Sun 'n Fun, Aviation's Season Opener
Near Lakeland, Florida
Every spring, for one week in late March or early April, the skies over Lakeland fill with airplanes. Not commercial jets. Experimental homebuilts. Antique biplanes. Warbirds painted in the olive drab of nineteen forty-two. Restored crop dusters. Ultralights that look held together with will and baling wire.
The event is called Sun 'n Fun, and it is the second-largest airshow in the United States. Its origin was modest. In January of nineteen seventy-five, a group of sport aviation enthusiasts gathered at the Lakeland Municipal Airport for a weekend fly-in. There were three hundred sixty-five aircraft and fewer than two thousand visitors. They called it Mid-Winter Sun 'n Fun.
The following year it expanded to a full week, the number of visiting aircraft more than tripled, and a tradition took root. By the time the event reached its maturity it was drawing over two hundred thousand visitors annually, more than five hundred sixty exhibitors, nightly airshows, and a week of technical forums that double as a graduate seminar in aeronautics for the people who care most about it.
Sun 'n Fun became known in the aviation world as the season opener, the first major gathering of the year after the winter months, the place where manufacturers unveiled new designs and pilots shook hands across a decade of not seeing each other. The campground that surrounds the airport fills with pilots who flew their own planes to get here and see no reason to stay anywhere else.
The Florida Air Museum on the airport grounds is open year-round and includes the Howard Hughes collection among its exhibits. But in the week of Sun 'n Fun, Lakeland Linder Airport briefly becomes one of the busiest airports in the country, measured by the number of takeoffs and landings. The control tower does not sleep.
