet, the booth was relatively quiet. The pattern was undeniable.