Today is the second and final day of Wings Over Willamette, EAA Chapter 292's annual fly-in and STOL WARS competition at Independence State Airport. Saturday's forums, pancake breakfast, and dinner are already behind the chapter. What's left is the main event, the STOL WARS competition running from 9 a.m. to noon, the reason the airport goes NOTAM closed to incoming traffic until 2 p.m. today. By this evening the folding tables will start coming down, the youth activities tent will get packed up, and the hangars that hosted forums and a Saturday dinner will go back to just holding airplanes. For two days, 7S5 looks like an airport putting on a show. For the other 363 days, it runs on a rhythm most people outside the fence never see.
That rhythm is the real story right now, and it has less to do with the fly-in than with a runway light the state has been planning to replace since at least March.
What This Weekend Actually Looked Like
Wings Over Willamette is EAA Chapter 292's marquee event, and this year's schedule ran from breakfast to dinner on Saturday, with the marquee competition capping things off today. General admission runs $10 for adults and is free for anyone 18 and under. The two-day lineup includes:
- Pancake breakfast both mornings from 7 to 10 a.m. at $12 a plate
- Saturday's forum with Rian Johnson, Van's Aircraft's chief engineer, on the development of the RV-15
- Saturday's historical aviation session pairing the Oregon Aviation Historical Society out of Cottage Grove with the Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum in Hood River
- Saturday's panel with Pete Zaccagnino, a four-time Reno Jet Gold champion with a 560 mph fastest lap and more than 24,000 flight hours across roughly 290 aircraft types
- Saturday's STOL and backcountry flying discussion with Juan Browne of the Blancolirio YouTube channel, who also announces the competition
- Saturday dinner at 5:30 p.m., $35 if you pre-registered or $40 at the door
- Hamburger lunch both days from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at $15 a plate
- STOL WARS, the short takeoff and landing competition, today from 9 a.m. to noon
Because of the STOL competition, the airport is NOTAM closed to incoming traffic today from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Proceeds from the weekend go back into EAA Chapter 292's youth programs, including Young Eagles flights, the Teen Build program, and Ray Aviation Scholarships, plus a youth activities tent near the EAA clubhouse where kids could build foam gliders and check on the chapter's in-progress Jabiru.
If that sounds like a lot of programming for one small state airport, it's worth knowing the chapter putting it on has been building toward this for a while. EAA Chapter 292 was founded in 1967 with 26 paid members, three years after Independence's airport was established. The chapter built its own hangar on Cherokee Taxiway in 1988, added a clubhouse in 1998, and ran its first STOL Expo alongside the summer fly-in in 2018. This year's weekend is the current version of something the chapter has been refining for close to sixty years.
The Airport Was Busy Long Before Saturday
The fly-in draws outside traffic, but it isn't what keeps 7S5 in near-constant use. The airport carries 191 based aircraft and handles an estimated 33,658 general aviation operations a year, with roughly 71 percent of that traffic itinerant rather than local pattern work. Spread across a year, that works out to roughly 92 operations a day on a single runway, Runway 16/34, which measures 3,142 feet by 60 feet with a full-length parallel taxiway. A two-day fly-in is a spike on top of a baseline that's already running.
That baseline is also social, not just operational. The airpark's own community page describes a monthly Oregon Pilots Association potluck, weekly pinochle, bunco, and bridge games, a bowling league, and a morning coffee group that meets at the EAA hangar on ordinary weekdays, no event required. There's a restaurant inside the airpark itself, which means residents can walk to a meal without leaving the property line. None of that shows up on the Wings Over Willamette event page. It's the part of living here that doesn't need a ticket price.
The Fly-In Ends. The State's Project Doesn't.
Here's the part that actually changes something for people who fly out of 7S5 every week: the Oregon Department of Aviation's 2026 construction outlook, published in March, lists a PAPI replacement at Independence State Airport as one of the year's planned projects. A PAPI, a precision approach path indicator, is the row of lights beside the runway that tells a pilot on final approach whether they're coming in too high, too low, or on the correct glide path. It's a visual tool, not pavement, and it matters most in low-light or marginal-visibility conditions, which the Willamette Valley produces on a regular basis.
The project has real money behind it. A federal funding announcement from Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden and Representatives Suzanne Bonamici, Maxine Dexter, and Janelle Bynum confirmed $144,000 earmarked specifically for Independence State Airport to install a new precision approach path indicator system. As of an August 14 update on the state's aviation page, the notice reads that the PAPI replacement is starting soon.
That's a different kind of disruption than what the airport went through last fall. In September 2025, Independence ran a taxiway, taxilane, and apron surface seal project that included crack seal, asphalt patch repair, resurfacing, and new pavement markings. That work closed sections of taxiway, taxilane, and apron across five separate work areas over 17 days, and while the runway itself stayed open through most of it, back-taxi was required during construction and the runway was closed outright for up to two days. Anyone who kept an aircraft behind one of those closed sections couldn't get in or out until that section reopened.
The PAPI project reads differently in the state's own notices. There's no language yet about closing pavement or restricting hangar access the way the 2025 seal project did. What's changing is the equipment that guides a plane down to the runway, not the surface underneath it. For residents whose daily flying depends on a clean approach in Oregon's gray-sky months, that's the upgrade worth watching, and it's happening on a much quieter timeline than a two-day fly-in with a ticket booth.
Who's Actually Watching the Runway Light Get Swapped
If you live at Independence Airpark, the group tracking projects like this isn't the homeowners association. It's the Independence State Airport Support Group, which represents the interests of airport users separately from the neighborhood's HOA. Residents here also operate under a model Thru-the-Fence agreement with the FAA, the arrangement that lets private hangars along the airpark connect directly to the public-use airport's taxiways and runway. According to the airpark's published fee schedule, that access carries an annual runway fee of $210 on top of yearly HOA dues.
None of that is dramatic. It's the paperwork behind why a state infrastructure project shows up on a resident's radar at all, and why the fly-in weekend, for all its noise, isn't actually the biggest thing happening at 7S5 this year.
Once today's STOL WARS wraps around noon, the competition is done until next August. The runway light replacement is just getting started, and it's the kind of quiet project that changes how this airport flies in fog season long after the pancake breakfast is a memory.
Smile! Relax! Enjoy! For more on life around Independence Airpark and the rest of the Willamette Valley's aviation communities, connect with Stacey McGhehey. Let's Connect.
