Fresh out of a 7-year restoration in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, this sub-killing PBY Catalina is my pick for the most beautiful warbird of EAA AirVenture 2026:
(Also a very welcome sight in 1945 for sailors from the USS Indianapolis who were abandoned to exposure in the Pacific Ocean.)
The 35,000+ lb. plane belongs to the American Heritage Museum in Maskachusetts (their press release), but will live for a year at the EAA Museum in Oshkosh. Some details on the plane’s history:
Credit to the folks in New Smyra Beach, Florida who handled the 7-year restoration:
In other seaplane news, as soon as we got to the EAA Seaplane Base, a 30,000+ lb. Grumman Albatross flew over our heads and splashed down. A bit later, a Grumman Mallard took off and then did a fly-by:
We encountered the plane on wheels a few hours later, back at KOSH, and the owner invited our boys to climb up into the cockpit and then down through a tunnel into the bow:
Any other fun warbirds? A Boeing B-52 in Boeing Plaza next to the Boeing pavilion:
A couple of B-1s flew by. Some additional aggression, but apparently not enough to stave off surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran:
The A-26 Invader and Al Franken:
EAA AirVenture also has some hardware related to potential civil war. Suppose, for example, that Ayatollah Mamdani’s Red Guards come to your house to arrest you for being part of the bourgeoisie. You might be able to flee down I-95 in the $465,000 BEC Defense Renegade APC, built on a Ford F-600 4×4 chassis:
It’s perfect for “family protection”:
If you prefer speed to armor, Piper is ready with a Corvette:
(Parked in front of the “Fury” makes sense since anyone in South Florida would be furious that this isn’t at least a Z06 version. 495 horsepower is insufficient for the trip to Publix.)
Just don’t try to flee the Mamdani Caliphate in a Joby. As in previous years, they showed up with something that does everything except fly:
Houses in the nicer parts of Evanston are worth over $2 million. Some of what were originally family houses have been converted to commercial or Northwestern University use. Example:
Here’s a 10-bedroom (with no “master” bedroom?), 5,500-square-foot place at 1707 Hinman Ave, worth $2.2 million (Zillow):
What if the owner were to drive his/her/zir/their car from this house a few blocks to the bookstore? First, let’s consider the Prius, a beautiful genocide-free car from any angle:
The shop directly in front of the car is Bookends & Beginnings, an “ICE FREE ZONE” (because a lot of undocumented migrants spent their time in English-language full-price bookstores?):
Just as one walks in, the shop reminds us to #Resist Amazon:
There were no customers or employees in the store who appeared to identify as “Black”, but there is a robust African American Studies section on the main level:
A “Love is Love” card is available on the main level, but most of the Rainbow Flagism books are downstairs:
Acceptance of homosexuality is in no way a gateway belief to acceptance of polygamy:
Did the cruel Trump administration manage to kill DEI? Fortunately, a book by Evelyn R. Carter, PhD, remains available:
Stepping out into the wider world of downtown Evanston, we find that undocumented migrants who like to dress in tennis whites and swing a custom-strung racquet are safe inside the tennis shop:
What if speaking with one of the handful of Republicans who are hiding somewhere in Evanston has made a “marginalized” progressive feel unsafe? “Support and validation” are available for a fee in “The Safe Room” (fully virtual, for safety from SARS-CoV-2):
(Over 90 percent of Evanstonians vote correctly in a typical election so it is unclear why a “POC” would be “marginalized” by these righteous folk.)
The store by our hotel was a refuge for dogs, migrants (ICE thugs not allowed to enter), and the 2SLGBTQQIA+ (note trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag):
Given that so many migrants to Illinois are Islamic, however, how can the store be considered a welcoming environment for migrants if it also welcomes the haram (pet dogs; men who have sex with men)?
There was a Cars and Coffee event the next day and at least one attendee was sacrilegious (“Black Cars Matter”):
Speaking of religion, the First United Methodist Church seems to have been neglecting its BLM and Rainbow Flags in favor of sheltering migrants from ICE. It’s not a replacement, of course, but concern for migrants has replaced concern for native-born Blacks and native-born 2SLGBTQQIA+:
The Lake Street Church has a huge pro-open-borders banner and somewhat smaller signs promoting Rainbow Flagism (not trans-enhanced, however) and BLM:
Is there any space for the progressives of Evanston to welcome the stranger? Northwestern isn’t $100,000/year to attend just yet, thank God, but only $99,375/year:
Northwestern is officially relentlessly positive regarding immigration (web site). Immigrants don’t commit crime and create tons of jobs. ICE is bad because “Immigrant Enforcement Can Impact Trust in Law Enforcement”. Any objection to open borders stems from a “misconception”.
Could these virtuous pro-immigration folks make room on their own campus for enrichers? If they built up their 240 acres to the standard height of newer lakefront buildings in Chicago proper, i.e., about 50 stories, they could house roughly 500,000 immigrants in addition to their 5,000 on-campus students. That assumes that the new apartment buildings cover about 50 percent of the 240 acres, leaving the rest for green space, streets, etc.
Like Pope Leo XIV, in other words, Northwestern doesn’t want to “welcome the stranger” on property that it actually controls, but instead wants other people to organize a welcome for strangers.
We’re informed that low-skill migrants make any European nation richer both economically and culturally. If that weren’t true, there would be no reason for Europe to accept even one low-skill migrant (acceptance of migrants can’t be based on humanitarian grounds; Sudan has a population of 52 million, for example, and it makes no sense to provide four generations of welfare to a handful of Sudanese in Europe while providing nothing to 52 million Sudanese in Sudan).
After one bounteous day, Spain is now in possession of roughly 60,000 additional migrants (BBC). Can Spain now offer these enrichers to other EU nations for a reasonable processing and transportation fee? At 60,000 migrants per day, even $20,000 per migrant yields a $438 billion/year revenue stream.
Bizarrely, the head of the EU says that enrichers are “unacceptable”! Europe previously wanted to be enriched, which is why some European nations are now 25% migrants or children of migrants, but Europe no longer wants to become culturally and economically richer?
The images coming from Ceuta are unacceptable.
We cannot allow anyone to come to our Union without abiding by our rules.
Dangerous crossings must stop immediately. Smuggling networks must be dismantled. And returns must be swift, as our rules allow.
Here’s the same leader saying that €10 billion in tax dollars are going to be spent on data centers because, presumably, private companies are underinvesting in AI?
AI is the most important technology of our time.
Europe wants to become the first AI Continent.
For advanced healthcare, for the transport sector and so much more.
European AI Gigafactories will provide the necessary computing power to make this possible.
Could Spain fund a massive collection of data centers by selling migrants to France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and other EU nations? Retail electricity rates in Spain are more than 2X what consumers in the efficient U.S. states pay so it doesn’t seem like the most obvious place for AI cogitation.
Ceuta-based lawyer Manuel Jurado said: “Like the rest of the residents here we’re living through this situation with a feeling of complete uncertainty. There are people everywhere and there’s violence now in the city.
“I understand these young migrants have arrived here looking for a better life but there are legal mechanisms that offer that security both for them and for us.
The “looking for a better life” as a justification for immigration into a welfare state is confusing. By this standard, shouldn’t anyone anywhere in the world whose spending power is less than whatever a welfare state, such as the U.S. or any of the headline EU countries, be entitled to move? If it’s “a better life” to be on welfare in Maskachusetts or Spain than to live in Yemen, for example, shouldn’t at least 40 million Yemenis be entitled to migrate to Maskachusetts or Spain?
Rotorcraft and vertical lift technology will be the featured highlights at the new EAA Vertical Lift Center to be unveiled during EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2026. The 73rd Experimental Aircraft Association fly-in convention is July 20-26 at Wittman Regional Airport.
As announced at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2025, this area will feature an emphasis on helicopters and VTOL aircraft as part of a partnership with the Robinson Helicopter Company and Vertical Aviation International (VAI), a membership organization dedicated to supporting the vertical lift industry. The dedicated space within AirVenture’s Aviation Gateway Park will display aircraft as well as promote rotorcraft education, industry recruitment, and innovative technology in the vertical lift industry.
“The future of flight is vertical, and EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh is an ideal stage to sponsor and showcase the innovation happening across our industry, from traditional rotorcraft to the next generation of piloted, remotely piloted and unmanned systems,” said David Smith, President and CEO of Robinson Helicopter and sponsor of the inaugural Vertical Lift Center at AirVenture 2026. “As the demand for skilled engineers, A&P mechanics, and test pilots reaches an all-time high, Robinson is committed to supporting education and careers across vertical lift. We encourage everyone to visit the Vertical Lift Center to discover how these advancements are shaping the next era of flight and how they can become a part of it.”
Robinson, under new MIT-educated leadership, seems to be making dramatic project in autonomous aircraft. Who’s going even faster, though? The hurry-up-and-deliver crew at Amazon Prime Air (Wokipedia seems to be understating the scale of this enterprise):
All of the FAA regulatory hurdles that are impossible to surmount Amazon seems to have surmounted, e.g., operating Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS, for which Amazon got approval in 2024). The company is building its own airframes, its own engines, its own software, and then is operating its own Part 135 cargo airline. This is a throwback to the old days of Boeing, before President FDR broke it up into airframes (Boeing), engines (Pratt), and airline (United). (Bill Boeing quit at this point and became a developer of racially segregated suburban real estate.) The FAA seems to be trying to encourage a whole industry in this area, but among the vendors at Oshkosh, Amazon appeared to be way out in front. The guys in the booth said more than 1,000 drones were currently in operation and that the assembly line is capable of producing mroe than 1,000 additional drones per year.
Could a human pilot do what the Amazon drone does? It would be unfair to ask a human to drop a Blackhawk into a driveway surrounded by trees, but suppose that we gave a Robinson R44 pilot the same amount of open space relative to machine size. Could the R44 pilot go straight down, avoiding obstacles and vortex ring state, push a package out the side, and lift back up? Theoretically, yes, but to do it 50 times per day every day would require a remarkably high level of proficiency, not to mention a ton of power! (Helicopters are most efficient when taking off and landing like airplanes, ironically.)
Jassy said Prime Air service will be able to serve communities with 30 million customers by the end of the year, with a much wider catalog of goods to choose from, and is expected to annually deliver 500 million packages by the end of the decade in under 30 minutes. The ability to scale up drone deliveries is possible now because of more than 85 same-day fulfillment centers that carry Amazon’s top 90,000 products and serve as launch pads for the autonomous delivery vehicles.
Does anyone need this? Consumers in China already experience something similar, though delivery is mostly by scooter. I was surprised during a 2019 visit to Shanghai at the lack of any stores like CVS and also at the absence of supermarkets. It turned out that everyone was getting everything delivered in about the same amount of time that it would have taken them to walk to CVS and back.
Amazon has competition in this area, of course. Zipline is one and they’ve supposedly done a couple of million deliveries, but the product that they brought to Oshkosh didn’t seem as finished as Amazon’s. Wing, part of Alphabet/Google, has a similar system to Zipline’s in that the main drone stays up in the sky while a sub-drone is lowered by cable. The Amazon solution seems cleaner and a better fit for suburban American life. The “longline” idea does seem to open up the possibility of deliveries to tighter spaces, e.g., within the Mamdani Caliphate or San Francisco, but how can it work to deliver high-value packages autonomously in those places given the number of package thieves?
The barriers to entry for creating human-occupied eVTOL “super drones” seem to be remarkably low right now. Some truly tiny companies, e.g., with only 10 engineers, were exhibiting. Below is a sampling of some of the human lifters.
Here’s a hybrid from France (reclaiming the country’s early leadership in aviation!) with two hours of flight time:
Here’s one from Korea, apparently sized for Koreans:
We’re informed that everything good that happens in Britain is thanks to non-British immigrants, but the team at Skyfly has a distinctly pale appearance:
Their product had an encouraging finished look (the potential customer in the red pants, however, like she might be a better fit for a Cirrus SR22):
Jump Aero was exhibiting in a separate tent. This company, founded by a co-founder of Terrafugia (a flying car), offers a practical use case for human-occupied eVTOL: deliver a paramedic to the scene of an accident.
CO2 emissions from Canada 2023 on the same order of magnitude as all North American fossil fuel CO2 emission. (Nature Magazine) The effect on U.S. air quality of recent fires was pernicious (“Air quality: 1980s Ponderosa smoking section”).
The idea is dumb, you say? How dumb is it compared to building millions of robots to somehow terraform Mars into a livable planet? Speaking of Mars, let’s have a look at SpaceX stock:
Finally, what about the fires in the Islamic world? The New York Times says that the burning is unprecedented. Could forests in the Dar al-Islam reasonably be thinned? My impression was that the pre-Islamic (“legacy”) Europeans already did as much cutting within what used to be their forests as was conceivably reasonable to do. It’s not a Canadian-style situation where there aren’t roads into the forests, right?
March 2021: CDC Director: Impending Doom for the mostly-vaccinated U.S. (Fauci: “If we open up completely now, that is premature, given the level of infection” The likely reason for the uptick in cases, he said, is that states are opening up too quickly.)
January 2023: Could you please paint a portrait of me (you can cover every wall of your house with portraits of yourself and not be an “egomaniac”; unclear what the term is for someone who covers every wall of his/her/zir/their house with portraits of a golden retriever family member)
Fauci’s legacy was alive and well at Chicago’s main airport yesterday. Here’s a Faucist wearing an under-chin mask while traveling with at least one unmasked family member (who, if infected, can easily pass the infection on to the Faucist):
My personal favorite Fauci diary excerpt, highlighted in party by the New York Times:
“I went to a book party last night for Jonathan Karl’s new book about Trump” at Cafe Milano in Georgetown, reads the entry on Nov. 17, 2021. “I was totally swamped all night by people wanting to say hello, shake my hands, and take pictures with me. I could not get away from it. Although some people may think that this is great to have people treat you like Elvis Presley, but it was really very unnerving.”
After telling young nearly-invulnerable Americans that their #1 focus should be avoiding a respiratory virus (social distancing, masking, etc.), the vulnerable old guy voluntarily goes to jam-packed events and takes off his mask. More from the NYT:
“Chris and I went to a book party for our friend Ruth Marcus (Washington Post columnist)” at the home of David Bradley, former owner of The Atlantic, reads another entry. “Super A list at party: Senator Mark Warner, Kellyanne Conway, Andrea Mitchell, David Ignatius, David Frum, Zeke Emanuel, etc., etc.”
After being honored at a gala at the National Portrait Gallery (“it was the highest level of AAA list you could imagine in Washington DC”), he writes about hanging out with Venus and Serena Williams, Clive Davis and the celebrity chef Jose Andres. “We were invited to go across the street by Jose to his restaurant Zaytinya for after hours champagne.”
(Note that José Andrés later became core to Hamas’s military logistics in Gaza, cooking and serving food to the Palestinians via “World Central Kitchen” so that they could concentrate 100 percent of their time and energy on fighting to achieve river-to-the-sea liberation (i.e., the destruction of Israel and imposition of Hamas rule over a larger area).)
Evanston, Illinois is represented in Congress by Jan Schakowsky, an Evanston resident (source). She opposes any requirement that people present identification prior to voting (source; “burdensome demands on citizens who want to vote — including photo identification laws”):
What if people want to go to the (Lake Michigan) beach in Evanston and not be subject to a burdensome demand for money? They must show ID. A “voter registration card” is an acceptable form of ID:
Anthony Fauci is back in the news thanks to his literary efforts as a diarist (WSJ). This would good a time to flash back to this blog 3.5 years ago: Could you please paint a portrait of me. The meat of that entry is a quote from a 2022 New York Times article on the great man:
The walls in Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s home office are adorned with portraits of him, drawn and painted by some of his many fans. … Dr. Fauci seemed a little uncomfortable with people knowing about the pictures. He said that previously, when they were captured on camera, the “far right” attacked him as an “egomaniac.”
Is coronapanic behind us? A photo from earlier today taken in the Islamic Republic of Illinois, specifically the (Ken) Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (note the masked employee in orange lab coat):
One of the many interesting talks at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) 2026 was by James Schreiber, a U.S. Navy veteran-turned-IBM-patent-lawyer with a passion for seaplanes.
First, there is no reason that seaplanes can’t be part of a modern navy. The ShinMaywa US-2 is a four-engine monster with tremendous range in service with Japan (source):
Here’s the radius of search and rescue action:
Contrary to what we tell MIT students, a seaplane actually can land in real waves (up to about 10′ in this case):
(If the Canadians weren’t sending so many of their tax dollars to Hamas, they could have purchased water bombing versions of this magnificent 120,000+ lb. beast and preserved U.S. air quality.)
We learned that one of the most interesting periods of our U.S. Navy was the 1950s. The USAF had gained ascendancy in government and the doctrine was to destroy our enemies via strategic bombing from land-based airplanes, such as the then-new B-52 (considered a short-term solution at the time, a stopgap until the glorious age of supersonic bombers), and ballistic missiles. The Navy’s funding requests for new aircraft carriers were denied and, thus, the Navy tacked (so to speak) toward submarines and sea-based airplanes. The Navy had designs for jet-powered fighters, bombers, and transport seaplanes. The Convair F2Y Sea Dart is the most famous example, a supersonic fighter that first flew in 1953. For raining down destruction on our enemies (back when we actually wanted to win wars!), the Martin P6M SeaMaster first flew in 1955. For moving troops and vehicles from harbor to harbor, the Convair R3Y Tradewind, which first flew in 1954 (a little heavier than the above-mentioned Japanese seaplane and, therefore, potentially even better for our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters trying to fight fires in Canada with whatever funding scraps they have left over from serving as the Palestinians’ logistics arm).
Part of the 1950s rationale for a fleet of sea-based aircraft was that they’d be more challenging for the enemy to find and target than runways and monster-sized aircraft carriers. Perhaps that rationale is even more, uh, rational today? Let’s consider our gradual surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran (can’t be called a “war” because we apparently don’t have any ambition of winning, in which winning would be defined as destroying the Islamic Republic’s oil and electricity industries so that they wouldn’t be able to rebuild and run weapons factories). The ships of the Iranian Navy that were larger than an aircraft were quickly destroyed by the U.S. On our side, our fixed bases, such as Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, have proved vulnerable to Iranian missiles.
Readers: What do you think about resurrecting the 1950s idea?
Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following a search that lasted nearly 24 hours after the attack in downtown Berlin. Prosecutors said he had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.
Ballout was tracked down around 6 p.m. Sunday at a garden in Spandau, a Berlin suburb, the city’s police department wrote on X. They said he apparently ran toward officers with a sharp instrument, and police fired at least one shot. He died at the scene.
If this German-born child of enrichers had only a “sharp instrument”, why wouldn’t the famously lenient and gun-averse Europeans have subdued Abdul with “less lethal” force, e.g., a taser?
Furthermore, according to the New York Times, the shooting was especially unfair because the perpetrator of the attack on the “LGBTQ Pride event” was “a car” and not Abdul:
A German newspaper, translated by Google, on the success of deradicalization classes:
As recently as May, Ballout was in judicial custody. He was also reportedly in the preliminary stages of a deradicalization program and had already completed two appointments with experts in extremism prevention, during which no plans for an attack were discussed.
How does a person get qualified as an “expert in extremism prevention”?
