109th Airlift Wing Brings Polar Airlift Mission to World's Largest Aviation Celebration

OSHKOSH, Wis. — The 109th Airlift Wing joined more than 10,000 aircraft and hundreds of thousands of aviation enthusiasts last week at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, the world's largest annual gathering of aircraft and airmen, showcasing the unit's one-of-a-kind polar airlift mission to a global audience.

Held each summer at Wittman Regional Airport, AirVenture transforms the small Wisconsin city into what organizers bill as the "World's Greatest Aviation Celebration." For one week, Oshkosh's airport becomes the busiest in the world, logging tens of thousands of takeoffs and landings and drawing pilots, families, industry leaders and military units from across the globe. This year the event set an all-time attendance record of roughly 734,000 people from 94 countries, with more than 10,000 aircraft flying in and over 1000 commercial exhibitors on the grounds.

For the 109th Airlift Wing, a New York Air National Guard unit based at Stratton Air National Guard Base in Scotia, New York, the show offers a rare opportunity to bring its mission directly to the public. The wing operates the LC-130 "Skibird," a ski-equipped variant of the C-130 Hercules and the only aircraft of its kind in the U.S. military. Fitted with retractable skis, the LC-130 can land on snow and ice runways in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, making the 109th the Defense Department's sole provider of polar airlift.

Each year the wing flies missions in support of the National Science Foundation, delivering passengers, fuel and cargo across the ice sheets of Greenland and to research stations throughout Antarctica as part of Operation Deep Freeze. That mission set draws steady crowds at Oshkosh, where visitors can walk up to the aircraft, meet the aircrews and maintainers, and hear firsthand what it takes to operate at the top and bottom of the world.

"There's no better place than Oshkosh to show people what we do," said Maj. Joe Shanahan, an LC-130 navigator who accompanied the aircraft to the show. "You spend your career flying to the most remote places on the planet, the ice runways of Antarctica, the Greenland ice cap, and then you get to park the Skibird right here in front of hundreds of thousands of people who love aviation as much as we do. Talking with kids who might one day fly this mission, and with veterans who remember the Hercules from their own service, reminds all of us why this work matters. It's been an incredible week."

AirVenture traces its roots to 1953, when Paul and Audrey Poberezny founded the Experimental Aircraft Association and hosted a small fly-in with a handful of homebuilt airplanes and fewer than 150 registered visitors. The gathering outgrew its original Milwaukee-area home, spent a decade in Rockford, Illinois, and moved to Oshkosh in 1970, where it has grown into an international event now more than seven decades in the making. The show was renamed "AirVenture" in the late 1990s.

The 109th Airlift Wing's aircraft and personnel will remain on display for the remainder of the show, continuing to connect with the public and, as Shanahan put it, perhaps inspiring the next generation of Airmen to take on one of the military's most distinctive flying missions.