No more MOSH(pit)KOSH

The recommendations appear sensible at face value.
 
I've often wondered why they don't have two different arrival corridors, with one going to the 18/36s, and the other to 09/27. No matter how many waypoints you put on the arrival, you have every bit of VFR traffic converging on one point.
 
hindsight2020 said:
The recommendations appear sensible at face value.
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Creating a longer inbound line is a fail. You're always going to have a gate. Moving it farther away from the field just moves the join farther from the field and doubles the amount of "pseudo formation" necessary for the arrival. There is no process i can think of where a longer line is better.

The other fail is the ADSB mandate for MVFR arrivals. The thing you DON'T want to do is throttle arrivals. All that does is forces more aircraft to mill around waiting for better weather and then slamming the inbound gate. What you want to do (MVFR or great VFR) is set a threshold - above this threshold, we're pushing aircraft to the runways and below the threshold, the field is closed to VFR arrivals.

These two "fixes" will magnify existing problems, not fix them.

The real fix is to better utilize the runways for arrivals. That means Oshkosh experienced controllers effectively using the relaxed spacing rules to put a lot of aircraft on the ground. Also, minimize runway downtime for military fly-by's and such on the peak arrival days. Last year, when Bryan and hundreds of others were in an endless hold, the runways were not busy at all. ATC turned a problem into a big problem by restricting inbounds when they should have put the pedal to the metal.
 
midwestpa24 said:
I've often wondered why they don't have two different arrival corridors, with one going to the 18/36s, and the other to 09/27. No matter how many waypoints you put on the arrival, you have every bit of VFR traffic converging on one point.
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Because having one stream allows the folks on the ground at Fisk to push you to *this* runway while turning me to *that* runway in order to manage spacing and maximize total runway utilization.
 
While changes are welcome this year will be complete havock from people following the old procedure.
 
kyleb said:
Creating a longer inbound line is a fail. You're always going to have a gate. Moving it farther away from the field just moves the join farther from the field and doubles the amount of "pseudo formation" necessary for the arrival. There is no process i can think of where a longer line is better.
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That is what I was alluding to as well. I don't see how having the gate further out helps very much, especially since it is at such an angle to the rest of the entry.

kyleb said:
Because having one stream allows the folks on the ground at Fisk to push you to *this* runway while turning me to *that* runway in order to manage spacing and maximize total runway utilization.
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I can maybe understand that.

I was watching the arrivals this last year, it did seem like there was a lot of wasted runway time when no one was landing. Dozens if not hundreds of planes at Fisk, but not a single plane landing. The Fisk controllers were spinning everyone instead of trying to let at least a few through, which just compounded the problem. I'm not sure why they were doing that, if they were simply overwhelmed or if someone else was telling them to do it. I think there needs to be a review and possibly a retraining of the controllers to ensure more traffic is getting through.
 
I think the problem is that Fisk is too close the 36 Base leg.

Understand that the RUNWAY is only part of the issue. There was a good amount of time in last years Oshkosh where we couldn't take arrivals because we were out of places to remove them from the runway. This was a combination of the loss of parking due to various construction projects and the fact that they royaly f-d up the drainage on the grass off 27 when they redid the taxiway B rebuild and a few other things.

Usually, the problem on the Fisk transition is because the airport is saturated for some reason (mass arrival on 36, accident on 27, whatever). The problem is there's no sane flow control going into Ripon-Fisk. The Rush lane and other holding patterns are disasters and they have NEVER EVER WORKED.
 
hindsight2020 said:
They could always go with the Reklaw method. Everything turns up just fine...for the most part :D
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The legacy approach to Osh works fine. Last year, controllers throttled the arrivals. We were watching from seats alongside the runway. And got bored because there were so few landing aircraft.

Fix that issue and most of the problem (of aircraft being stacked on top of one another in holds) goes away.
 
Just rip out a bunch of houses and build a couple more runways. Problem solved. ;)
 
painless said:
Just rip out a bunch of houses and build a couple more runways. Problem solved. ;)
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You still need to park them someplace. You still need taxi routes to get them there. It's a bigger issue than runways.
 
flyingron said:
You still need to park them someplace. You still need taxi routes to get them there. It's a bigger issue than runways.
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Buy out the corn farmer out on the South 40 (Fond Du Lac) and hundreds more aircraft could be parked.
 
The first thing that everyone has to admit/realize is last years issues were not any one singular problem. It was weather, mass arrivals, lack of good taxi/runway exits, military fly-bys and controllers that didn't think through what they were doing by turning everyone away. Thus it is not going to be fixed by any one singular thing.

Unless there is ground saturation the airport and EAA HAVE to figure out how to allow the aircraft off the runway as quickly and safely as possible. EAA knows that the FAA is not going to go for continuing full blown operations in MVFR. Utilizing ADS-B and NextGen technology would allow them to keep some arrivals open more than they may have had in the past. The FAA absolutely MUST take ownership for their lack of situational awareness in constantly turning everyone away just because they don't have their spacing and realize when they are making the problem worse and fix it. It is absolutely not my fault that some numbnuts didn't follow the rules for any number of reasons. I think all of us were listening/watching and waiting for something very bad to happen last year. Somehow it didn't happen.

Some things I did like was the subtle acknowledgement that they need to have a more standard procedure to get from the Fisk arrival to FDL. I can only imagine what FDL was like when they shut down/turned everyone away. Limiting the flexibility of mass arrivals. This will be unpopular with some but that only made issues worse. It will likely make the VFR arrival worse but at least they will have a flow. Finally education through a video distributed to the chapter network.
 
Cykoguy said:
EAA knows that the FAA is not going to go for continuing full blown operations in MVFR.
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Why should MVFR be an issue? 1500' and 3 miles and they are gonna turn hundreds of aircraft away? People have been flying MVFR to Oshkosh for decades (I know I have). MVFR isn't a problem, never has been.
 
On Monday morning it was a mess out on the hold at Green Lake. One reason they were holding us was for the B1 arrival. And they were down to one runway compounded by changing the follow distance to 1-mile in trail. I refuse to participate in the Green Lake fiasco again which was akin to Russian Roulette. How we got by without anyone swapping paint is amazing
 
Mooney Fan said:
Buy out the corn farmer out on the South 40 (Fond Du Lac) and hundreds more aircraft could be parked.
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Actually, they expanded into that area to some extent. Unfortunately, it's going to take a few years to get the thing in shape (it was one giant puddle last year and it's very badly rutted in the best of time even after running a steamroller over it for days). It's not "100's" of spaces anyhow. It barely added 100 spots even if it was all usable.
 
Mooney Fan said:
On Monday morning it was a mess out on the hold at Green Lake. One reason they were holding us was for the B1 arrival. And they were down to one runway compounded by changing the follow distance to 1-mile in trail. I refuse to participate in the Green Lake fiasco again which was akin to Russian Roulette. How we got by without anyone swapping paint is amazing
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The holds have NEVER EVER EVER EVER worked. Green Lake / Rush Lake / Spin in place. NEVER. Better to just tell people to go park it at some other field and wait it out on the ground.
 
kyleb said:
Why should MVFR be an issue? 1500' and 3 miles and they are gonna turn hundreds of aircraft away? People have been flying MVFR to Oshkosh for decades (I know I have). MVFR isn't a problem, never has been.
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If they get overloaded during MVFR conditions @1500', they will not have the option of putting planes in the published holds
 
The self-created emergencies need to be diverted away with no exceptions. Low on fuel, divert. Sick passenger, divert. Alternator failure an hour ago and still in the hold, divert. Fixed your tail wheel last week and just not sure about it, are you kidding me?—divert. And yet I heard every one of those people get sent in when the rest of us who had planned ahead and even diverted once to wait things out were patiently continuing to hold and eventually diverting to other airports for the night. Letting people skip the line because they didn’t plan ahead only creates an incentive to plan poorly.
 
Usually, it's not a problem. They're pretty well done and even the largest (like the Bonanzas) get down and off in short order. However, this year the rescheduling and the fact that there was still bad weather and other issues made things dicey. What they should have done is just cancelled the thing. Weather happens. We cancel the airshow when the t-storms roll in during it. There's nothing sacrosanct about the mass arrival. The Bos even got split up by weather this year. It made a mess.
 
I listened to ATC live during some of the snakier portions of the arrival days. It was both entertaining and terrifying. It sounded like weather created an serious choke point of planes wanting to get in. With all the pseudo-emergencies going on and ppl doing their own thing on arrival I wonder if any “pilot deviations “ get issued??
Do the rules get relaxed at events like these??
If some is the bs that happened at osk happened at your reg towered field I imagine there would be some more questions to follow.
The idea of osk trip in plane is a boy’s dream come true, but after listening to the mess this year (I never listened before) I would be happy to fly near by and rent or Uber my way there.
 
I am sorry to say that my main concern with any change in arrival procedure is relying on those who can’t seem to figure out the current notam to comply with any new directive, especially if it proves to be more complicated or restrictive.
 
Stuart Fraley said:
Mass arrivals under MVFR were a big part of the problem in 2018.
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No. Runway throttling was the issue. On Sunday, the runways were not used to capacity. Not near capacity to be honest. We went out to watch arrivals on 36 and got bored because so few aircraft were allowed to pass Fisk.

I don't fully understand why so few aircraft were passed through to the field. Certainly there were taxiway problems for 09/27 but that doesn't explain the issues with both 36L and 36R.
 
kyleb said:
No. Runway throttling was the issue. On Sunday, the runways were not used to capacity. Not near capacity to be honest. We went out to watch arrivals on 36 and got bored because so few aircraft were allowed to pass Fisk.

I don't fully understand why so few aircraft were passed through to the field. Certainly there were taxiway problems for 09/27 but that doesn't explain the issues with both 36L and 36R.
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They spent way too much of the day Sunday with arrivals turned off. Then they would do a “trickle arrival rate” which of course consisted entirely of the most egocentric and least considerate pilots diving in past Ripon, and of course those same pilots caused problems that led to the arrivals being shut off again.

It does seem like the proposed changes will mostly just move the problem farther out, resulting in even less consistent arrival spacing.

I think that a controller for the Green Lake hold when things get that bad would be a better solution. If you want to throttle arrivals, put a throttle valve out there. Don’t just blip them on and off as was done this year. “Blue and green Cessna, proceed to Ripon. Red and yellow Piper, one more turn in the hold and I’ll try to get you in next.” This would have solved the problem we saw on Sunday this year without making changes that will be unnecessary 9 years out of 10 and confusing every year.
 
Not a popular opinion, but I think the mass arrivals are too big because of the better deal they get. I was one of the first in Saturday morning and had to fight to get to North 40. Almost all the good parking was being held for the mass arrivals, so I was parked next to the Super 8 gate. The muddy field was the excuse they gave me, but the real reason was the reserved space. I watched the cherokees taxi into the “closed” portion just fine. A large number of participants in the mass arrivals (at least the ones I talked to) were only involved for the good parking and guaranteed entry.

Tell the mass arrivals they can park together on the north side of 27 or in the South 40 and I bet the numbers go down and ground ops are better.
 
South 40 is an excellent idea. Supposedly it’s getting bigger. Send the mass arrival Cool Kids down there along with a restaurant, and the S40 stigma vanishes. The only downside is the increased crowd it would bring to the Ultralight area, which has become my favorite place.
 
aggie06 said:
Not a popular opinion, but I think the mass arrivals are too big because of the better deal they get.
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The mass arrivals are a great way to bring a large number of aircraft in quickly. The issue is they need to hit their window, and the window needs to open and close promptly on a published schedule. If it turns into "The Bo's are supposed to be here at 10:00 but are delayed by 20 minutes, let's just hold the normal arrivals for another 20 minutes, and...", well, that's a problem.
 
kyleb said:
The mass arrivals are a great way to bring a large number of aircraft in quickly. The issue is they need to hit their window, and the window needs to open and close promptly on a published schedule. If it turns into "The Bo's are supposed to be here at 10:00 but are delayed by 20 minutes, let's just hold the normal arrivals for another 20 minutes, and...", well, that's a problem.
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And based on recent history, mass arrivals aren't hitting their windows because of weather. If you make the mass arrival less attractive by sending them to park together in less desirable space, you cut the 150 airplanes to a smaller number and the others tend to find much less busy times to arrive. I always hear that mass arrivals are much more efficient, but never seen the numbers. As it is now, we're closing 2 runways for an hour or more to get 150 planes down. That's 75/hour/runway or one every 48 seconds. I'm not sure that's even as fast as normal arrivals. And shutting things down adds to people in holds and creates more problems.

My bigger problem, though, is not the mass arrival itself. If you can make the numbers work when considering all the things it impacts, fine. My issue is the caste system it has created with the additional benefits bestowed on the almighty B2OSH and whatever else to Osh groups. I get it - they've done some training to be proficient at formation flying, but that's almost an excuse for being part of the "cool kids" group.
 
Mass arrivals aren't done to be "efficient." I'm not sure what your beef is. They spend a lot of time to put on a show (and be part of it). There's at least four of them (Cessnas, Bonanzas (to include Debs and Barons), Mooneys, and Commanches). The Bos were just the pioneers in the thing. A few years we had the Cubs as well, though the logistics of parking them pretty much told them not again unless you've got a significant anniversary, we ain't doing this every year. Periodically, there are other type clubs that get the logistics together to prearrange it. There's also a group of people (Ercoupes, Metro Warbirds, etc...) who do an ad hoc mass arrival. They just stage at a nearby airport and descend on Ripon all at the same time. Works fine for a 10-20 planes.
 
Mass arrivals may be efficient FOR THEM, but they muck up the stream of regular arrivals.
 
Since I wear a bright yellow EAA vest, I get to hear a lot of the complaints! Even after all of the holds, I didn't hear one pilot blame the EAA or FAA. It was the weather and the fact that people who normally arrive early weren't able to get in and this caused a lot of congestion. The other thing was a lot of us made it to within and hour's flight of OSH and then masses of planes launched at the same time for the last bit of the short flight. I'm not saying it can't use improvement, but it didn't seem to cause a lot of heartache.

The South 40 did... I never heard so many people complain. They parked planes in the South 40, even though the North 40 had a lot of open room. It rained heavily. Then they started allowing those that complained to move, which left ruts and holes where they heavier planes were parked. The next set of planes that went into that area were not happy at all. However, again, this was mostly caused by weather.

The biggest issue when adding more parking to the South will be trams. You have to extend the trams. They only operate them on pavement, so unless they pave a road, I'm not sure how they will do it. Where the tram stops now, to the back of the South 40 is a long, long walk and people were not happy. Extending it further out would really be bad.

Lastly, they'll have to expand the small store that is there, or add some option to get food down there. Hopefully it all comes together and no plane is turned away again!
 
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