EAA AirVenture Oshkosh

It's awesome.

AG and I did it down on the way back from AirVenture.

I don't know.

Those are my thoughts on that.

And if you are in the Oshkosh area or are just passing through, you can certainly find on our website the full schedule for these speaker events.

They're usually, I believe, the third Thursday of the month, other than AirVenture.

So with that, why don't you, why don't we start by going just kind of across the table here and you could talk about your, your connection to the B1 program, you know, throughout your career.

Okay, yeah.

And seeing that, I was like, man, that's going to be a good photo.

Yeah.

It's one of the biggest, most iconic AirVenture photos of the last decade.

So if anybody wasn't there, that video is around, and it gets a lot of views.

This was probably before.

It was coming home from EAA AirVenture, right? So it was end of July.

It was right before Lollapalooza was going on.

So the whole city is kind of on heightened awareness of everything happening.

She didn't get to see what her dream became.

But the next time you're at AirVenture or Sun 'n Fun and you see a Black pilot walking the flight line or sitting in the front seat of a warbird or pulling a pits through a hammerhead in front of the crowd, think about a woman in a Chicago barbershop in nineteen eighteen who looked at a door and said, 'No, I'm going to find a way around it.' That's Bessie Coleman.

Most of what I've shared today comes from the research of Dr. Doris Rich, whose biography, Queen Bess, is still the definitive account, along with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's records on early Black aviation and the archives of the Chicago Defender.

Good sources, every one of them.

Then he would distribute it in a manner that just seemed natural and friendly, never revealing his operation to educate the American palate, to teach people to appreciate the finer chocolates of Germany.

Each April and July, Launchpad would fill coolers with smuggled German chocolates and bring them with him to Sun and Fun and AirVenture to distribute as what he would call prizes or friendly gifts.

Sometimes, when his stash was still overflowing after those two events, he would do what he would call giveaways, asking people to send him a postcard with their name and address, and Launchpad would use America's own postal service to his advantage.

Launchpad was brilliant in his tradecraft, all the time knowing that his plan was in place and working.

He picked up Launchpad's smuggled German chocolates, transferred them to his own personal coolers that he kept just for this kind of emergency, and secured the smuggled stash at his home in Austin until the time was right.

Then, during the last week of July 2021, Martin recruited a fleet of van RVs, loading one of them with Launchpad's chocolates.

They flew in formation from Austin, Texas to AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Martin knew that they needed a fleet to carry out Launchpad's chocolate mission.