Shopping at AirVenture’s Aeromart — General Aviation News

Everybody comes home from EAA AirVenture Oshkosh with something — souvenirs, a smart phone full of photographs, T-shirts with pilot sayings, a sunburn, lots of memories — and maybe airplane parts.

Peel back the onion of the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh campus at Wittman Regional Airport (KOSH), and a white tent in the background might be easy to pass by. But seasoned AirVenture attendees know this fabric canopy as a homing beacon called EAA Aeromart.

Aeromart has been an AirVenture destination since 1992, drawing more than 20,000 shoppers annually. Typically about 6,000 items are offered for sale.

In its humid shade, tables and racks hold slightly banged-up bones like Aeronca control surfaces, pointy Cessna prop spinners, yellow-tagged instruments, and a short overrun of punched aluminum instrument panels.

The big-ticket item at the 2024 show? A Hartzell propeller for a Lancair, priced at $8,000.

Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) volunteers operate Aeromart, logging in items consigned for sale by fellow EAA members. The organization’s cut is 12% of each sale.

Any AirVenture visitor — EAA member or not — is free to rummage the rows of parts.

One never knows what parts may reside amongst the racks at Aeromart — and it’s not just dusty diamonds for your next aircraft project.

Aviation prints, runway lights, old uniforms, and this year, a Russian missile in a crate, competed for curiosity and cash. Bent propellers only good for hanging on a wall and only able to spin yarns, not RPMs, can be had for the price on the tag.

Mary Goddard, an Aeromart volunteer from Green Bay, Wisconsin, said, “I had my eye on some B-17 prints, but was too busy working” to buy them.

All sales are final. Buyers have come to trust the vendors’ descriptions of condition provided with some of the parts, where candor and honesty count, volunteers noted.

When we visited, Callum Hawley was holding up an instrument panel, pondering uses for it. Callum, who describes himself as “an Australian from Hong Kong,” showed the panel to Cam and Tracy Hawley. The Hawleys are working on the pedigreed Beech Model 17 Staggerwing cabin biplane once assigned to the 1940 United States Antarctic Service Expedition, known colloquially as Admiral Byrd’s Beech 17. Byrd’s Beech later flew in Australia.

Sellers began bringing items to Aeromart the Saturday before AirVenture opening day on Monday, July 22, the first day of sales. The following Saturday at 2 p.m., as the departure of aircraft from KOSH swelled, this year’s rendition of Aeromart came to a close. Sellers could pick up their remaining pieces, and it is understood that all unclaimed consignment items become the property of EAA to sell as their own next year.

And next year, one of the 6,000 consigned items might make your Beech better or your Man Cave manlier.