Note: On August 1, 2005 the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story by Meg Jones dealing with EAA. As regards EAA attendance, Jones wrote: "Poberezny said Sunday that final attendance numbers wouldn't be known for a few days, but the crowd size will surpass last year's 690,000." I then sent her the following email. --Tony Palmeri

Hi Meg,

As regards EAA attendance, I am disappointed that the Journal Sentinel continues to pass on EAA's hyper inflated claims as fact. Four years ago I wrote the following: http://www.tonypalmeri.com/experimentalattendance.htm

The local Oshkosh Northwestern now at least concedes that the bogus number given out by EAA is based on number of event passes sold and not an actual body count. I think it is a travesty that the newspaper does not insist on an accurate count, but at least they have made some progress (for more than 30 years they simply printed whatever number the EAA gave them). Your story does not do that and makes readers think that 690,000 were in Oshkosh the last week. That is SIMPLY NOT TRUE.

In March of 2003, Rick Rousos, a reporter for the Lakeland (Florida) Ledger, revealed that the Experimental Aircraft Association-affiliated Sun ‘n Fun fly-in had exaggerated its attendance figures by more than 400,000. According to Rousos, “Sun 'n Fun claimed an estimated attendance of 645,000 for its week-long fly-in in April 2001. But Sun 'n Fun's tax and internal records show the attendance was less than 250,000. Of that number, 86,515 actually paid to get in. The rest were mainly volunteers, vendors and media representatives.”

The local Oshkosh Northwestern has never done any research to determine the actual attendance at EAA and the resulting exaggerated claims of economic impact. Nor have they bothered to find out how much the exaggerated claims have been used by government officials to justify the variety of perks the EAA has received from Winnebago County over the years. I think these would be very worthwhile things for the Journal Sentinel to investigate.

At the very least, I would hope that next year the Journal Sentinel explain to readers how EAA arrives at its bogus attendance figure.

All the best,

Tony Palmeri