It was a weekday evening and I'd just finished flying with a relatively new instrument student who was proving to be competent, determined to learn, and overall a genuine pleasure from an instructor's point of view. I'd stopped into the Pilot's Lounge at the virtual airport out of habit and ran into Old Hack, Sandy and a few other regulars. It was immediately obvious the topic of the day was frustration with the very public, stupid-pilot tricks experienced every year at the EAA's blowout at Oshkosh. In a matter of minutes, I listened to recitations from my friends about everything from trying to follow someone on the Ripon arrival who couldn't hold airspeed or altitude and made things miserable for everyone trying to follow him, through a half-wit on Unicom frequency who had not read the NOTAM for the arrival procedures and wanted someone to read it to him over the air, to watching pilots land the wrong way on the active runway, opposite to the flow of arriving traffic. The annual parade of knuckleheaded behavior by pilots at Oshkosh is a matter of great concern to me, personally, because I fly in and want to do so safely and because some years ago a friend of mine was killed on the Ripon arrival, not too far short of the approach end of Runway 9. I wrote a column about thatand expressed my deep, abiding anger at those who were hurting all of us in GA by their simple lack of basic, common sense in and around airplanes.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/the-pilots-lounge-128-oshkosh-arrival-lets-stay-alive-this-year