By Hal Bryan
Our convention grounds overflow with stories. Some are obvious — fresh aircraft builds and restorations, changes in FARs, the tireless efforts of our passionate army of volunteers, etc. Some stories, however, are more inconspicuous.
If your AirVenture travels take you to the Blue Barn, the home base for EAA chapters (and if they don’t, they should — chapters are the lifeblood of our organization), beyond the surprisingly comfortable Adirondack chairs and the directional signs, you’ll see a few kiosks providing information about chapter programs. Once you’ve read about chapter websites and AeroEducate and IMC/VMC Clubs, take a step back and look at the kiosks themselves, and you’ll see the obvious and appropriate aviation influence. But they aren’t just pieces of furniture — they are artifacts in their own right.
In June 2006, I was semi-frantically preparing for AirVenture, just as I had for several years prior and every year since. At the time, though, I worked with EAA, but not yet for EAA. I was working at Microsoft on the Flight Simulator team, and we were getting ready to come to AirVenture as sponsors and exhibitors. I had a brand-new boss, the late and lamented Brett Schnepf, EAA 1306226, and I was showing him the planned layout of our booth in “Microsoft Flight Simulator Exhibit Hangar D.”
He didn’t like it. He thought it was bland and boring and corporate, and he was absolutely right.
Later that morning, I sent him a link to a young company called MotoArt (known now as PlaneTags) in California, which upcycled aircraft parts into high-end furniture. I told Brett that we should talk to these guys about doing something fun for our booth — next year. Brett was on the phone with MotoArt founders Dave Hall and Donovan Fell in less than five minutes. He told them we needed something interesting, cool, and authentic to show off our upcoming product, and they’d need to ship it to Wisconsin in three weeks.
We not only didn’t have time for this project, we had no budget for it. I had to go begging to the executive assistant who was temporarily supporting our team while our usual assistant was on leave and casually ask for a six-figure check. The fact that she was (and is) my wife didn’t make it any easier, but I got it anyway.
Dave, Donovan, and their team set to work. First, they built a 12-foot-tall mock-up control tower with flat-screen monitors mounted on the sides, and then they built four two-sided standup kiosks that housed two computers and four monitors — one for the virtual pilot trying the simulator, and a cloned display higher up so other visitors could watch.
The bases of the kiosks were created by welding a pair of 737 airline galley carts together, which, with some additional cooling, not only made for a perfect place to house the computers, the fact that they were on wheels made it really easy to set up and rearrange the booth. While the galley cart bases had flown thousands of miles serving countless passengers, the upper portions, used to mount the monitors and hang signage, spent their early years serving their country — what we used as monitor stands are actually elevators from venerable WWII-era TBF/TBM Avengers.
They served us well at Oshkosh, Reno, and other trade show locations until 2009 when Microsoft closed down the Flight Simulator division. That’s when I found my way to EAA, and, after I’d been here about a year, I got a call from a friend of mine, Steve Mallinson from the trade show production company that handled Microsoft’s shipping and logistics and stored the booth properties between events. Microsoft, having no need for aviation-related anything at the time, canceled the contract and told Steve to just throw it all away. Thankfully Steve, whose grandfather was a United States Army Air Forces maintenance chief in WWII and worked on the first Mustangs, saw the value in these things and arranged to donate them to EAA.
In the 20 years since, they’ve popped up all over the grounds and in our museum, supporting displays and programs of all kinds. I’ll always be grateful to Dave and Donovan for their work, to Brett who loved nothing more than doing the impossible, and especially to Steve for choosing EAA over a landfill.
Everything around our grounds has a story, and now you know this one.