The 2011 edition of AirVenture Oshkosh was one for the ages. The weather was beautiful, the airplanes, and there were a lot of them, were spectacular, and the politics were, well, intriguing.
The show got off on a very strange note when AirVenture Chairman Tom Poberezny called it quits by retiring at high noon by the original brown EAA Arch on the very first day of the 2011 show. Poberezny, who had been in charge of EAA from the late 1980s up until that Monday morning gave no specific reason for leaving the show or for leaving the organization. The EAA, for its part, wanted to talk about the event as little as possible. In its daily rundown of the events of Monday, it included a note about Poberezny’s retirement as the third item in its list. Clearly, there was a lot going on behind the scenes.
