Podcast: What Are The Highlights From This Year’s Oshkosh?

Listen in as Aviation Week's Molly McMillin, Jeremy Kariuki, Mike Lavitt and Steve Trimble discuss highlights from the 2025 EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, including MOSAIC, the Goodyear airship and more.

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Jeremy Kariuki: Hello and welcome to the BCA podcast live from the 72nd annual EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I'm your host Jeremy Kariuki and I'm joined by my colleagues Molly McMillin, Mike Lavitt and Steve Trimble. Welcome everyone. Alright, so last year AirVenture saw record attendance with over 680,000 people walking into Wittman Regional Airport. This year EAA is expecting to exceed that based on pre-sales sold out exhibit space and the need for over 6,000 volunteers. Now there's been some big announcements at the show, most notably with MOSAIC from the FAA. Molly, what's the latest on that?

Molly McMillin: The U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, made an announcement. I think some people are expecting. No one was quite sure that he announced the Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certification, or MOSAIC, that has been finalized and signed. It's something that Jack Pelton, who is the head of the EAA, CEO and chairman of the board called it the biggest change in his lifetime. Basically what it does, it's called Sport Pilot 2.0 in that it removes a weight limit. It goes by stall speed. It removes some of the previous requirements of sport that made it more restrictive for people. Some of the regulations and rules are still kind of to be read through and figured out, but basically the hope is that it will bring more people into aviation and also will expand the aircraft fleet that's available to be flown by sport pilot certificate holders. And they're saying to as much as 70% of the current GA fleet, like a 172, a Cherokee, a 152, that will be considered under a light sport rule. Meaning that now if you want to get a light sport certificate, you probably can just go out to the airport and rent a 172. It also will take about half the time, and of course then half the cost of getting a private pilot's license, it takes away the, you can fly at night. It goes from a limit of two seats to four seats. Although as a sport pilot, you can only still take one passenger. It just does a lot of different things that it's exciting to the industry.

Jeremy Kariuki: Yeah, the crowd was very excited when they announced that today.

Molly McMillin: Yes it was. And then the hope is also that, not the hope, but I guess what they really believe what will happen is manufacturers will expand products into that segment and it'll be easier to get certified. So there's a lot of benefits to changing that rule.

Jeremy Kariuki: Awesome. I know the industry has been waiting on that, but for a little while now. So it's nice that they were able to break the news at Oshkosh where all the biggest fans are, so

Molly McMillin: Right. It was included in the FAA reauthorization bill, but they actually had till next May to do the final rule and then the rumors were it was going to be in September or August. And then I think they really said we would love to announce that here at Oshkosh. And like you've said, Jeremy, there was a big crowd there today

Jeremy Kariuki: And moving on every year. Mike has a photo contest that he runs for Aviation Week. Mike, would you tell us about how that went today?

Mike Lavitt: Sure. We had our annual forum here at Oshkosh and we had about 85 people in attendance. So that's a good attendance. I have four photographers plus me. I've never had that many photographers before. One of them, Avi Sofer is an Israeli photographer who won first place in our defense category last year when Iran fired a ballistic missile attack at Israel on October 1st, he went up to his roof and set up remote cameras that recorded the attack and Israel's response with their anti-missile force before he had to take cover. It's an incredible photo. We actually entered it in the Pulitzer Prizes

Jeremy Kariuki: And Oshkosh serves as just a playground for aviation photographers, given that the different types of aircraft that are at the show.

Mike Lavitt: Yeah, there's an incredible variety. I don't think you find this variety of aircraft anywhere.

Jeremy Kariuki: And you also spoke with HondaJet as well?

Mike Lavitt: Yes, I interviewed their chief operating officer, Ahmad Kar yesterday. And Honda is doing very well. They have a two-year backlog of Elite Twos and they've seen a few orders come in because of the bonus depreciation being restored on business aircraft and they're hoping that will further drive orders and increase their backlog. They delivered 14 or 15 HondaJet elites in 2024 and expect to be at about the same point at the end of this year. Supply chain problems have been largely resolved, but a couple of suppliers are still working to get things in order and that's why they're holding their production at that 14 or 15 level. Next year, they expect to deliver between 26 and 30 Elite twos. They're not too concerned about tariffs because about 70% of the aircraft's value involves U.S.-made parts. So they're not importing as much as some manufacturers and 70 to 75% of their orders come from the American market. So they don't have a big worry about counter tariffs. The Echelon is their new aircraft that's in development and it's on target for first flight in late 2026 with certification in late 2028. The echelon will have the same basic configuration as the elite with engines mounted above the wing, but it'll be a larger aircraft and have a range of 2,600 nautical miles. This will open it up to Part 135 operators. Mostly elites have been sold to individual owners or maybe companies.

Jeremy Kariuki: And speaking of tariffs, I know that there might be another round come August 1st, but as to whether or not there was a bit a stick or going to effect is still up for debate. But moving on, Steve, I know you've had some conversations with companies about fuels. What's the latest there?

Steve Trimble: Yeah, I guess I get the bad news at the show. So avgas is a real big issue for general aviation for the industry right now. There is a transition that U.S. government and the industry is trying to orchestrate over the next five to seven years to switch from leaded gasoline to unleaded gasoline. The source of the problem is this little compound additive called tetraethyl lead that they add to the petroleum product in the fuel. It's actually a very small amount because that is about one third of the general aviation fleet can't get by on 94 rated octane with unleaded fuel, which is available today. There's unleaded 94 octane fuel that one third of the GA fleet, something like 50, 60,000 aircraft need the higher rated octane that currently does not have an unleaded offering. So it is called low leaded 100 avgas. The problem is that communities, governments, and industry are starting to move away from leaded fuels in 2022 Santa Monica, the Santa Monica airport banned leaded fuels, low leaded fuels, leaded avgas from the airport.

And then in 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency came out with a rule well ruled that leaded avgas poses a harm to the public. And then finally you've got a supply chain issue because the only company in the world that makes tetraethyl lead or TEL anymore is this UK company called Innospec. And they've made it very clear they want to get out of that industry or out of that market as soon as they can. So now the U.S. government and industry is trying to navigate this transition and we got a little bit more insight into the process and the schedule and the pace of this transition and some of the events that they hope will take place. The Eagle Initiative, which is this public-private partnership between the FAA and all the major industry associations came out with their plan for one of the three candidate fuels that's participating in an FAA program called PAFI.

There's a lot of acronyms involved in this. I won't get into all of them, but that fuel is on track now to receive full authorizations, to be used in general aviation airplanes and engines with certain exceptions by, I think it was the second quarter of 2027 is what they said yesterday. And once they do that, then they're going to try to start socializing in a way this unleaded avgas, which they're already doing now with a small number of airports and a small number of aircraft, and to make that regional and get the regional distribution issues sort of worked out. And then after a couple of years of doing that, we get to this 2030 timeframe where they want to move the country outside of Alaska to complete this transition, complete the transition of the distribution of the production and of the use of unleaded avgas.

Alaska gets two more years notionally, but all of those dates are actually just goals because they understand that this is actually a very difficult transition. Currently no avgas, none of the three makers of the avgas currently qualify for the new standard. And that process is going to take a while to work out. Even then they've got to somehow get the nationwide distribution of this new type of fuel sorted out so that a pilot taking off an airport A with unleaded fuel arrives at airport B that doesn't have unlighted fuel and maybe still just has leaded fuel, how you deal with those types of problems as they take a mixed fuel, can that work with that engine? That's part of the testing that they're doing. Another problem is just the infrastructure. If an FBO somewhere has two fuel tanks and one of them is an unleaded avgas at the moment, who's going to pay to put that unleaded avgas is the fuel company, will they do it?

Is there some government support that could be provided? It's a very complex, complicated process that is going to take place over the next several years, but it has massive implications for a significant portion of the general aviation fleet that they navigate this as smoothly as possible and as quickly as possible knowing that there's sort of a ticking clock on the availability of this tetraethyl lead compound and the acceptability of anything with lead anywhere in society. So not a lot of great news on that, but at least you can sort of, I don't know if you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but you can see the tunnel and it's going to be complicated.

Jeremy Kariuki: Yeah, that's going to be a long road ahead, I'm sure. But to wrap things up, I'd like to go around the table and talk about some of the more fun, eccentric or interesting stuff that we've seen so far at the show. Back to you, Molly. What's been on your plate?

Molly McMillin: Well, the most fun, I don't know if it was crazy, but it was crazy fun, was you and I were able to ride in, sorry Steve, I'm going to call it a blimp, the Goodyear's iconic Blimp and what Goodyear is celebrating this year, it's the 100th anniversary of the inaugural flight of the first Goodyear branded blimp that they called Pilgrim. So to celebrate Goodyear embarked on an aerial tour of more than a hundred cities in North America, and they brought two, and Steve, I'm going to call it correctly, the semi-rigid airships to Oshkosh, including Wingfoot One and Wingfoot Two. And I'm calling Steve out because he rightfully pointed out that you really can't call it a blimp, that it is a semi-rigid airship. And we'll talk about that in just a minute about why. But anyway, Wingfoot One and Wingfoot Two are here.

They did an outside wrap on one of them that was inspired by Goodyear's historic first blimp. So it has that look of the blimp of a hundred years ago. One of them is outfitted with an LED sign so it can participate in the night shows. And we were able to talk to a few of the pilots that are here with the rides. And one pilot told us that there are 11 pilots certified to fly the airship, and of those four are female. And in fact, one of our two pilots was female and one of them talked about it flying, feeling like flying an airplane, a helicopter and a boat all at the same time. It actually kind of has, I don't know what you felt like,

Jeremy Kariuki: It felt like a boat on the water.

Molly McMillin: It did. It kind of rocked like you would expect to be going down water in the lake anyway, that was the most fun.

Jeremy Kariuki: Yeah, definitely a rare experience. I really enjoyed it. It was incredible. I severely underestimated how fast it gets up into the air. I mean, given that it's just full of helium, I guess it just goes up like a balloon or a semi-rigid balloon, if you will.

Molly McMillin: But I guess we've ought to talk about there was a design change in 2011 that started with the Zeppelin NT, NT for New Technology, and that made it into a semi-rigid airship because it has this internal framework of carbon fiber and aluminum that allows it to carry vectoring engines. So it changed from an official blimp to a semi-rigid airship, although semi-rigid airship isn't as fun to say as the Goodyear Blimp.

Jeremy Kariuki: Doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.

Mike Lavitt: I saw them flying today in formation over the show, and at least one of them was actually moving backwards because it was fairly windy and I guess the wind caught them.

Jeremy Kariuki: Yeah, the pilots were telling us about how if they're moving at a double-digit speed and if they get the right headwind, they'll be knocked down to single digits in terms of knots. So it's crazy. And another cool thing about the blimps is in regards to the helium, helium is not very available. We only have a very limited amount of that to use. So they do recycle it because they have to adjust the levels of it to get to certain altitudes to adjust for certain temperatures and whatnot. So it comes in and out of a bladder, I think inside the airship. And I thought that was a really neat workaround to a shortage of a certain element.

Steve Trimble: It's like a submarine in a way. It manages buoyancy.

Molly McMillin: Well, and the pilot's just saying they just have so many things to monitor, not only the winds but the tree line and if it's night or day, the temperature, there's just all sorts of things that change how it handles and what you have to think about. And then they have to figure out how much helium to fill it with taking into account like a helium balloon after a day, you lose a little bit of helium and you have to counter for that and how much loss you're going to have. One was telling us that even it makes a difference if the sun is shining or if you're flying at night because the helium she said, weighs more.

Mike Lavitt: Well, helium, like any gas expands as it gets hot. So the volume will increase and the entire airship would have a lower density. They have to pay a lot more attention to the gas laws than pilots of fixed-wing aircraft.

Steve Trimble: Now I have gas laws. Those are different.

Jeremy Kariuki: Alright, Mike, what did you see at the show?

Mike Lavitt: There's a great collection of Rutan-designed aircraft here, and I think the most interesting one was some of these are one-of-a-kind prototypes and the most interesting one was the Grizzly. This was Burt Rutan's bush plane. And he commented later that he should have gone to Alaska before he designed a bush plane because he didn't realize how much stuff it needed to clear and how much ground clearance it needed to operate well. So that's why there was only one built and many Rutan aircraft. It has a canard, but this canard is actually connected to the main wing and it's just different look, even different looking than his other aircraft. And it's actually a beautiful thing to photograph if you shoot from the right angle, getting down very close to the ground and shooting up.

Jeremy Kariuki: Yeah, it was definitely an eye-catcher when we came across it, but

Mike Lavitt: Yeah.

Jeremy Kariuki: And Steve, what did you find interesting at the show this week?

Steve Trimble: Well, I should say I'm the defense editor for Aviation Week. So this isn't really my natural territory, but I used to come here a lot. And so it was nice to come back since the first time since 2017, mainly because it is so cool to see all these very different types of aircraft and all these one-offs that come from everywhere. I interviewed the guy who owns a QU-22B warbird, which most people probably have never heard of because I had never heard of it either. But it was a Bonanza B-36 that they flew over the Ho Chi Minh Trail as an unmanned aircraft initially, although it was an optionally piloted aircraft. And it really sort of filled in the gaps for me in understanding that continuum of remote-controlled aircraft technology, starting with the Kettering bug in World War I, Operation Aphrodite of World War II.

The D-21 started at the beginning of the Cold War's early 1960s, and then this in the early 1970s, the Q-22. And then finally when they were able to bring in things like satellite communications and GPS navigation, how they were able to untether their human operator but still give that human operator as much situational awareness as they needed to operate an aircraft safely and actually do a useful mission. And that's what we got in the 1990s, but it was just a little piece along that trail that I hadn't known about before. So there's that. And then the other thing that was bizarre was there was a Chinese company here that is a Chinese drone company that I'd never heard of before called X Control Systems. And what they brought was this thing that kind of looked like a drone as I was walking by, I assumed it was a drone, and it's this tandem rotor aircraft, so it looks like a C-46 or CH-46 or CH-47, like a Chinook.

But then there was this gondola sort of slung beneath the main part of the structure of the fuselage structure connecting the two rotors. And that gondola had a seat in it with straps for a seatbelt, no control mechanisms, no throttle or stick or anything like that. But then I sought out the sales agent for, this is called the Janus One, and they call the nickname that they came up with. It is the Flying Suitcase because it folds into something that kind of looks like a suitcase, so it doesn't look too much like any suitcase I have. But it is something that it is human operated inside the aircraft, but it's still kind of a drone because they don't have throttle and stick, but they have this control box, like an Xbox type thing, a controller that they use their hands and the fingers to manipulate going up and down, sort of flying it as if it was a drone, but you're inside it.

And they showed them testing it in all these different places, including the North Pole where they said it was the North Pole. I believed it looked kind of like a North Pole, but there wasn't a pole there obviously. And at the top of the Himalayas and Tibet, some pretty random places for a civilian program, which caught my eye as the defense editor for Aviation Week, but they were offering it for sale here. They said it was $300,000 starting, which seemed pretty high, a $400,000 depending on certain options. There was some different floats that you could use, things like that. So just not something you see every day, not something I was expecting to see, but it's one of those things you come to Oshkosh looking for kind of surprises and new things like that, right? It's hard to

Jeremy Kariuki: Come to the show and not see something new for the first time. So yeah. Thank you guys all. So that's all the time we have for today. Thank you Molly, Mike and Steve for your reporting this week. And thanks to Guy Ferneyhough for being our man in the chair across the pond in London. If you enjoyed the show, please remember to follow or subscribe to us wherever you listen. Thanks again and happy Oshkosh.