Aviation Day Centennial - 12 JUN 2010

I read an article about a Centennial Aviation Day celebration, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the first Aviation Meet held in the United States (the second in the world). It was taking place a few miles away at Dominguez Ranch and I thought it would be fun to check it out...finding it was another story. I had verified the address on their website but found my car's navigation system did not recognize Rancho Dominguez as a valid city. There were four of us in the car and we figured we knew the address was on Alameda, all we needed to do was drive down Alameda until we found it. Not quite. The address was on South Alameda but the street signs were labeled East and West Alameda, plus the street was divided by walled railroad tracks and we couldn't tell if we had taken the right fork in the road...after much frustration and arguing we decided to head over to the Dominguez University campus to find someone who could tell us where this event was taking place. On our way to the information booth, we found a parking lot attendant collection money for the Aviation Meet parking. After driving around for half an hour we found, by accident, you needed to park at the college and take a shuttle bus over to the Ranch which was just around the corner on one of the streets we had driven down. As we arrived, we saw this bi-plan but it turned out to be the only one, to be seen, all day.

There were several vintage automobiles...

...some with traditional hood ornaments...

...others with creative trimmings.

Rob poses with a 1913 Rolls-Royce.

Tinky Winky checks out his upside-down reflection in its' head lamp...

...and then jumps inside to check out the view.

There were a few more flybys:

There was the only one canvas winded plane on display:

Rob and I took a free Ferris-Wheel ride to catch a view of tree tops.

There were a few people in vintage costumes and some entertainment.

There were a few parachute jumping demos.

The excitement of the day was when one jumper miss-calculated the tree clearance because he was toting a large weighted flag. He was looking beautiful coming down with the National Anthem playing over the loud-speakers.

But, the flag caught on the trees, throwing him into a crash landing.

Luckily, he only received a gash on his cheek.

Several people quickly climbed up the tree to retrieve the flag, and the excitement was over.

This was the poster from the 1910 event which ran for 10 days.

This poster was from the 1st world aviation event which took place in France the year before.

The best laugh of the day was when Rob and I were sitting in the shade listening to the key-note speaker who was thanking the crowd for attending. There were over 200,000 visitors at the 1910 event and this one looked rather thin by comparison, so I leaned over to Rob and said, "Doesn't seem like much of a turn-out." And with out skipping a beat, he said, "The rest of them couldn't find it."