 My name is Kathleen O'Brien and I've had the privilege of being the master of ceremonies for the FAA forums. This Sun and Fun has been the 33rd annual Sun and Fun fly-in. It started with just a few planes and has now grown to the second largest air show of its type in the whole U.S. Sun and Fun has balloons, ultralights, home-built, aerobatic planes, choppers, and experimental aircraft. It's been a wonderful week for aviators of all kinds and new people wanting to get into aviation. We have a wonderful program for you today just wrapping up all the activities that have gone on. Let's begin with a little overview starting with how the balloons took off one morning this past week. Bob Donahue. Welcome back, everyone. I have with me Bob Donahue. He's acting FISDO manager for Sun and Fun while we're here. And Flight Standards Office is open from 7.30 in the morning to 4.30 in the afternoon, sometimes even later. And lots of things have gone on there, Bob. Tell me a little bit about what the purpose is for Flight Standards being here at Sun and Fun. Right now we're trying to support the local pilot community out here by providing all sorts of available information, anything from airworthiness issues all the way through pilot credentials. We serve a multitude of ideas and a lot of these agencies that we provide a lot of support to integrate very nicely into the overall safety of the aviation services. Today we have virtually concluded an outstanding session with operations here with the aviation community. It seems like we have increased the safety significantly. In fact, we only had a total of four accidents and two incidences which is outstanding for such a large mix of aviation assets within the local area. We have an outstanding support from the local emergency response units, which they did respond to these operations over here and they performed magnificently for the first time. I've never seen this done before, but we actually integrated the active flight line with the actual customer base or the civilians that we have in the local area. This went without incident and it was an outstanding opportunity for the local people to ensure they not only the safety of their own benefits, but to actually see how the aircraft operates in such a local environment. It's really been fantastic. Couldn't speak highly of everybody and they've done a real fine job. Bob, people actually got to walk the flight line then and take a close look at the aircraft. Right up close and personal, when the engines were started they got an opportunity to see the actual ferocity of the winds, the sound of the engines, and actually got a chance to see the pilots. The ground crews, the wing walkers, everything was done fantastic. Everybody got an opportunity to see up front and personal every aspect of the aviation community and perfect safety. It was a beautiful mix. The helicopter rides was fantastic. The tail draggers, the by planes, everybody got a chance to really get involved this year and they had an opportunity to experience what we're doing now. It's gotten so good, though, that the sport pilot side of the house is taking off very, very fast. The majority of our questions that we fielded were specifically oriented towards the sport pilot side. We provide all sorts of new airworthiness information to the public and it seems as though the trends that we're seeing today is leading the sport pilot community in a good, solid direction. Bob, how were you able to provide up-to-date information when people walked into the flight standards office? We had a good team, good competitive personnel from airworthiness to operations that came in from the Orlando Flight Standards Office and the Tampa Flight Standards Office. So we had representatives of at least two per segment to support all of these questions. We had a high activity level of all areas to include the ultralights, the activity levels and providing airworthiness and pilot credential information. We had compliments coming in from Oklahoma City to provide all sorts of those hard questions that we cannot answer at our local level. Things that are medical operations and airworthiness certifications of ultralights all the way down through the experimental bills. So the public this year has provided an extreme amount of interest in the sport pilot and ultralight fields. With our participation this year and the answers that we were able to provide, I'm sure will increase the safety levels of things to come. You did a beautiful job and thanks to the team in Oklahoma and the other people that were on the other end of a telephone or at the other end of a computer were able to support anything. Thank you very much. We're going to slip to a segment that shows some of the ultralights. We'll enjoy ourselves. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. Bye-bye. We talked a little bit about some of the things flight standards did. Some of the other things that happened during this week were that local regional and regional awards were given out for the general aviation award program. We had remarkable visitors from the FAA and from all over the world. We interviewed many of the air performers, the air show performers and talked about what it was that got them excited and interested in having this kind of an aviation life. And now we're going to talk about the heart of a lot of the aviation activities here at Sun and Fun. Welcome, Laurie Zugre. Laurie, air traffic performs a pivotal function here at Sun and Fun. Let's start with how many people do you bring in and where do they come from? We do bring in people from as far north as Albany, New York, down south to Miami, Florida, all the way out west. We bring in people from Memphis, Evansville and Minneapolis. So we've got a team of 56 people that we bring in up and down the East Coast, basically. What kind of jobs do they need to do? Are they just telling people where to go? What we do is we separate up the individuals that we bring in the controllers into teams. We've got eight teams and six controllers on each team. One team does have a seventh controller. We have an agreement with Oshkosh. And what we do there is a controller is picked at Oshkosh as the controller of the year. That individual comes down and we recognize them and honor them and we put them on one of the teams and they work with us. And this year, tonight, in fact, we will select a controller of the year for Sun and Fun and we will send them to Oshkosh. So it's really a very good will event back and forth. Each of the teams is responsible for either working at the tower or they're out at Lake Parker, which is a fire tower that we use. Lake Parker, we will have aircraft that we're very busy. They'll hold over Lake Parker and we'll meter from Lake Parker then into the airport here. We've got two more areas that we'll put teams. We call it departure and that's for all the arrivals that want to depart, especially after the air show. We get a significant number of pilots that are leaving after the air show. We have a team of controllers that actually are on the sides of the runway, out on the runway, and they position the aircraft on the runway for departure. So in about a 45 minute period of time, we can get about 300 aircraft out of the airport. We try to do that as efficiently as possible because we would like to get the departures out prior to sunset. We get the controllers off the runways before it gets dark. And then the other position that we have is what we call fly by and that's for the arrivals that the controllers will be out again on the runways and taxiways. And they will be directing the aircraft on how to exit the runway so that they can either head towards a terminal or they can head towards Sun and Fun or Camping or wherever they want to go. And then Sun and Fun volunteers who do an excellent, excellent job take over and leave the aircraft to their parking. Laura, do you have any numbers for some of the operations that conducted here? Sure, we do. So far, not including today's numbers, we've worked about 18,000 operations. It's significant for an event that is basically a week long. And we're able to do that because of waivers that we have received for reduced separation for our phraseology. The City of Lakeland does a tremendous job in allowing us to come in and helping us. We use one of the taxiways as a runway that's notaned that way. We've got a waiver for that. The City of Lakeland is very hospitable to us. They allow us to come in, the FAA come in and take over the tower. During the event, we do use the Lakeland Air Traffic Controllers also. They're on one of the teams. And on Thursday at 10 o'clock in the morning, that was our largest arrival period. We had a total operation of 570 on Thursday. And then for our departures, that was on Friday and that was from 6 to 7 o'clock in the evening. We worked 635 operations in that period of time. Lori, a lot of good things have happened. And I've seen the red shirts around and they come with smiles and they come with enthusiasm. And because they do such a good job, we had a wonderful year here at Sun and Fun. Thank you. Thank you. And now we're going to go and see a little bit of our static displays that happened here at Sun and Fun. Thank you, Lori Zuge. Thank you very much. Stay here. Welcome back. Marty Broward is here with me today from Flight Service. And Flight Service has been on the field thanks to a lot of people. And Marty, how about we start off with thanking the people that helped get Flight Service here with us today. Absolutely. Thank you very much. We're honored to be here. I represent Lockheed Martin and the FAA has tasked us this year to provide flight services to the Sun and Fun fly-in event. And as you probably know, space is very limited here on the airport. There's many, many vendors and spaces at a very, very minimum. And the FAA production studio allows us each year to share a portion of their building for our flight service area. And I would like to thank Obi Young and the entire production crew for making us feel at home in their space. Marty, thank you very much. Now tell us a little bit about what you've been doing here. And how did the equipment wasn't here when we came at first, was it? Right. Again, because this is borrowed space and the FAA production studio uses all the space they have here, they pull out all their equipment to allow us to bring in our equipment. So Lockheed Martin sent us the computer displays and monitors. And then we have two vendors that provide our information. One is WSI that provides our weather graphics and TFR information. And the other one is AISR that provides us with the weather text data and the flight processing capabilities. Well, we had relatively good weather here, some beautiful clouds, but not much else. So tell us what kind of customers did you have coming in and what was that like? Again, safety is the key and one of the key reasons we're here is to provide pre-flight briefings for pilots. And as part of the air show event, there's also reservation requirements. So we also provide reservations for the pilots. But again, the key thing is the pilot weather briefings. And we do the complete pilot weather briefings on-site for walk-in face-to-face briefings and also flight plan handling. But in addition to that, we provide numerous outdoor briefings. We provide the emergency response team a morning briefing so they know about the winds and any special weather situations that could impact their operation. We provide a balloon brief for the balloon launch. We also provide a ultralight briefing three times a day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the late afternoon for the ultralight pilots. We provide daily air show briefings and warbird briefings. We also provide an outdoor briefing for just general weather summary because numerous people fly in. They kind of want to know how the weather looks for later in the week and what day they should plan on leaving the event. Again, we were blessed with great weather and although our numbers are down a little bit this year, for safety's sake, we're always glad when the weather's good and it's not a factor for any bad situations impacting the pilots. Marty, what are your numbers? Do you have any idea? So far this year we've had 6,700 total flight services, a little over 3,200 pilot weather briefings, and right at 200 flight plans process. And how many personnel did all this work? We had 14 total, one operations manager, one supervisor, and 12 specialists. That's a lot of work for a very small group of people. What happens if someone arrives at Sun and Fun and all the excitement forgets to close their flight plan? That's an excellent question. We actually do overdo aircraft searches here on the airport and as a result of that, as you can imagine on an event this large with this many airplanes, it's really difficult to try and find one airplane that forgot to close their flight plan. Civil Air Patrol has a presence on site. This year Lieutenant Lynn Gilner had 78 senior members and cadets helping him monitor each airplane that landed and help us to locate any overdue aircraft. There's one other important part of flight service when you come to town and that is the barbecue. Was it a success this year? It was. Our manager Reggie Rivers does a phenomenal barbecue and every year as part of the event to honor the specialists that come from all over the country, he cooks a barbecue and it was very successful. And I went in for leftovers and there were none. So that doesn't count. But Marty, thank you very much. The flight service, I was in there several times. Good questions answered. Good answers for poor questions and lots of good support. Marty, thank you very much. And now we're going to segue to some of the military aircraft that gave us such a good show and such a good time here at Sun and Fun. Welcome back everyone. We're going to talk about a unique and important part of Sun and Fun and the FAA production studio. And that is our outreach program. And I have with me a regional and national winner for the volunteer program, volunteer fast team rep of the year, Cheryl. Come talk to us. Cheryl DeFilippo. Hi, Kathleen. Thank you so much for having me here today. You know, this week has been a whirlwind, but luckily we'll be able to remember it with all our great coverage and our photography that we've done throughout the week. You know, the FAA production studios is on the field all year long. 365 days a year. We're on the field open for business about six days a week, sometimes seven days a week. And we welcome everyone out there to join us on our live stream. Hopefully all of you out there now will join us in our future productions and our replays of some of the programs that we've had here at Sun and Fun. It's been a tremendous week. We offered up 28 programs throughout the week. We put eight programs up live via satellite. We brought you educational format that was second to none, and we will strive to do that all year long. What's real important though, Kathleen, is to let everyone know that this studio is completely free to the aviation public, all our viewing, all our educational programs. You can join us live. You can join us on our stream. You can join us on the get-in network. That's the government educational training network, the aviation training network. And everyone that makes this happen and brings this program to our viewers are volunteers. We have a volunteer staff here at the studio of approximately 125 to 30 volunteers. And the absolute dedication that happens here at the studio is phenomenal. Our cameramen, our floor people, our technical directors, our staff, all the way down to our catering crew. And I shouldn't say down to because this week we couldn't have made it without our catering crew. And I give them a huge, huge applause. It's been a tremendous week. We've had a lot of fun. You've been a wonderful host for us all week. Kathleen's been our host throughout the entire week, and we can't thank you enough. You've done a tremendous job. Cheryl, I appreciate it. You know, you talked about the volunteerism. What you didn't mention is how much expertise they bring. I'm astounded by the quality of people that come and the quality of personality and professional expertise. You're absolutely right. And they're second to none. We have people that come to us with a tremendous amount of experience. We have professional cameramen. We have professional people up on our avid editing equipment that bring these programs to you and edit our productions and bring you the terrific finished product. We have everybody from airline transport pilots, student pilots, CFIs. I just can't tell you the very amount of talent that is here. You never know who you're going to be standing next to. You never know who you're going to be talking to. But we're all in one big family. That's the best way I can describe it. It's one big family and it's one cooperative effort. And it's a privilege to be a part of that kind of family. Yes, it is. It truly is. And Cheryl, you've done a lot of anchoring to this whole week because you've been on call to take visitors. We had an extraordinary aviation person from Costa Rica. We've had administrators from Washington in the FAA and people from our regional office. Life has been full all week long and you've been there and your camera crews have been there. Yes. The golf carts have been there for the most part. Yes, yes. And all of life has gone along very well. We've had no less than two remote crews out on the field at any given time. I think our coverage this year has been extraordinary. And we're looking forward to being able to bring you programming and aviation safety programming coming up that is second to none. Thank you, Cheryl. I appreciate it. Thank you, Cat. We're going to switch over now and look at some of the joys that people come for. And that's the air show here at Sun and Fun. Oh, that's wonderful. Let's take a good look. Welcome back, everyone. Joys such as that air show couldn't possibly take place without the background, the infrastructure and all the dedication of the people that have been here at Sun and Fun. And especially the National Aviation Safety Foundation. Ernie Strange was here with us and he was in there with all the other volunteers, monitoring, helping, sweeping, whatever needed to be done. We've had a remarkable week with good safety forums, with remarkable workshops, with an outstanding group of vendors who came and helped out and did other things, especially with an open door flight service and flight standards, with good exhibits, new exhibits and support from all around. The FAA studios here are part of the National Safety Foundation and the FAST team here. We've had support from Kevin Clover, the national FAST team person, and Ken Spivey, our regional FAST team manager, and also Doug Murphy. So life has been good. Obi-Yan is still alive and well and leading us. So now let's go to Living the Dream video. What happens here at Sun and Fun? Before I got into country music, I was a professional pilot. So this is really important to me now because I don't get to enjoy aviation as much as I used to for a living. So if I get the chance to come something like this man, I eat it up. You know, this is my ninth Sun and Fun convention that I had the chance to actually come to. And every single year it's a different experience for me. Since the last time I was here, we've continued to work with aviation and space education for the FAA, continued to grow that program. Last year we reached over 200,000 students through all the help and donation of time from FAA employees and all of our partner organizations that the FAA works with. And we're continuing to just basically spread the word that the aviation industry has a lot of career opportunities for young people to get involved in. I think the theme for Sun and Fun is here Living the Dream is a great choice for the theme because aviation is one of those wonderful things that people don't fully understand and appreciate unless you're involved in it. And the involvement here is just phenomenal. I'm a big believer that the success of what we do is because of people working together to make each other successful. We have the best aviation system in the world. Certainly the state of Florida and the area around Lakeland Linder Airport has got to be the hub of aviation for this country this week. And we're just excited to be a part of it and continue our area on not only enhancing safety but promoting this wonderful thing called aviation. Please welcome Mark Grady. Big thank you to the FAA safety team and the FAA Safety Center here in Lakeland, Florida. And a big special thank you to the folks at the FAA production studios here. All of these and all these cameras up in that ominous looking booth upstairs with Obi Young and Hugh and the crew up there directing all this are the volunteer crew members that are making this possible for you at home to watch this on the internet and also to have this stream all over the world to pilots to help them become a little bit safer. Let's give the FAA production team a big hand for their work and what they're doing here in Florida. Hi, my name is Rodrigo Brenes. I am from Costa Rica, Central America. This is Araceli, my lovely wife and welcome to Sun and Fun. Let's see you next year. This was a remarkable week for me and for everyone here. Thank you so much and next year is the 34th annual. Come on back. We're going to close with some pictures because we couldn't cover everything in this short time. Stay with us. Come back. Thank you FAA production studios.