Hello, I'm Brandon Martini, a commercial pilot and flight instructor.
And I'm Carson Vasquez.
I'm a private pilot.
And you're listening to the Aviation Mentors podcast sponsored by Stratus Financial.
So buckle up because the aviation mentors are taking off.
Welcome back everybody to the aviation mentors podcast.
Thanks for listening today.
We are so sorry that we've missed out on releasing all our episodes during Oshkosh, but we have
been absolutely slammed in the Stratis Financial booth and looking around and visiting with
people and meeting our clients.
And it's been a lot of fun.
Plus we've had some storms to deal with and the kids tent is now in pieces this morning
even.
So it's been an interesting week, but it's been a fun one and an interesting one at that.
And I'm excited that we're finally getting to record Carson.
It's been a long time coming for recording.
Every day I've been waking up excited to talk about it.
Every day something interesting has been going on.
Just to give you guys a rundown, Brandon's been visiting schools and getting to talk
to everybody.
And I've been in the booth getting to meet all of our fans and actually got my first
picture with the fan and that was probably one of the most exciting parts so far.
If you want a picture with me or an autograph if even.
Right Brandon?
Somebody actually asked for his autograph and whoever that was, thank you very much.
He's putting it all on my face.
Oh, it made my day.
But we are going to have a meet and greet.
It's going to be what the 29th?
Yeah, it's going to be on Saturday.
I'm hoping we get this episode out by then.
But if not, everybody who's going to come out, thanks for coming.
But Brandon's been walking around seeing schools and I've been in the booth every day.
And being in the booth might sound like the less exciting part, but I've gotten to stay
in the nice cool AC and get to talk to brand new schools and customers for Stratus and
get to see a lot of people.
It's been really, really fun.
Absolutely.
By the way, there's like a media area and a bunch of other places that Carson's been
going to and I've been outside the whole time sweating my butt off during the day.
And he stays in these nice air conditioned buildings and meets with schools and in luxury.
So good for you Carson.
It has been in luxury.
My new rainbows haven't had too many miles on them, but Brandon's already flowing through
a pair.
Absolutely.
And by the way, you guys hopefully are going to hear this airplane noise.
There is American flag, some other type of flag that's getting towed by these parachuters.
And there is actually an airplane doing circles around somebody in a parachute that just jumped
out of an airplane.
So I can't believe how terrifying that would be.
Taking a parachute.
There's that airplane noise for you.
Taking that parachute all the way around.
I mean, how would you feel if you were up there Carson?
Yo, I would not like someone flying at me if I was jumping out of an airplane.
Please do not fly out, fly straight at me.
It definitely looks like something that Red Bull should be doing, but I'm surprised it's
not Red Bull.
So back to what we've kind of had to experience.
When we first got here, I couldn't believe it, but our booth almost did not show up.
So we came by and the booth was supposed to get shipped out and it was supposed to arrive
by like Wednesday.
And they said it was going to arrive actually by Friday, which was the last day for our
stuff to arrive last Friday.
And apparently at 12 noon, the guy came over here and tried to drop off all of our entire
booth, which included all of our camping supplies for 10 people.
And he decided he didn't want to wait 10 minutes and he took off.
So we had to pull some magic.
And luckily I have a very huge LinkedIn family and I messaged every single person that worked
for that shipping company.
And somebody reached back out to me on a Saturday morning and Carson and I took a little two
hour detour to Milwaukee and met with you.
You haul truck in a U-Haul truck and that luckily there were some available because
most of the U-Haul trucks are not available at Oshkosh because everybody runs them all
out.
It was a fun sidetrack to the beginning of our Oshkosh adventure.
And just like we told you guys when we're preparing for this that they do call it slosh
cost for a reason.
And it was raining like crazy last few days.
We've had some crazy storms.
Thunder and lightnings that I've never seen or heard anywhere in California at least.
Yeah.
I mean the winds were 40 mile an hour gusts.
The kids tent ended up getting flooded the other night.
So they came and slept in the trailer.
And then last night we had 50 mile an hour gusts, tornado warnings and all sorts of fun
stuff and you're right.
There's some people with slosh cost t-shirts around here by the way, because this year
is a little wet and rainy and stormy.
We're supposed to have another storm tonight.
Today we're recording it's on Friday of the show.
So I'm hoping the rain subsides a little bit.
I need to stop stepping in all this mud.
Yeah.
But we earned those slosh cost t-shirts.
We earned them for sure after this trip.
But we've also done quite a few cool things in the last couple of days.
We've gotten a few different parties.
Brandon, why are you telling about this?
Yeah, absolutely.
We went over to the Piper Pilatus party and they had an awesome spread of food.
They also had probably the best band I've ever heard in Oshkosh.
They were a cover band, but they just did phenomenally well.
We only could stay for a little bit because we had quite a few other places to meet and
friends to go see because this is really the aviation meetup of the year.
There's a lot of people I see here once a year and there's only so much time we get
to spend with them.
So I think this is my eighth or ninth Oshkosh in a row without missing, but I'm actually
staying here the longest this year.
So hopefully I get to see all my friends, but I know a few already came in the beginning
of the week and have already taken off, unfortunately.
So I haven't got to see everybody, but I sure do try.
And Carson, how's your second Oshkosh treating you?
Treating me really well, actually.
It was the first one that I've worked and last year was my first time ever at Oshkosh.
And I made a friend named Cam and last night ran into him and it was crazy.
It was the first experience I had of seeing someone once a year at Oshkosh.
And just Oshkosh where everyone comes together.
It's a good community and you finally get to experience it that one time a year.
Absolutely.
And Carson still needs to fly into here to get the full Oshkosh experience.
It hasn't quite happened yet.
One day, not today, not tomorrow, but one day, Carson.
You know what I did get to fly for the first time?
I finally got to fly it.
What was that, Brandon?
C5 Galaxy.
That's pretty cool.
Well, if you guys just got confused there, I was not flying.
I got to fly an icon.
That was pretty cool, huh?
Oh, Carson got to fly the icon.
Luckily, Brandon has an icon and we made a phone call and Carson got to take his first
seaplane ride and land in the water.
How was that, Carson?
It was an amazing experience.
So I got to take off and I got to, you know, the first time I've ever flown a seaplane.
So first time he did the landing and we're just sitting there on the little lake and
he said, hey, do you want to take off?
And so he just told me how to do it.
And I got to take off and then we took it around the pond for a little bit and said,
hey, you want to land this thing in water?
I was like, I don't think I can.
And he said, no, it's easy.
Just like land on a runway, except it's going to splash a little bit.
And sure enough, it was the weirdest experience flying at the water on purpose and then landing
in it on purpose.
Or porpoise, I guess is a good pun.
But it was a really amazing experience getting to fly that ICON and something I've been
looking forward to for a long time, especially since Brand's never taken me up.
But well, unfortunately, our weight and balance is off.
That's why we can never fly it.
But luckily ICON's got some pretty small guys that and gals that work there.
And he was able to go up with one of them, which was fantastic.
So but after he went up, I got my opportunity.
ICON is a new four bladed propeller.
They put out a press release earlier this week.
I think it looks terribly ugly on the airplane, and I think most people think the same thing.
But I'll tell you this.
It adds some performance to it.
It gets up and goes a little faster.
It sounds a lot, a lot quieter, which is like a big thing for me.
So I might purchase that prop and put it on my airplane just because it's so much quieter.
I mean, that's the biggest deal for me.
That's not even something I thought about was how quiet that plane was.
Absolutely.
And then luckily, the same sales rep who sold me the plane, he and I got to fly it together.
And I don't know if we ever actually flew together before, but he didn't care.
You know, I'm an icon owner and I've got a ton of hours in the icon.
So he just said, you want to take the controls?
I said, yeah, just let me fly the plane, please.
Because at home, the waves are normally too big and I can't go land in the water.
But luckily, he flies around the US and he knows all the spots, especially in Southern
California.
He gave me three spots where I can get pretty clean water so I can go land and go putt putt
around inside the LA basin area.
So when I get home, I'm going to go check out those spots as soon as I get back, because
that just sounds like a blast to me.
And maybe it'll make me want to keep the airplane a lot longer because I can actually use it
for what I want to use it for.
But he let me do whatever I wanted in that airplane we were doing.
I don't know how many splashing goes I did.
I think I did 10 or 12.
It was ridiculous.
And by the way, they are called splash and go.
It's a real term.
I thought you were just making that up.
No, it's a real term.
It's called a splash and goes and there's no touching goes.
So I got to do a bunch of splash and goes.
I got to do a lot of step taxing and I just had a lot of fun with the airplane, which
I haven't got to do because it was in maintenance for a while.
And I only flew the icon like a week before we came out here.
It's been three months, actually.
So I was pretty excited to go fly again, even though it wasn't mine this time.
Yeah.
But speaking of fun things that we got to do, we got to see the night air show.
And that was the first time for a lot of people that came with us.
And that was probably one of the coolest things they've ever seen.
Definitely the coolest thing I've seen.
I think they won't even figure with that big surprise at the end, the wall of fire, the
wall of fire.
Now we can we don't have to keep the surprise from everybody anymore because now you've
all have seen it.
At least you could have been watching the air show live on EA's website, which has been
pretty phenomenal.
But I have to say that is the only air show that I actually watch still.
I'll watch.
I'll watch some some different air shows such as the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds, the
Snowbirds or something like that.
I'll watch those types of shows every once in a while just because they're so precise,
especially the Blue Angels.
But I don't watch normal air shows anymore.
I've I've worked in this industry for 10 years almost now, and I've gone to a lot of air
shows.
So I've seen most of the acts and they're just not as interesting to me anymore.
I'd rather go like learn how to do it myself.
Right.
There's something about the night air show when you see airplanes with fireworks flying
off of them and then airplanes flying through fireworks, that just seems very unnatural.
So that's why I like it so much.
It's all pitch black.
And like, that's just not something you would imagine someone doing at night is flying and
shooting fireworks off just pitch black dark.
Definitely not.
I mean, they obviously they can see the ground.
There's a lot of lights coming around on the ground, but it's a pretty, pretty dark place.
And then they have smoke on sometimes and sometimes it's hazy and it's probably a very
difficult thing to do.
But the best part about that night air show, in my opinion, is EA's firework display.
They are literally world class.
I think the firework display is way better than even Fourth of July displays back home.
Now, granted, I live in California.
Our displays aren't that great anyways.
But the fireworks play here is just world class.
Phenomenal.
They've got a great finale to it.
They had three walls of fire.
Normally, they just have one wall fire at the total end.
They had three walls of fire.
And one of them, I think, didn't go off in time, but they still they still lit it off
like 10 minutes after the show.
And everyone's like, oh, no, I can't believe how surprised I was.
And it's this weird thing, which is getting a whole bunch of heat from across the runway.
You would never believe that balls of fire from, I don't know, under my words.
Yeah, at least at least maybe a mile away could feel that hot.
So I can just imagine how hot it was for the people semi close to it.
They were lighting them off.
I mean, it was brutal.
That is my favorite part of us.
Oh, I've got a lot of favorite parts of Oshkosh.
But for air shows, air show side, the night air show is the one thing I never miss.
And this is my first year actually staying for the entire show.
I normally leave on Thursday or Friday, either usually because of storms or I want to get
back to get to work, usually on Sunday or Monday or something like that.
Or my son needs to be somewhere on the beginning of the next week.
So I've never actually stayed all the way to the end.
And this time we're staying all the way to the end.
It's midday Friday, like we said, and there's another night air show on Saturday night.
And I am looking so forward to it.
We get to go hang out with all of our best friends again and and watch those fireworks.
I can't wait.
We can see it from a pretty cool place this time, right?
We're not just walking up to the runway.
Exactly.
Oh, by the way, you know where Carson found the perfect spot for us?
And then he texted me and said, will this spot work for you, Brandon?
He got he got a spot right next to an albatross.
I was like, this is a very nice spot.
So I've got like pictures of fireworks going off behind an albatross, which hopefully we'll
get some of those posted.
I think there I don't think it has the albatross and I think it has like a beach beach 18 or
or something.
But Stratus Financial actually posts on the Facebook page one of the videos that I took
of the fireworks and part of the explosion.
So if you want to see that, you can watch that video on I think it's on our Facebook
or Stratus's Facebook, Stratus's LinkedIn and a few other things, too.
So and I'll actually I'll post those in a little bit so everybody will be able to see
them.
So by the time this goes live, you'll be able to see some of those videos.
They were just phenomenal.
We had a blast.
Yeah, no pun intended on the blast part either.
But that was one of the coolest displays that you're ever going to see.
I'm just too quick with the puns, Brandon.
That's fine.
You're a punny guy.
I am.
Thank you very much.
Well, thanks, everyone, for listening today.
We will have a few more episodes that are going to come in quick succession probably
next week.
So after after this one, we're going to be talking to some different aircraft manufacturers.
We're going to go up and talk to some of Stratus partner schools.
And we're really going to show you guys what Oshkosh is about over the next couple of days.
We finally have most of the week behind us.
Most of the hard work has been done.
So now we can relax and have a little bit of fun and record some some awesome episodes
for all of you all.
So hopefully see you soon and come on by and visit us.
Thanks, guys.
We'll see you later.
And remember, if you want to reach out to us, you can find us at Carson at AviationMentors.com
or Brandon and AviationMentors.com.
By the way, we've got shirts in stock free.
All you have to do is say you love Aviation Mentors and like and subscribe to us on Spotify
or wherever you listen to podcasts and we'll get you a free t-shirt.
So come on by the booth.
We got plenty.
See you guys.