If you’ve ever flown into Oshkosh, Wis., for the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture Fly-in, you may have used the Fisk Arrival, a set of VFR fixes and procedures that helps organize and standardize landing at what is, for one week each year, the world’s busiest airport. Poor weather in advance of the 2018 event resulted in a surge of arrivals on the Sunday before the show’s Monday opening. According to Sean Elliott, EAA’s vice president of advocacy and safety, “That brought a huge wave of inbound flights to Oshkosh in a short six-hour period that afternoon. While the controllers and ground personnel did yeomen’s work to park 3000 aircraft within a six-hour period, there are ways to do it better.”
With that in mind, the association convened a working group to consider pilot feedback and input from managers with “expertise in GA safety, homebuilt aircraft safety, air traffic control, and mass arrival processes,” the association said. The results identified three broad areas of focus: procedure changes, improving its own education to pilots and finding “innovative air traffic control methods.”
