Reno Air Races 2013

One of the questions often asked in the aviation world, right after 'Have you been to Oshkosh?', is 'Have you been to Reno?'. I am delighted to say that both Alan and I can now say 'Yes!' to the latter!

Welcome to Reno!

We decided to go partly for a summer holiday for Alan, and also it was the 50th anniversary of the races, so it ought to be good. And there was a bonus in that several pilots from the Sport Air Racing League (SARL) would be racing in the Sport class.

Voodoo engine test

Reno National Championship Air Races (as they are officially known) are held at Reno Stead airport and divided into six classes: Biplane, Formula One, Sport, T6, Jet and Unlimited Warbird. Each of these is subdivided into Bronze, Silver and Gold with the fastest aeroplanes competing in Gold.

Rare Bear, a Gold-class Bearcat

Pilots arrive on the Saturday before the races for check-in and spend the first part of the week qualifying. Some of the classes are oversubscribed so a few planes get knocked out. They can only fly nine planes at a time so spots are limited. The final races are flown on the Sunday, eight days after check-in.

The races start early in the morning with the Biplane heats, followed by Formula One. They seemed to use rolling starts from the runway, unlike the other classes. 

Biplanes rounding the corner; you can just see the tip of the white pylon cylinder at the bottom

A Formula One aircraft. See how tiny it is! These all use the same O-200 engine as found in a Cessna 150. They go somewhat faster, though.

Each heat and race is surprisingly short, only six or eight laps (I didn't count exactly; it might vary between classes too). They have a lot of races to get through each day and I guess fuel isn't cheap. Each class races on a slightly different length course, too, marked by pylons. Short courses for the smaller planes, long courses for the fast ones. I was told that the pylons are raised and lowered according to which class is flying at the time, although I didn't notice any going up and down, but then I wasn't looking...

Jet class racing

From Sport class upwards, the planes are led away from the airfield by a non-racing lead aircraft, and they form up in line abreast alongside this plane before coming down the Chute, which from our point of view brought them over the grandstands into the right hand side of the airfield, heading away from the crowd onto the racecourse. The guy on the left of the formation in the Chute is effectively on pole position as everyone else has to gather in to the course for the most effective flight line. If you are near a loudspeaker you can hear the starter say, "Gentlemen, you have a race!"

Here they come!

They say "Fly low, fly fast, turn left!" around here and that is basically what you do. The racecourse is a left hand circuit around the Valley of Speed, with the start/finish straight being parallel to the grandstands, several hundred feet in front. The addition of the third dimension makes for interesting racing, although I am not sure of the exact rules for passing others. If it is anything like SARL rules then you have to pass with the other aircraft visible at all times, which puts you on the outside of the turn. One of the pilots said you need a 5mph advantage to pass but it wasn't clear if that was determined by rules or physics.

One of the T-6 racers.

It is also different from motor racing in that you can see the racers all the way around the circuit! No trees or hills or buildings get in between you and the aircraft (they don't fly _that_ low ;-) So you can follow the action all the way around which gets pretty intense.

Unlimited Gold aircraft on the back of the circuit

We spent a lot of time in the pit area. You have to buy a pit pass in addition to the main entry but it is so worth it, as that is where most of the action is. The pits are very accessible, even the big warbirds are right there in front of you with their big tents and trucks and T-shirt sales etc. Some of them have control centers and viewing areas on top of the trucks which is cool. There are rope barriers to stop folks just wandering in, but you can watch everything they are doing, all the engine works and Things Going On.

The smaller planes are housed in some large hangars at the far end of the field. Biplanes and Formula One share a hangar, since they are so tiny, while the Sport class racers are split between two other hangars.

We ended up spending a good amount of time in the Sport hangars, with some of the SARL racers. Alan Crawford flies his Lancair Legacy as Race 21 in the Sport Silver class, along with Ernie Sutter flying another Lancair as Race 66. Jason Rovey flies Race 391, a Vans RV-8, in the Sport Bronze class, with Bob Mills flying his Rocket Six, Race 49.

Jason Rovey, Race 391

Bob Mills, Race 49

Alan Crawford, Race 21

Ernie Sutter, Race 66

Jason didn't fly on Friday as the Sport class had too many planes, so the slowest four planes took turns in sitting out so that everyone got a turn to fly. However on Saturday he had a very close race with a Glasair and only lost by a nose, in fact from our angle we couldn't tell if he had been beaten or not.

Jason and his nemesis, Race 7, just before the finish

So Jason made some modifications to his spinner, to prevent this happening again ;-)

Can't catch me now!

The crews were hard at work in all the pits before Sunday's races. Jason had Seth Baker on his crew doing sterling (and secretive!) work for him.

Alan had Dave Adams and Bobby Bennett working on his plane. Bobby is an engine master and Dave is a dab hand with fiberglass, so when Alan needed some fairings made for his flap hinges, Dave was on the case. It is hard to tell from one day to the next how much difference a mod makes in speed, with different weather conditions playing a part, but it was generally felt they might be good for an extra mile or two per hour.

Race 21 Pit Crew

A cool interlude was when I was asked to come and photograph a gathering of Southwest employees, of which there seemed to be a large number in attendance! They were gathering along with their ex-CEO, Herb Kelleher, who founded the airline way back when.

Southwest folks. Herb is in the red ball cap.

After a good heat on Saturday, Alan had a very close race on Sunday with a Lancair that he just couldn't squeak past, no matter how hard he tried. And he tried pretty hard!

Tarnation!

Of course, many people come to Reno to watch the Unlimited aircraft. These are mostly ex-WW2 fighter aircraft, converted for more speed, with clipped wings, bigger engines, sleeker canopies and any other modifications the engineers can come up with. These bad boys will do 450-500mph and sound Awesome.

Precious Metal; Griffon-powered and with a double propeller

One of the baddest boys out there is Strega, a P-51 Mustang. On the Tuesday of Reno week, the canopy imploded during a qualifying heat and she had to make an emergency landing (the pilot was fine, although I imagine he may have needed a new flight suit). This meant she had to start from the back of the pack after being fixed. Cue Friday's Unlimited Silver race, the first one we saw after arriving. Strega tore through the field like the others had lead bricks in their wings, I have never seen such a trouncing. We didn't discover why until after the race, when we found out the story. Of course, Strega is meant to fly in the Gold class.

Strega taking off with Merlin power

However, Strega's luck wasn't quite all there - she apparently clipped a pylon in that Friday session, so had to do it all over again on the Saturday! Which she did with the same ease. And then came the Sunday race. Once again, starting from the back of the line, she tore through everyone in Gold as well, apart from the leader - Voodoo, another P-51 - which handily won the race.

Voodoo finishing the race

On Sunday night after the races, they hold a huge banquet as the awards dinner. Alan kindly gave us tickets for it so we were able to join them, which was splendid. After the main awards were done, all the SARL guys and girls that could be found, were rounded up for a group photo on stage.

SARL Pilots

There was, of course, general silliness and more photo taking; if you're curious to see more then head over to my SARL gallery on the SportAirRace.org site.

A Sea Fury at the pylon

We would certainly love to go back to Reno. Let's hope next year's event is as cool!

Fly-Low

I'm doing the happy dance; I just received September's issue of Fly-Low in the mail, and it's full of my pictures!

I attended Oshkosh on a Fly-Low press pass, and this is the fruits of my labour. Although I've been lucky to have had lots of pictures in Fly-Low over the last couple of years - mainly due to the SARL Air Races - this might be the most I've had in a single issue.

Enjoy! You can download the current issue here: http://www.fly-low.com/current-issue/ - but the PDF here will change each month.

The cover, showing Gene Soucy during his night show.

The contents page, with Dusty from 'Planes'.

A whole double page spread!

#OSH13

I need to write a longer post about Oshkosh, but this video will have to sate your appetite for now. Here's this year's time lapse offering from various points around the show, including the last leg of our flight up there in Glenn's 172. We stopped for fuel in Maquoketa, IA which is about an hour and twenty from Oshkosh. Pictures were taken at 5-second intervals from a GoPro mounted on the wing. The same GoPro was used for the rest of it, with 2-second intervals.

San Marcos to Burnet by Cirrus SR20

Friend Charlie sent me one of those nice texts - the sort that invites a person to go flying :-) So quite unexpectedly, I found myself heading down to San Marcos (KHYI) to meet with Charlie and his Cirrus SR20 on a very nice Sunday afternoon.

Charlie wanted to go to Burnet (KBMQ) to meet with another friend and discuss a project they are both working on. It's about a half hour's flight between the two airports.

Here's the plane ready to go at San Marcos.

The instrument panel in flight. My favourite kind of panel - enough electronics and GPS trickery to be useful, with a normal 6-pack of steam gauges for sanity!

Charlie doing a bit of flying, before handing me the controls - yay! I got to fly it most of the way there and back :-)

On the ramp at Burnet, with another Cirrus taking off behind.

You can see what a clear blue day it was. Here's Lake Travis, west of Austin. We flew out at 4500ft and back at 5500ft, and there were hardly any bumps at all; really smooth air, which is quite unusual for a warm Texas afternoon. The day had started out pretty cool before the clouds evaporated so that probably helped.

Here's a still from a video Charlie took of me flying the plane, on the way out and back. See how the Cirrus has a side stick; it takes a little getting used to, compared with a normal stick. It's a comfortable arm position, however.

And the video in question!

Thanks Charlie, that was fun :-)

The Trojan Phlyers at Bluebonnet Airshow

Last Spring, I had the chance to fly with the Trojan Phlyers in their T-28 aircraft. You can read about that here (scroll down a bit). They liked the video I made, and asked if I could make another one, of them performing an airshow routine. They wanted to use it as a promo for the team. Of course I could!

They invited me up to their Spring T-28 workshop held at their home base of Midway airport at Midlothian, just southeast of Dallas. The intention was to have a whole bunch of T-28s practising formation flying, and lots of filming of this. Unfortunately the weather put paid to much flying, but they did give me one hell of a cool aerobatic ride before it all clagged in. More about that later.

This led us on to the next opportunity which was the Bluebonnet Airshow at Burnet, TX, in April 2012. I spent the Friday before the show crawling over the planes trying to rig cameras. This is actually quite tricky in a T-28; there are not many hard surfaces to grab onto with a camera mount. Most objects move, or are used to fly the plane, or they don't have a good view out of the plane. Suction cup mounts were undesirable, since I would not be in the aircraft to catch them if they came unstuck.

We ended up with one camera clamped onto the edge of the panel glareshield, over the rubber strip, in the lead plane. The other one in the wingman's plane was clamped to the box behind the rear seat; there's a hole in the side which you can just get a mount onto. Copious amounts of gaffer tape held them on, and the audio recorder was plugged into the back seat headset and contained in the lockbox to the right of the seat.

I wanted to mount a third rear-facing camera in the lead ship, but there was no way to get the camera mounted and have the canopy closed; it was too tall. So we abandoned that idea. I think if I had the larger tube mount, I could perhaps have got it around another part of the box structure, if memory serves. Another time. We also did not get to test any of this before the show; practise was running late so they did not fly on Friday as they'd intended.

On show day - Saturday - I loitered around near the T-28s until half an hour before they were due to perform. I started all the cameras and audio recorder, then left them to it. I was going to grab some ground-to-air footage while they flew their show, which I did with my Canon 7D and the 400mm lens. This mostly worked, but a few shots were too shaky for my liking, which is why I asked Jeff Lee of LiveAirshowTV if I could purloin some of his footage for the final video. I think two or three of the passes are his. I'm writing this now in January 2013 after editing the video in April 2012, so forgive me if the details are a little fuzzy.

Why such a long delay? Mainly because the Trojan Phlyers were uncertain what to do with the film... while they liked the flying sequences, it was not wholly what they were looking for. I was unable to attend any other shows at which they were flying, so things went dormant until they decided what to do, eventually turning it over to a film company, who came up with this which was shown at ICAS (The International Council of Airshows conference in December). It uses several segments of my footage, so I am glad to have been able to contribute something.

And after all that, I can now show you this, the airshow routine from Burnet:

Many thanks to the Trojan Phlyers for the opportunity to work and fly with them - they're great guys!

Enchanted Rock from the air

Friend Doug asked if I wanted to fly with him, and see if I could find and navigate to Enchanted Rock. This sounded like a great plan, so we set a course of 305° from San Marcos, and calculated that 30 minutes later we would be floating over the Rock. And sure enough! Half an hour of flying later, this is what we saw...

Enchanted Rock is a geological Batholith, rising up from the Hill Country between Fredericksburg and Llano. It is not like the rest of the area. It's also a Texas State Park, and I have climbed it on many occasions. The right hand dome seen below is the usual route, although the park encompasses both domes and the land surrounding them.

We flew a circuit around the Rock to get a look at it.

This might be the first time I've actually laid eyes on this side of the Rock. They say there's a cave about half way down the steep side.

We could see several people on top of the big dome here; maybe twenty or so folks enjoying the day. We left the area quickly to avoid annoying them, or others.

Nine minutes further south, and we were in the pattern for Fredericksburg.

Here we got lunch in the Airport Diner, always a good stop. They will make delicious vegetable wraps if you ask them nicely.

After lunch, another half hour or so brought us back to San Marcos. A very excellent day's flying. Thanks Doug!