I’ll write up a couple of in-depth items separately, but here’s an overview of my day at Sun ‘n Fun (Lakeland, Florida).
Previous visits to Sun ‘n Fun have been via (1) commercial flight from Boston and rental car from Tampa (advantage: Bern’s Steakhouse, back when you didn’t need to reserve months in advance), (2) Cirrus landing in the morning (complicated NOTAM, but not as busy as Oshkosh) and then potentially long-ish wait to depart between end of air show and 7 pm curfew, (3) minivan from our home in Jupiter, with stop at nearby Legoland. This year, I decided on a night-before flight to Bartow, Florida, a former P-51 training base (KBOW) that is 30 minutes from Lakeland, rent a car from Avis, and stay in a hotel (Florida has so much hotel capacity that prices don’t get to the insane levels that they do in Oshkosh). The mechanics of this worked out pretty well, but it is a mistake to try to leave Sun ‘n Fun by car within the first hour after the end of the air show.
For those who want to build their own planes, Sun ‘n Fun has a full slate of skills-building classes. Not sure that I would want to fly in a plane that contained my very first welds:
The airshow was loud, louder, and loudest with, admittedly, some finesse from superstar Mike Goulian. There were demonstrations of the F-35 (A and C models), the E/A-18G Growler, the F-16, and the Blue Angels (back to an all-male pilot team now that the Amazon Prime movie cameras aren’t rolling). With a smartphone, I think that the breakups are the best pictures that one can take of the Blue Angels, e.g.,
Here’s a photo taken from the control tower by a Bartow Airport employee (95B Photography on Flickr) that proves the ancient advice, “f/8 and be there”:
If you want to be a hero among progressives, you can volunteer with this Illinois-based organization (the representative was wearing an N95 mask, of course!) to exfiltrate a 15-year-old from benighted Florida to a state where his/her/zir/their genitals can be safely removed as part of gender-affirming care (abortion care is also part of the mission and the org says “hosted our very first drag show” in the 2024 annual report):
I’m not sure that the message of Elevated Access resonated with everyone at Sun ‘n Fun. There were some downright Deplorable people and planes (a couple of veterans, below):
As bad as it is to be a teenager in need of gender-affirming care stuck in Florida, the status of certified avionics is even worse. Situation summary: grim and expensive. Systems are old and clunky, e.g., the 2009 Garmin package touted in the latest -G7 Cirruses, and super expensive. There is still no reasonable upgrade path for the 4000 Avidyne-equipped -G2 Cirruses. A broker estimated that about 5 percent of these have been converted to the latest Garmin gear ($150,000 in an airframe that, pre-Biden, was only worth about $150,000) and that nobody should invest this kind of money. Considering that brokers make a commission on the total price of the plane, the advice not to do the Garmin upgrade means that it must be a stunningly terrible value. (Contrast to realtors, who always advise homeowners to do a huge amount of work prior to selling!) The Avidyne Vantage system is not certified yet. Dynon has nothing for the -G2 Cirrus.
Cirrus runs a great operation for owners at Sun ‘n Fun, including a perfect viewing location as well as air conditioning and cold drinks/snacks. I had my checkbook out to purchase a -G7, but the company refused my demand to add Blue Steel and Magnum to the color chart:
The latest and greatest Cirruses typically come with built-in oxygen for maintaining mental sharpness at high altitude. I’m wondering if this is being done all wrong. There’s a bottle built into the plane that is expensive to service and recertify. FBOs are getting into the habit of charging a fortune to top up these bottles with oxygen because their costs of labor and insurance are so high (the typical oxygen customer is a jet owner). There are some portable systems (example) that supposedly can concentrate enough oxygen up to 18,000′ to keep one pilot mentally sharp. It is rare to have more than two people on an oxygen-required flight and also fairly rare to go above 18,000′ (the limit for nasal cannulas). Maybe it would make more sense to put two of these these concentrators into the typical unpressurized airplane than a bottle-based system. I guess have a bottle supplement for those rare super high altitude flights.
V1 Hats is working on the problem of baseball cap-headset interference by thinning out the material near the ear:
I wish that it were possible to get custom designs and logos! Godzilla, at a minimum.
Here are some imports from China that made it in just under the tariff wire:
Towards the campground:
Flying out of Bartow, some ideas for decorating one’s living room ceiling and a nice museum devoted to the military’s time here:
