Oshkosh attendance

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For me, OSH is out of the question this year. With so many costs up,
flat income, and the cost of fuel so high, it is just not in the
cards. I am wondering if there are others in the same boat.

EAA carefully guards attendance figures but for those that are there,
what does it look like? Lots of open aircraft parking spaces and thin
crowds?


We flew in Saturday and left Wednesday. My impression was that camping
attendance was down only slightly from last year. N. 40 buses and the
vendor hangars seemed about as full as usual.

Side note: We spent a few hours Sunday monitoring ATC and watching the RWY
27 arrivals. The aircraft identification by controllers was generally poor.
We saw two situations where mis-identification produced dangerous confusion.
As I understand it, arrival controllers work in four-person teams with part
of the team being dedicated spotters. It seems more care needs to be taken
that spotters are selected who can tell the difference between a Navion and
a Columbia, which one of the teams we heard Sunday could not.