Greg Koontz to Receive 2014 Bill Barber Award for Showmanship

EAST TROY, WISCONSIN -- World Airshow News magazine (www.airshowmag.com) has announced that Greg Koontz is the 2014 recipient of the Bill Barber Award for Showmanship. Koontz joins a growing list of honorees that reads like an airshow hall of fame.

Greg Koontz is known throughout North America and parts of Latin America as a foremost authority on American Champion Super Decathlon aircraft. His aerobatic routines in both the Super Decathlon and the new Xtreme Decathlon have been featured at airshows from coast to coast and internationally, and culminate with an inverted ribbon cut in a stock aerobatic training airplane. His comedy act – The Alabama Boys – features Greg as “Clem Cleaver,” an Alabama Good Ol’ Boy who steals a 1946 Piper J-3 Cub. The act concludes with Greg landing the Cub on top of his pickup truck.

Koontz learned to fly in 1969 while he was still in high school and got his start in the airshow business at the age of 20 with Ernie Moser’s Flying Circus based in St. Augustine, Florida. While with Moser’s flying circus, he began perfecting the comedy act, the truck top landing, and began performing low-level aerobatics in the Great Lakes and the Decathlon. Greg stayed with the flying circus until 1981 when he began pursuing a corporate flying career.

Until 2002, Koontz flew jets for a corporation in Alabama while flying airshows part time. Today, he is a full time airshow performer and teaches basic aerobatics at the flight school/bed & breakfast called Sky Country Lodge that he runs with his wife Cora. Greg is a former chairman of the ICAS ACE Committee, holds an unlimited aerobatic waiver, and has been designated a Master Certified Flight Instructor-Aerobatics by the National Association of Flight Instructors.

The Bill Barber Award for Showmanship began in 1986, and is awarded to airshow performers or teams that have demonstrated great skill and showmanship. World Airshow News and the friends and family of the late Bill Barber present the award annually.

Plans are for the award to be presented on Tuesday, July 29 during EAA AirVenture at EAA’s Theater in the Woods.

Past Bill Barber Award winners include:

2013 Skip Stewart
2012 Matt Younkin
2011 Rich and Dee Gibson
2010 Steve Oliver and Suzanne Asbury-Oliver
2009 Michael Goulian
2008 Bud Granley
2007 Dacy Family Airshow Team
2006 Danny Clisham
2005 Pietsch Airshows
2004 Bobby Younkin
2003 Jim LeRoy
2002 AeroShell Aerobatic Team
2001 Northern Lights Aerobatic Team
2000 John Mohr
1999 Dan Buchanan
1998 Patty Wagstaff
1997 Gene Soucy & Teresa Stokes
1996 Wayne Handley
1995 Bob Hoover
1994 Bob & Annette Hosking
1993 Red Baron Stearman Squadron
1992 Sean D. Tucker
1991 Julie Clark
1990 Leo Loudenslager
1989 Jimmy Franklin
1988 No Award
1987 The French Connection
1986 Eagles Aerobatic Flight Team