AirVenture 2025: A Week of the World's Busiest Sky

One week of arrivals and departures at Oshkosh during EAA AirVenture 2025, cropped to about 50 nautical miles, arrivals in cool blue and departures in warm gold radiating from Wittman Regional as a dense starburst of ADS-B tracks.

One week over Oshkosh, July 16 to 28, 2025: arrivals in cool blue, departures in warm gold, within about 50 nautical miles of the field.

For one week every summer, a regional airport in Wisconsin becomes the busiest airport on earth. The Experimental Aircraft Association holds AirVenture at Oshkosh, and for the run of the fly-in the FAA staffs Wittman Regional (KOSH) as the busiest air traffic control tower in the world. We tracked the 2025 event in ADS-B, the position reports aircraft broadcast about twice a second: every arrival and departure that touched Oshkosh from July 16 to 28. That is 9,631 flights from 4,871 aircraft. In the single busiest hour, the morning of Thursday, July 24, 341 of them came or went. That is about one every eleven seconds.

flights tracked

9,631

aircraft

4,871

busiest hour

341movements

between movements

~11 sec

Here is the whole week. Switch between arrivals, departures, and everything at once.

Every arrival and departure at Oshkosh, July 16 to 28, 2025

Loading flights…

The week is a tide

Counted by day, the fly-in has a shape. Arrivals come first, building from a trickle on July 16 to a peak of 1,153 on Sunday the 20th, the day before the gates open. Then arrivals fall as departures rise, and the two cross on the 23rd. Departures peak on Thursday the 24th at 1,369, the single biggest day of the week. The fly-in floods in over five days and leaves in two waves, the Thursday exodus and the closing Sunday.

Arrivals in, departures out, by day

ArrivalsDepartures

Arrivals fill upward from the centerline, departures downward. The two cross on July 23.

Every departure from Oshkosh over the 2025 AirVenture week as ADS-B tracks radiating from Wittman Regional across the upper Midwest and toward the East Coast, colored by altitude from gold at low altitude to red at high. — Every departure over the week, colored by altitude. The tracks reach across the upper Midwest and east to the coast.

Every departure from Oshkosh over the 2025 AirVenture week within about 50 nautical miles of Wittman Regional, warm altitude colors radiating outward from the field in a dense starburst. — The same departures up close, within about 50 nm: the starburst off Wittman's runways before the tracks fan out across the country.

Inside the week is a day

The hours have a rhythm too. Departures own the morning. They run hardest from 6 to 9 a.m., in the cool, calm air. Arrivals fill the middle of the day and crest between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Almost nothing moves before 6 a.m. or after 8 p.m. This is a daylight operation flown under visual flight rules.

Where they came from

The traffic leans south. Arrivals came mostly from the south and southwest, departures left to the south and southeast, and little came from or went to the north over Lake Superior and Canada. The arrivals are also short. The fields feeding Oshkosh are all nearby: Juneau, Madison, Lone Rock, Fond du Lac, Janesville. Aircraft stage at a field near Oshkosh, then fly the short published approach in. So the wide view of arrivals is a burst over eastern Wisconsin, not a fan across the country.

Where arrivals came from, where departures went

Arrivals

Departures

Arrivals in, departures out, by 16-point bearing. Both lean south.

Top feeder fields (arrival origins)

1
KUNU256
Dodge County, Juneau WI
2
KMSN217
Dane County, Madison WI
3
KLNR210
Tri-County, Lone Rock WI
4
KFLD155
Fond du Lac County WI
5
KJVL139
Southern Wisconsin, Janesville

The nearest staging fields, where aircraft waited before flying the short approach in.

Every arrival at Oshkosh over the 2025 AirVenture week as ADS-B tracks converging on Wittman Regional from eastern Wisconsin and the surrounding region, colored blue to cyan by altitude. — Every arrival over the week. They converge from nearby fields in eastern Wisconsin, a regional staging network rather than a coast-to-coast fan.

Every arrival at Oshkosh over the 2025 AirVenture week within about 50 nautical miles of Wittman Regional, cool altitude colors converging tightly onto the field. — Arrivals up close, within about 50 nm: the convergence tightening onto Wittman's approaches from the staging fields.

What flew in

Most of it flew low. More than four in five flights peaked below 10,000 feet, the single-engine pistons and homebuilts that are the heart of the fly-in. A smaller set flew high: about 540 flights climbed past 18,000 feet, the business jets and warbird ferries that came from farther off. Oshkosh is a general-aviation event, and the altitude record shows it.

Peak altitude reached

Below 10,000 ft7,877 · 82%

10,000 to 18,000 ft1,184 · 12.3%

Above 18,000 ft544 · 5.7%

Each flight's highest tracked altitude.

One of the longest hauls in

Socata TBM 900N940WB

Santa Rosa, California to Oshkosh

Distance: about 1,570 nm
Type: Single-engine turboprop

The farthest arrivals we tracked cleanly all came from California. Distance is straight-line from where the flight entered coverage, so it approximates the trip.

The shape of a week

None of this is visible from the ground. It appears when you take a whole week of tracks and read the shape: the slow flood of arrivals, the fast drain of departures, the daily pulse of mornings out and afternoons in. That shape is the fingerprint of the fly-in, and shapes like it, one real flight at a time, are the raw material behind the prints we make.

Other events leave their own mark on the sky. After a championship, the private jets drain out of a city in one night: see the private-jet exodus after Super Bowl LX.

Sources

Flight tracks: our own ADS-B render of every arrival and departure touching Oshkosh (KOSH) from July 16 to 28, 2025, via PlaneQuery. The counts are the arrival and departure legs we could track cleanly, not the tower's official operations tally. AirVenture and the world's-busiest-tower staffing: EAA and the FAA. For what the underlying signal is, see what ADS-B actually is.