Is there a better location than Oshkosh?

It makes some sense to move the capital of AK to Anchorage, that hasn’t been happening.

Talking about moving Airventure is like thinking one can move the White House to Kansas City, taint happening.
 
No. That's your answer. No, there is not a better location.

Why?
1) Accessibility
2) Weather (surprisingly)
3) Infrastructure

We've already established that it's best to have it at the same time of year that it's currently held, so that school is out, other holidays are avoided, and families can attend easily. It also needs to be roughly centrally located east-west so that it's easy to get the maximum number of people in attendance. The mean population center of the contiguous US is in south central Missouri, roughly halfway between KLBO and M48. Go farther north to make it cooler, and you're at about Rochester, MN. Really, not that far away from OSH. And if you want to make it cooler you go farther north, drier you go farther west... But there's no place that has significantly better summer weather *and* is big enough to support an event of this size. Sorry, Minot.

Just for the heck of it, I used a more detailed prompt for ChatGPT:

"Find a list of the best locations to replace Oshkosh, WI for the annual Airventure fly-in. Primary consideration should be an airport that does not have airline service, with two runways that do not intersect, with one runway at least 8,000 feet and another at least 5,000 feet. The airport should be reasonably close to town. It should be located in the US, both far enough north to avoid excessively hot summer weather and centrally located east-west biased for US population - That is, probably somewhere where at least 40% of the US population lives to the east of it, and at least 40% of the US population lives to the west of it. There should be a large amount of land both on the airport and immediately surrounding it, enough to park approximately 10,000 small airplanes and around 25,000 RV and tent campsites, as well as enough hotels, dormitories, and rental homes within an hour drive to house an additional 100,000 people."​

The only answer it came up with that really met all those requirements was Battle Creek, MI, which isn't really significantly different from OSH in terms of weather at that time of year.

Also, there would have to be a massive financial incentive for EAA to move. They've got a huge museum, several massive hangars and hundreds of smaller buildings to support AirVenture, the EAA Academy Lodge, a crap-ton of electrical and water infrastructure, and just way too much investment at Oshkosh to think about moving... And that's if you can even find an airport with two long runways that has literally *square miles* of space on and around the airport that can be purchased and converted to camping and parking areas, but is still close to enough food and lodging for the attendees that keep coming.
 
Oshkosh had airline service for many years and operated it (without increasing the capacity) during the show. Not having commercial service isn't a requirement.

It'd be harder to move it now than in 1970 when they left Rockford (which they outgrew). The EAA headquarters is now in Oshkosh, as is the museum. The EAA has a cushy arrangement with the airport and the city. They also bought up tons of property for expansion (have you seen how big Scholler is now with all the extensions?). They're still planning things like moving the Ultralights across the road, etc.. to create more parking space.
 
Brad W said:
speaking of airline service
that's another prop for KOSH
there are several descent airports that aren't too crazy far away that folks can airline into.
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Indeed, I've flown once into ATW coming off a business trip (Margy flew the Navion up) and once I had to leave Oshkosh midweek and go back to work but came back the next weekend so I had an ATW-IAD-ATW roundtrip. It's an easy peasy way of getting around. Margy also flew to DC once when one of the grandkids was born.

We've run down to pick up folk from MKE as well.
 
172andyou said:
Thanks for trimming the AI nonsense off. I will never understand why people think we want that stuff. It's worse than posting google searches.
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Get off your high horse. I didn't post the "AI nonsense". I hate it as much as you do, though it is a useful tool sometimes.

I posted the prompt, which, if you'd read it, contains a bunch of criteria that matter to us as humans trying to solve the problem as well. And, I posted that the only other place that's even remotely possible is Battle Creek, MI which has practically identical weather to OSH.
 
flyingron said:
Oshkosh had airline service for many years and operated it (without increasing the capacity) during the show. Not having commercial service isn't a requirement.
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That was in the pre-TSA days. Not having commercial service in today's security environment is definitely a requirement.
 
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