Flite Fest: Flying With Ron
In early August I drove out to Dayton, Ohio, for Flite Fest with my old friend Ron. Saying that is a double edged sword, eh? How ambiguous, “my old friend Ron.” So, Ron is old. The implication is that, as an old friend, I’m old, too. I feel like I am getting lost here.
Anyway. in early August I drove out to Dayton, Ohio, for Flite Fest with my old friend Ron. — several days of nothing but model airplanes. Flite Fest is an annual event thrown by Flite Test, a company that designs and sells electric model airplanes along with all of the other necessities needed to fly them. This is our fourth year attending. Flite Fest 2026 was a special event. Normally, Flite Fest is held at Furey Field in Malvern, Ohio, but this year, Flite Test joined up with DARPA at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton Ohio. DARPA was holding their Lift Challenge – an event designed to, as the website says, “revolutionize heavy vertical lift aviation by seeking novel drone designs capable of carrying payloads more than four times their weight.” (Seriously, why should I put out all that effort to describe the event when I can copy/paste/done.) This was a fairly dreamy prospect for folks enamored with aviation – camping on an active air force base (really) right next to the Air Force Museum, side by side with a massive DARPA event.
Security was tight – we arrived super early and had a relatively easy check in with the Air Force personnel who required us to open the hood and all doors to have the airman check out that we had no weapons, contraband, or anything else that could compromise the airbase. The gates locked down at 8:00 PM, and if you were on the wrong side… too bad.
Every Flite Fest has a runway set up for flying planes of all sizes. An enormous space is set aside for flying, and can serve a couple hundred people flying at the same time. Freedom! Except when you are on an active AFB. We were given the flight parameters and were told, with certainty, that if we flew too far outside of the dedicated space, our plane would be shot down, and base security would be sent to have one of those discussions nobody wants to have.
Ron and I had a handful of great conversations with the military folks. We met the liaison between the US Air Force and DARPA and Flite Test. He was an absolutely charming 20 something who was walking around and greeting people with his boss and some other un-named guy. We asked him how often the Air Force allows groups like ours to come and camp out on an active base, and he said that no such an event has ever happened. Pretty cool. I later saw this same airman walking toward the flight line with a couple of little kids to watch the planes fly.
Last year, 2025, two minutes after we had our tent and tarp set up, a storm front came through and flattened our camp site. Moreover, almost every tent at Furey field was laid low, even the gigantic build tents that Flite Test sets up (see images below). From memory, one site that had a really cool yurt survived and one of those tents that attaches to the roof of Subaru. We lived for the next 24 hours in the van. The leading edge of that storm sported winds between 60 -70 miles per hour. It took about 100 hours to fix the tarp and tent after the blast.
As a result, I spent pretty much every minute of our time at Flite Fest watching weather radar, and we were hit by two fearsome fronts; one at about 2:00 PM in the afternoon, and one about 12 hours later – at 2:00 AM when we were sleeping. Fortunately, I asked Claude how to defend against the upcoming winds, and his response was simple – if you are hit by a front like the year before, you will be flattened again, but if you stake down the tarp to every grommet, that will spread the force against the most stakes, and keep the tarp from flapping. AI for the win, when the storms hit, it was terrifying, but the tent and tarp survived both storms.
The most important priority of the trip was that Ron would get to fly his one big plane. And he did. (See images below.)
Since we were camping on Wright-Patterson AFB, after breaking camp and packing the van, we visited the Air Force Museum which is one of the most amazing museums in the world for people who enjoy aviation. My top 5 favorite planes can be found in the collection. I only took pictures of a few. The museum is well worth visiting. Set a side a couple days to do it right.
