Site (and Event!) History

You clicked on "Site History", and I'm going to talk about the history of this antique website.

If you scroll down, I'm also going to exert some editorial privilege and reminisce about the event itself.

As to the SFI website, remember that the first actual event occurred in 1983.

But the web didn't exist in 1983. Indeed, the very first website ever created was on August 6, 1991, some 8 years after the first SFI filled the skies over Saint Francis, Kansas.

As nearly as I can determine, the first SFI website was posted circa 2004. I didn't have web coding skills then, so I used a software called Microsoft FrontPage, one of the early what-you-see-is-what-you-get, (WYSIWYG, pronounced "wizzy-wig"), website creation tools. FrontPage requires special server extensions, so hosting it became increasingly difficult (to nearly impossible) because there was very little demand for such an arcane implementation.

FrontPage itself was clunky (no offense: it was an early, valiant effort), and the SFI site was also clunky and, well, a little ugly. Here's a screenshot of the original site.

Faced with the monumental task of converting the old FrontPage site into HTML5/CSS3, the format I was now conversant with, I did what I thought best: I procrastinated.

Then, a few weeks ago, in October, 2026, I finally tackled the task. I mentioned the enormity of the job to my daughter. She is, fortuitously, an expert in coding and AI. Mikaela told me that I could ask Claude to do it.

I laughed, thinking that she was kidding. It seemed impossible, given the antiquity of the code. She assured me that it would work, and while I hoped that she was correct, I was still dubious. I estimated that this job would take at least 20 hours of tedious work, and more likely, 50 hours. At $100/hour, hiring it out to a human would likely cost between $2k-$5k.

So I installed Claude, gave Anthropic $20 for a month's subscription, read the FAQs, and issued explicit commands. Claude ground around for a full 25 minutes (which I later discovered is quite a long time for Claude), and then dumped a completely new website into my designated directory, after offering to give me the classic look or one with a more modern look.

I was astonished! Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law says that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and at that moment, I was leaning toward magic.

I looked at the "classic version", and went back in and asked for the modern formulation. As noted above, the original was a little ugly. So I chose the more modern version, tweaked it a little, again using Claude and some manual editing, you are now looking at the result.

Now, on to the event and some retrospective thoughts about it:

First, you should look the abbreviated history on the old site. Then, if you want more, come back here.

The Stearman Fly-In was amazing: an aviation extravaganza.

It combined three aviation groups--airplane pilots, balloonists, and skydivers--and those three disciplines rarely mingle. They are comprised of people with different outlooks and passions. But when we got them all together in the same place and at the same time, they all got to learn about and enjoy the others' passion. It was magical.

The video of the 7th annual SFI is a must-see: it gives the viewer an idea of what the event looked and felt like. This was before digital photography existed: our good friend, Lloyd Walz, patiently lugged his shoulder-mounted VHS camera and shot almost everything. This 7th annual video was laboriously edited with primitive tools, and the video quality proves it. Plus, it's the earliest video that you will see here.

The next thing to ponder is that the event took place on the Cheyenne County Airport in Saint Francis, Kansas, a town with a population of about 1,200 people, in a county of about 3,000 people. At the time, the airport had one 3,150 x 50 foot asphalt runway, and three wide sod runways. It was a pretty sleepy place for 51 weeks of the year.

There were years where we had 120 aircraft, including 14 Stearmans, 8-10 hot air balloons, and we made 115 skydives with more than 20 jumpers. Think about those numbers: the air was literally full of fabric-covered biplanes, skydiving canopies, and whooshing hot air balloons.

You could stand on the sod runway 27, ten feet away from an inflated hot-air balloon while skydivers landed beside you and Spearman's flew overhead, all at the same time. Spectators weren't on the other side of the fence: they were literally in the middle of the action. It was an immersive and personal view of three different types of aviation, all at once.

The unicom frequency was very busy: it felt like JFK's tower at times, but it was a collaboration by the pilots, who took turns and very efficiently used the airspace.

The hotels and restaurants were packed, despite our BBQ-In-The-Park on Saturday night, and the participants-only house party across the street from the Friday night skydiver demo jump, which landed on the High School practice field.

The Saturday night demo jump into Sawhill Park was tight: not every skydiver opted in, and it was always exciting.

We had amazing help from the entire community, with numerous volunteers, and it literally could not have been managed without them. Grace Flying Service was the financial sponsor, and we accepted donations, which were generous. There were even households who opened up their homes to house some of the attendees since housing was very tight.

Many participants told us that the event was the highlight of their year. There existed much bigger and more prestigious fly-ins, boogies, and hot-air balloon rallies, but that didn't matter. This one was different, and it was special to the participants.

We actually had a waiting list of balloonists, who wanted to come to a place that was way too windy, a problem we didn't anticipate in the early days. But the deal was that even if you never got your balloon off of the trailer because of the weather, and that sadly happened more than once, you could have a great time watching amazing aircraft and skydiver antics, both in the air and on the ground.

Special thanks to balloonist Dewey Reinhard, who gamely attended with balloons the first time, knowing that it was too windy of a locale to schedule a ballooning rally. But he was apparently impressed, and began helping us (immensely!) by recruiting other balloonists from the Front Range. Dewey was a very prominent balloonist, the organizer of the Colorado Springs balloon rally, a much bigger and more prestigious event, so his endorsement was invaluable.

Plus, Dewey gave me the ballooning bug, and I was soon in Phoenix getting my private LTA certificate and then buying a Galaxy 7 hot-air balloon.

More special thanks to Bob Kooser, a skydiver who helped organize the jumper community: Front Range Skydivers. It's easier to herd cats than skydivers, so we truly appreciate his efforts.

And I can't say enough about Dr. Curt Kimball, who was the Stearman pilot who actually started the Stearman Fly-In. That story is here.

There were a lot of rare and exotic aircraft attending over the years, including the 1929 Alexander Eaglerock, and several Beechcraft Staggerwings. And here are four Yak-52s in a formation fly-over, with smoke, of course.

But the Stearmans were always the special attraction. Harris and Ann Bowen from Florida, and Ted and Diane Miller from California came regularly. Both of those flights are extraordinary journeys in an 85-knot biplane that struggled to get above 10,000 feet MSL.

No one got seriously hurt, but there were a few spectacular mishaps, including a Stearman flyover on the field where one of them hit the windsock and knocked it ajar. There were bad landings, impromptu formation flights, and some amazing skydiver canopy work: CRW down-planes and biplanes.

Finally check out this list of Stearman pilots, balloonists, and skydivers to get a feel for the scope of the participants. (Yes, Stephen Coonts is the famous author.)

If you made it this far, thank you!

Robert Grace

P.S. If you care, and I don't see why you would, I'm one of the pilots flying the "249" Stearman, and guy with the black, pink, and silver 9-cell canopy, and the blue-orange-yellow Galaxy 7 balloon.