For one week every July, a regional airport in eastern Wisconsin becomes the busiest patch of sky on the planet. In 2026 it also became the most crowded it has ever been.

EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2026, the annual fly-in the Experimental Aircraft Association bills as “The World’s Greatest Aviation Celebration,” drew roughly 734,000 people across its seven-day run from 20 to 26 July. That edges past the 704,000 who came in 2025 and sets a new all-time attendance record for an event that has been running since 1953.

Numbers like that are hard to picture until you translate them into aeroplanes.

The busiest control tower on Earth

During AirVenture, the FAA tower at Wittman Regional Airport handles more traffic than anywhere else in the world. This year controllers logged 15,527 aircraft operations between noon on 16 July and noon on 27 July — an average of about 101 take-offs and landings every hour the field was open. More than 10,000 aircraft flew in to Wittman and other airports across east-central Wisconsin.

To keep that flowing, arriving pilots follow a famously unusual script: rocking their wings instead of talking on the radio, landing on coloured dots painted on the runway, and parking wingtip to wingtip in a temporary city of tents and aircraft.

The show floor spanned the full spectrum of flight, from home-built experimentals and vintage warbirds to airliners, aerobatic acts and current front-line military jets such as the F-35 Lightning II. NASA brought a presence too, with administrator Jared Isaacman appearing at the popular “Warbirds in Review” sessions.

A record year, and a birthday

The 2026 turnout landed in a year with extra resonance in the United States: the country’s 250th anniversary. EAA leaned into the theme, and its chairman framed the record week around it.

Behind the spectacle sits real money. A 2025 study by the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh estimated AirVenture generates around US$257 million a year for the five surrounding counties — a reminder that a week of aeroplanes is also the economic engine of a region.

Why it keeps growing

In an era when many airshows have shrunk or vanished, Oshkosh keeps climbing. Part of it is scale: no other event puts this many aircraft, disciplines and eras of flight in one place. Part of it is culture — AirVenture is as much a pilgrimage and a reunion as it is a show. And part of it, plainly, is that people still want to stand on a Wisconsin airfield and watch things fly.

734,000 of them did this year. On current form, that record has a short shelf life.

A highlights reel from EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2026.

Sources: EAA; Vintage Aviation News; WSAW; Fox11; University of Wisconsin Oshkosh economic-impact study (2025).