It’s another December and that means another ICAS convention! I’m at the Rio All-Suites Hotel and Casino here in Las Vegas along with just about everyone who’s anyone in the airshow business in North America.
It’s a busy convention for me this year. In a couple of hours, I go downstairs to see Gene Kranz, Apollo program flight director and the author of The Kranz Doctrine, which is the subject of a popular Airspeed episode from 2009. Yes, I’m having my copy of Failure is Not an Option. After that, it’s a day of floor sessions and breakout sessions. I’m hitting the Blue Angels Forum and the sponsorship session. Then, this evening, I’m taking a side track to see Penn & Teller here at the hotel. I’ve been a fan of Penn Jillette for a long time and I have front row seats to see him llive.
Tomorrow (flight suit day!) I’m attending Air Boss 201 to add some color to the Air Boss episode of Airspeed. It’s be nice to get some training so that I can find out what I did wrong bossing my first demos this past June. After that, it’s more floor sessions and then I bust out to the airport for a red-eye Delta flight back to the D.
Throughout all of this, I’m taking calls and making sure that the desk I’m supposed to be flying back in the D stays aloft. It exhibits reasonable spiral stability, but does require occasional corrections and the autopilot is notoriously unreliable.
There likely won’t be an episode from here at the hotel this year. I have three episodes for which I’m collecting material. Producing an on-site episodes can take as much as three or four hours and I think that that’s time better spent downstairs gathering the material and making the contacts that will inspire episodes that I’m not even thinking about right now.
Off to breakfast with the men and women who make airshows happen!