Gun Fighter Skies 2008

Gun Fighter Skies 2008 took place in 2008. The photographs and captions on this page record that event as it happened.

This page gathers photographs and notes from the Gun Fighter Skies airshow of 2008, held at Mountain Home AFB in Idaho. It is a personal aviation scrapbook rather than a formal report: a record of a weekend spent on the ground among aircraft, hangars, and crowds, with the emphasis on the aircraft that were on static display and the people who keep them flying. The tone is that of a hobbyist keeping track of his own history, careful and unadorned, with the details that matter most to him preserved in full.

The centerpiece of the show as it appears here is a Long-EZ canard pusher, the unusual aircraft designed by Burt Rutan and owned by Joe Dubner. Canard configurations like this one draw attention because the lifting surfaces sit forward of the pilot and the propeller is mounted behind, an arrangement that looks startling to anyone used to conventional layouts. Having one exhibited on the ground gave visitors a close look at the airframe, the twin-boom tail, and the construction details that are normally hidden in flight.

Alongside the aircraft photography, the site carries the other threads of Joe Dubner's interests: home-built aircraft projects, avionics and instrument work, radio and APRS-related computing, GPS position reporting, solar power for the hangar, and design notes for propsellers and small encoders. These topics sit together naturally on a personal site, since tracking, displaying, and fixing equipment are all part of the same hands-on hobby of building and maintaining aircraft and the electronics that support them.

The remaining pages on the site are more domestic in scale: where he lives, links to friends and colleagues, notes on returning forwarded mail, and small announcements about additions and corrections to the address book and other lists. Even the housekeeping carries a personal tone, with requests for acknowledgement, exceptions to normal mailing rules, and light housekeeping notes about cleaning up and obscuring addresses. The whole site reads as one person's quietly organized corner of the web, updated slowly and kept, in his words, with minor edits rather than grand revisions.