Tarkio, in northwest Missouri is planning on ringing in the red, white, and blue this weekend with the Wingnuts Flying Circus, an airshow dedicated to celebrating aviation and freedom. The one-day event is Saturday, July 8.
Brooks Hurst is the Airshow Manager. He tells Missourinet that the event will be at the Gould Peterson Municipal Airport, which is located one mile east of Tarkio.
“A lot of people like seeing the general aviation planes as well. I mean, you know not only the performers in their fancy planes during the show, but you know, you get a lot of just plane old Cessnas and Pipers that the people like to see,” he says.
The event draws about 5,000 people from across the Midwest shows off around 200 general aviation planes.
“This airshow has several purposes,” says Hurst. “One of them is to get the general public interested in aviation, get kids flying. There’s nothing better than, you know, seeing a kid get his license and his first solo and, we love to get kids interested in aviation. The other purpose that we try to do is to pay honor to our veterans for the sacrifices they’ve made.”
Hurst, when scheduling this event for July 8, had a specific reason in mind.
“That’s guard weekend. So, a lot of times, when your neighbors and friends are doing their guard duty, they’re flying their Apaches out of Whiteman (Air Force Base) or B-2s or whatever, they do that on the second Saturday so it’s real easy for us to get them to come in,” according to Hurst. “It’s real easy on the guard weekend for them to do that so that we can pay honor to our veterans and to our servicemen.”
A town-hall meeting with northern Missouri Congressman Sam Graves kicks off the event at 10:30 a.m. and the airshow begins at 12:00 noon.
Click here to see images from last year’s airshow.
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