704,000 VISITORS AND 10,000 AIRCRAFT: THE WORLD’S GREATEST AVIATION GATHERING

EAA AirVenture Oshkosh annually transforms a stretch of Wisconsin runway into what the aviation community regards as its most important gathering. The 2025 edition attracted over 704,000 visitors through the gates — the highest attendance in the show’s history — and drew more than 10,000 aircraft to Wittman Regional Airport, making it the busiest airfield in the world for the duration of the event. As the 2026 edition approaches, Merlin Labs, a California-based developer of autonomous flight systems, has shared the reflections of its team members on what the show means to the people building aviation’s next era.

Merlin Labs develops autonomous flight technology with a particular focus on enabling existing aircraft to fly with reduced or modified crew requirements, including through programmes with the US Air Force on the C-130 platform. The company’s team encompasses pilots, engineers, software developers and aviation professionals for whom Oshkosh is not simply a trade event but a formative and recurrent experience — a reunion point for an industry defined as much by its community as its technology.

WHERE THE OLD AND THE NEW SHARE A FIELD

A recurring theme among Merlin team members is AirVenture’s refusal to choose between aviation’s heritage and its future. Josh Peek, Merlin’s senior technical sourcing recruiter, describes the mix of historic and cutting-edge aircraft as rare and the mutual respect among attendees as palpable. For Charles Njenga, a principal systems engineer at Merlin, the show was a gateway: as a college student, AirVenture opened him to aviation’s history and potential future simultaneously, an experience he says created the camaraderie that keeps him excited about where the industry is heading. He now works at Merlin precisely because of that excitement.

Pat Shine, Merlin’s virtual test environments engineering lead, attended for the first time in 2008 — flying the famous Fisk arrival, sleeping under the wing of his Cessna 172, and walking more than ten miles a day across the grounds. What stayed with him was not the headline display aircraft but the rows of amateur-built aircraft and the depth of passion evident in each one. He credits that visit with planting the seed that led him to begin building his own aircraft a decade later. Jonathan Oliver, now an Engineering Test Pilot at Merlin, arrived in 2010 as a college intern at EAA’s Air Academy and went home having spent his intern wages on a private pilot’s licence. This July marks his 16th consecutive AirVenture.

AUTONOMOUS FLIGHT AS AVIATION’S NEWEST CHAPTER

For Merlin, AirVenture provides both personal meaning and professional context. The show is where aviation’s inventive tradition is most visibly alive — a point Shine makes by citing the year the Martin Jetpack was unveiled as an example of the genuinely novel ideas that debut in front of AirVenture’s uniquely attentive audience year after year. For Oliver, the pull has shifted over successive visits from the aircraft to the people: AirVenture is, he says, aviation’s family reunion, and one he cannot imagine missing.

Merlin’s participation this year carries a dual significance. The company will showcase its work in autonomous flight systems to an audience of pilots, engineers and builders for whom the technology is neither abstract nor distant — it is the next problem to solve, the next system to test, the next chapter in a century-long story that everyone at Oshkosh shares. Merlin frames its own work explicitly in that tradition: building autonomous flight not as a departure from aviation’s past but as the newest expression of it.