My Worthless Legends Club Ticket
This is my first, and hopefully last, negative essay published on this Website.
I was going to let this disappointment pass, but I received a nasty e-mail from an individual that somehow believes I don't have the right to be dissatisfied with my experience at the Gathering of Mustangs and Legends. Either this individual was one of the organizers of the event or he needs to get out more often. The event WAS NOT, in any way, worth the money they charged for the Legends Club tickets. And, it definitely was not a once in a lifetime event, unless you discount the April 1999 Gathering and all the other truly great airshows that have taken place in the US and UK in the last 20 years.
Let me put this into perspective. The Gathering's organizers charged $350 for a Legends Club ticket. (General admission was $15.) What did we get for the extra $335?
- Organizers claimed we'd have "Exclusive VIP Parking,"
but they forgot to tell anyone other that the people who
paid for the tickets. This meant people with Legends
Club tickets parked in general admission areas. So much
for easy access to and from the show.
- The Legends Club ticket holders got to stand in the
very long prepaid ticket line. (There were about 150-200
people in front of me, and I got there ½ hour
early! I would have been there an hour early, but I
had to walk from the general admission parking lot.)
While people who paid $350 waited to get through the gate, general admission people could walk right up, pay their $15, and walk right in to the show. What a deal!
- Legends Club ticket holders got to sit in the Legends
Club chalet. Whoopee. General admission people could
bring in their lawn chairs and sit in one of the lawn
seating areas with just as good a view of the show.
- Legends Club ticket holders were served a lunch. General
admission ticket holders could buy a lot of food for
the $335 they saved by not purchasing a Legends Club
ticket.
- To add insult to injury, they wanted to charge us
for the souvenir program. We had to show them documentation
proving this was part of the package before they grudgingly
coughed up the programs. To ensure we didn't swindle
them, they marked our tickets so we could not get a
second program.
- There's more, but the points above should suffice.
How did this royal treatment compare with other airshow opportunities?
AirVenture: AirVentire's gates open at 7:00 AM daily, and admission is $22.00/day for members. You can get in even earlier if you stay at Camp Scholler ($19.00/night). That's a total of $41.00 per day, and the complete seven-day event would cost you $287.00. A whole week at Oshkosh is $63 less than one day at the Gathering.
AirVenture is the world's premiere aviation event and about 2,500 show aircraft normally are in attendance. My first visit to this airshow was in 1987 when over 50 P-51 Mustangs showed up. I have a photo of a 12 Mustang formation on this Website and even more were in the air at the time. (I did read a report that nearly 2 dozen P-51s flew following the Gathering's airshow, but we were long gone by then.) In the following years, AirVenture hosted such one-of-a-kind aircraft as the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, Hughes H-1B, XCOR EZ-Rocket, Bert Rutan's Voyager and SpaceShipOne, and Steve Fossett's Spirit of Freedom Capsule. Many of these aircraft are now in museums, and you will never see them up close and personal. Each was truly a once in a lifetime experience.
Thunder Over Michigan: Photo Tour admissions at Thunder Over Michigan at the time were only $40.00 per person per day. The Photo Pit is an additional $25.00 per person per day. That's $65 per day for much more than the Legends Club ticket offered.
You could attend the two-day event at Willow Run for $136.00. For this fee, you get entry to the flight line at 7:00 AM and can take photos for the next two hours without worrying about people walking into your photos because the general public is not admitted until 9:00 AM. Then you can go to the Photo Pit for an undisturbed viewing of the air show. That's two days for $214 less than one day at the Gathering.
Thunder Over Michigan has hosted large quantities of Grumman Avengers, B-25 Mitchells, Boeing B-17s, and British WWII aircraft. Let me tell you, seeing eight B-17s together in one place and seeing 16 B-25s in the air at one time is far more thrilling than watching two to four Mustangs flying around.
The Gathering of Mustangs: This
airshow was over-hyped with 25% of its Mustangs AWOL, along
with a long list of other aircraft, including the P-61 Black
Widow, Me 262, Bf 109, and Fw 190.
For the general admission price of $15 it would have been
a good day, and I'm sure people purchasing a general admission
ticket had a great time. My advice: Don't pay a cent over
the general admission price for any event hosted by the
organizers of this airshow.
As for the person who wrote the nasty e-mail... get a life. Spiteful, venomous words and a shallow mind only work if you are elected to Congress.
