EAA AIRVENTURE 2009 - WHITEKNIGHT 2 FLIES IN

This week marks the annual fly-in jamboree for the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, US. The EAA AirVenture show is HUGE, with some 2500 aircraft usually attending, ranging from warbirds, classics and jets, to experimentals, homebuilts and helicopters. For anyone interested in aviation, it’s a gold-star event on the air show calendar.

And this year’s show has a top-interest appearance for space advocates, as the Virgin Galactic WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) Eve is on all-week ground display, after flying in yesterday (see video) to make its world-first public showing. The twin-fuselage carrier plane will be at the show before taking off on Saturday.

WK2 is the biggest all-composite aircraft yet built, and has been developed by Scaled Composites, the company founded by revered aircraft designer Burt Rutan, in partnership with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceline. The Ansari X-Prize winning planes WhiteKnight and SpaceShipOne were on show at AirVenture four years ago, so the fly-in of WK2 marks the spectacular progress made by Rutan’s development team since then.

Burt Rutan reckons the EAA fly-in encouraged him to develop sub-orbital spacecraft. He said: “To get the kind of feedback we get here at Oshkosh was one of the ingredients that was important for me in making the decision that maybe I can build a spaceship... my interface with Oshkosh dating back to 1971 was real important for me in having the courage to say, 'Listen, I can do this, and I'm going to go for it.”

If all continues to plan, it looks like we really will get a chance to fly to the edge of space soon; meantime you can visit the EAA AirVenture here.

Thanks to AVWeb for the video.