Folds of Honor, the Biplane on the Oshkosh Ramp, and the F-16 Pilot Who Turned Grief Into Scholarships

A biplane in Folds of Honor colors sitting on the Oshkosh ramp is more than an airshow display. It represents an organization that has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in educational scholarships to the families of fallen and disabled service members - built by a single F-16 pilot who made a decision on a commercial flight in 2007. On Veterans Day, that history is worth understanding in full.

How Dan Rooney Founded Folds of Honor

Major Dan Rooney was returning from his second combat tour in Iraq aboard a United Airlines aircraft still at the gate when the ground crew loaded a flag-draped casket into the hold. The body belonged to a soldier named Joe Bier, killed in action. The cabin went quiet. Then passengers returned to their phones and magazines.

Rooney - an F-16 pilot with the Oklahoma Air National Guard and a working commercial airline pilot - did not look away. He watched the full sequence, sat with what he was feeling for the entire flight home, and by the time the wheels touched down had made a decision to act.

That decision became Folds of Honor.

What the Name Means

The organization takes its name from the thirteen-fold ceremony performed when a flag is draped over a casket and presented to the next of kin. Each fold carries a specific meaning. Folds of Honor carries that symbolism into everything it does.

What Folds of Honor Actually Does

The mission is targeted and specific. When a service member is killed or permanently disabled in the line of duty, their family loses more than a person - they lose income, stability, and the future built around that career. Educational opportunity is often the first casualty of that loss.

Folds of Honor provides college scholarships and K–12 scholarships to the spouses and children of fallen and disabled service members. The scholarship goes directly to the family of the person who served - to the child who lost a parent, to the spouse rebuilding a life.

Since 2007, the organization has awarded tens of thousands of scholarships and distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in educational funding.

Why This Matters to the Aviation Community

Rooney did not build Folds of Honor as a purely military organization. He built it at the intersection of two communities he belongs to: military and aviation.

Folds of Honor maintains a standing presence at AirVenture Oshkosh every year. The biplane photographed on the Oshkosh ramp during AirVenture 2026 - as captured by AVweb - serves as a visual anchor for that presence, a direct link between aviation heritage and military service heritage.

That connection is not coincidental. Folds of Honor scholarship eligibility extends to aviation training. Some scholarship recipients are themselves becoming pilots - children of service members following a flight path their parents never got to finish.

The Biplane as a Symbol

The choice to use a biplane as a visual anchor is deliberate. The fabric-covered biplanes of the 1930s and 1940s - the Stearman, the Waco, the Ryan PT-22 - processed hundreds of thousands of young men through primary military flight training in open cockpits with nothing between the student and the sky but a leather helmet and whatever instincts they had developed in the previous few months.

Those aircraft produced the fighter pilots who flew P-51s out of England and the bomber crews who flew Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses across occupied Europe. A biplane on the Oshkosh ramp is not nostalgia. It is a direct line.

Veterans Day and Aviation’s Shared Roots

Veterans Day traces to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 - the moment the guns stopped on the Western Front and the Great War ended.

What followed, among many things, was the rapid acceleration of aviation. Pilots who survived World War I came home with skills that had no ready civilian application and invented one: the barnstorming era, the air mail routes, the early commercial aviation experiments that became, within two decades, a functioning airline industry.

The names are familiar to any aviation historian. Charles Lindbergh flew air mail and held his Army wings before crossing the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. Jimmy Doolittle flew combat missions before winning the Thompson Trophy. Eddie Rickenbacker flew fighters on the Western Front before running Eastern Air Lines. Military service and aviation heritage are not parallel histories. They are the same history viewed from different angles.

How to Get Involved

Folds of Honor operates year-round. The primary fundraiser is Patriot Golf Day, held annually and among the largest single-day charitable golf events in the country.

For the aviation community, AirVenture Oshkosh is the most prominent touchpoint. The organization’s presence there includes fundraisers and awareness programs tied into the broader Experimental Aircraft Association community. Flight instructors and pilot mentors should be aware that Folds of Honor scholarships can apply to aviation training - information worth sharing with any military family you work with.

Key Takeaways

Major Dan Rooney, an F-16 pilot with the Oklahoma Air National Guard, founded Folds of Honor in 2007 after witnessing a fallen soldier’s casket loaded onto a commercial flight home from Iraq.
The organization provides college and K–12 scholarships exclusively to spouses and children of service members killed or permanently disabled in the line of duty.
Since 2007, Folds of Honor has awarded tens of thousands of scholarships and distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in educational funding.
The organization maintains a standing presence at AirVenture Oshkosh each year; some scholarship recipients are using those funds specifically for aviation training.
The primary annual fundraiser is Patriot Golf Day; aviation community engagement is most visible at Oshkosh.