David vs Goliath: An Adventure of Two Airshows
Published on April 2019
Florida is an aviator’s dream. The terrain is flat, the weather fine, and airports abound. There are a host of springtime airshows scattered across the state. This year I went to both the biggest of those airshows and the smallest. Side-by-side, it’s a tough call to say which is more fun. Sun-n-Fun is a massive gaggle of aviation; it’s a D-Day invasion without the bullets. It features more about 200,000 attendees, thousands of planes, 500 exhibitors, 3,000 volunteers, a museum, a year-round public high school and even a radio station. In contrast, Seaplane-Palooza in Tavares (which bills itself as America’s Seaplane City) is a tiny event just for people and the floatplanes they love. This two-day event drew 74 planes, two helicopters, twenty vendors, plus innumerable boaters who tethered their toys onto the grassy shoreline of Lake Dora. It was a perfect time for a side-by-side comparison, and we can total up the “fun points” for an overall winner.
