Watch: EAA AirVenture Brings Out the Weird and the Wonderful

EAA AirVenture 2018 is going full blast right now in little Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Bet you didn’t see this one coming Avgeekery Nation! Most aerobatics aficionados are familiar with the Yakolev Yak-55. The airplane has been around since the early 1980s. Plenty of aerobatic pilots fly them these days. But what happens if you take two Yak-55s and glue them together? Well you get the Yak-110. That’s not new math…just some very creative thinking. First, a couple of EAA members named Dell Coller and Jeff Boerboon found a pair of Yak-55s and took them to their chamber (or is that hangar?) of horrors in Idaho. Then the fun really got started…

They removed a wing from each of the Yaks and fabricated a center section with the same foil parameters. Then they joined the two fuselages to the center section at the normal wing attachment points and joined the two horizontal stabilizers together too. They left full controls (for the entire aircraft) in each cockpit but put the smoke controls and starters for both engines in the port side only. Cool, right? Unique certainly. Did somebody say more power? All indicators point to yes because they soon decided to bolt a General Electric CJ610-6 turbojet engine to the center wing section with a long exhaust port led to the tail. Two props AND a jet? No way! This video was uploaded to YouTube by AirshowStuffVideos. Listen to how that thing sounds! Now get your jaw up off your desk.

Also happening in Oshkosh, and pretty much anywhere there are British airplanes flying this year, are Royal Air Force (RAF) 100 tributes. The RAF turned 100 years old back on April 1^st, but that’s not keeping anybody from firing up the odd Spit, Lancaster, or any other RAF classic and flying around the local airpatch in tribute to the RAF- and that’s good and cool thing! At Oshkosh they’re just doing it on a bigger scale. Here’s a look at a classic Supermarine Spitfire doing the honors, also uploaded to YouTube by AirshowStuffVideos. Turn those speakers up (and ignore that pesky PA guy!). More to come as EAA AirVenture 2018 rolls on.