Indy 2011: Friday - Part 1

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Yeah, it's my favorite time of year again. I'm a little blue as I find myself in mid-May and not out at the Aviation Station shooting a movie. I miss my Acro Camp crew more than I thought I might. But there's nothing like an airshow to take the edge off of that particular blueness.

Indy is one of my favorite shows. This is my third year covering it. It's at Indiana Regional Airport (formerly Mount Comfort) (KMQJ), which has excellent surroundings that offer performance lines that can accommodate almost anything you'd want to fly in the airspace. It's reasonably accessible. Firebase Airspeed this year is at the Super 8 in Greefield, which is only a few miles to the east. But for the construction on the main highway that has things down to one lane for much of the going, it's easy access. And I'm getting to the show around 0700 each morning, so it's no big deal for me.

I spent most of the day shooting cameo interviews for Acro Camp. I re-shot the Billy Werth interview that I did last year (the audio was unusable) and added fellow Red Eagle Dan McClung, hang glider pilot Dan Buchanan, Super Stearman pilot Dave Dacy, and wingwalker Tony Kazian.

And I shot as much of the practice flying as I could. Most notable was Billy and Dave Werth's Sibling Rivalry demo. Billy flies a Pitts S-2C (in which I've flown with him) and Dave rides a ridiculously powerful motorcycle. The act initially involved racing down the runway. But it has evolved since then.

Billy and Dave are now doing a lot of formation performing. In the lead shot to this entry, Billy heads down the runway and Dave reaches up and grabs the wing. And today, for the first time that anyone can think of, Billy flew inverted ahead of Dave and Dave was able to grab the tail of the Pitts. Pretty precise stuff on the part of both pilot and rider!

The Viper West F-16 Demo Team tore it up very nicely. Although ti wasn't terribly hot, it was pretty humid. And that meant huge blankets of moisture cascading over the wings of the Viper at almost any positive angle of attack. The sky was pretty gray and the circumstances weren't great for shooting either video or stills. And, let's face it, I mostly do audio or close-up video. But the 200mm Nikon rig yields up competent images from time to time. The above wasn't the best representation of the Viper that I've ever captured, but you can see the burner and there are huge clouds on the wings. Good enough for me!

Capt Garrett Dover cranked the aircraft around very convincingly. The tight-turning capability of the aircraft continues to amaze me. It just rolls over and cranks around at +9G for a full circle. You're always sure that the Viper is going to bust the 1,500-foot line coming back around, but it never does. That's just unbelievable pull!

I'm still chasing the Heavy Metal Jet Team for a couple of planeside interviews for Acro Camp and the podcast. I was close to Jive and Rook during the briefing in the morning, but had to leave early to interview Billy, then lost them. Heavy Metal does a lot for the Make-a-Wish Foundation and I understand that the team was engaged in taking care of some commitments along those lines. That's fine. I still have tomorrow before heading back to Michigan.

I'm planning to ferry a Cirrus SR-22 from Pontiac down to the Carolinas for maintenance on Sunday and then drive back to Michigan on Monday. Then back to the office and my mild-mannered lawyer alter-ego until the next show. But, until then, it's freshly-mown grass and the smell of 100LL and JP-8!

Indy 2010: Arrival

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A meandering trip this morning and early afternoon through Dayton and then over to the Mount Comfort Airport. A stop at the Waffle House, 25 minutes hung up in a gawker jam, lots of podcast listening, and then the parking lot at Indy Aero.

It’s that time of year again! Time for the Indianapolis Airshow! I attended the event for the first time last year and I’m enthusiastically back.

Thursday before a show is one of my favorite times. The ramp is relatively bare. But the energy is building. A fleet of golf carts awaits volunteers and staff. The rows of vendor tents are going up. Indy Aero, the FBO, is starting to buzz with activity (red shirts everywhere!). People like Billy Werth who were new friends last year greet you with familiarity that far exceeds the time that life has thus far let you spend together.

It’s a special time when a performer aircraft are arriving every half hour or so and golf carts and tug whiz around like crazed gophers. But, at the same time, right next to Kent Pietsch’s Jelly-Belly-liveried 1942 Interstate Cadet and Billy Werth’s Pitts S-2C, 30-hour student pilot Jon Ebbeler is preflighting his aircraft for a few trips around the pattern.


I strolled through the hangar and got some drool on Mike Goulian’s Extra 330, one of the Horsemen’s P-51 Mustangs, and the Red Eagle II.

Then I strolled the ramp with Liza Eckardt from Fence Check. Although mostly unpopulated, parts of the ramp were beginning to take shape. The A-10 Thunderbolt IIs of the U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command East Coast A-10 Demo Team had arrived and the maintainers were getting the birds show-ready. Although he was busy, I got Maj Johnnie “Dusty” Green to talk energy management and aerobatics on camera in front of the aircraft as a possible sequence for the Acro Camp movie. The A-10 has no afterburners, so energy management is very important to both combat maneuvers and the airshow demo profile. With no blowers to fall back on, the energy you have is basically the energy you have and you have to manage that while supporting the ground operations and potentially being shot at.

By the time we got the rest of the way around the ramp, all three of the Horsemen aircraft were on the ramp and preparing for a flight to warm up and work out some elements of their demo. The ASB.tv package at the show is pretty impressive. The Horsemen, Mike Goulian, and announcer Rob Reider form a pretty impressive core of airshow entertainment.

I got the chance to sit down with managing partner Kurt Kratchman at the ICAS convention in December and talk about everything from the airshow operations to other properties like Mike da Mustang to the online presence (which, by the way, includes the innovative BlackBox presentation engine).

And, of special interest to me and other aviator-musicians, composer James Horner has scored and directed the music for the Horsemen’s demo. You’ve heard Horner’s stuff. To name just a few of the 100-odd scores he’s worked on: Braveheart, Apollo 13, Glory, A Beautiful Mind, The Perfect Storm, and Avatar. (And Apollo 13. And Apollo 13!) You get the picture. Horner is tight with the Horseman and gets to ride along with some frequency. There’s a short film at ASB.tv called Write Your Soul that goes into the backstory.

Kurt, Ed Shipley, and others from ASB sure seem to have a broad and deep set of properties in the airshow and lifestyle vertical. And I think what they’re doing has the seeds of revolution for some areas of new media. I’m perhaps pretty decent at thinking deeply about the present infrastructure and shape of new media. I think I play well with that. But I look at ASB and see a gathering critical mass of . . . something. I don’t know what and I’d be foolish to speculate. But there’s a lot of talent and resources in very close proximity. I’m watching ASB.tv pretty closely and can’t wait to see what happens.

Anyway, the time hack for this post will likely be in the ridiculous hours of the morning, so I’m going to go ahead and post this. Media credentialing is at 0800 local and I intend to be there. Bleary-eyed, but there!

Air-to-Air with Billy Werth of Grayout Aerosports at the Indy Airshow

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Matt Kryger of The Indianapolis Star was kind enough to send me some pictures from yesterday’s photo flight with Billy Werth of Grayout Aerosports. I’m the guy in front operating a couple of cameras and an MP3 recorder.



Like I said before, this was a great flight so several reasons, the most compelling of which was that this was my first time being in formation. Both the photo ship pilot and Billy did a great job of making sure that everything happened to put the Pitts in the best possible position for the shoot. That involves, among many other things, flying the right attitude, putting the sun in the right position, keeping the photo ship’s shadow off of the beauty airplane, and other considerations.

If Billy was challenged by any of that, he sure didn’t show it. A great couple of pilots on this flight and I really enjoyed getting to see it happen.


This shot graced the front page of the Star today. You can’t recognize either Billy or me in the picture, but Billy was credited in the text, so he received due notoriety for the shoot.

Stay tuned for more from the Indianapolis Air Show. And follow the show on Twitter as @IndyAirShow.

I’m here all day tomorrow covering the show before beating a hasty retreat back to Michigan to see what has piled up on my desk. It’ll be Sunday, so I’ll be in the red Airspeed shirt wandering the ramp with MP3 recorder and camera in hand and deranged fanboy look in my eye!

[Update 8 June 2009] Also, check out video from the flight at the Indy Transponder at http://indytransponder.blogspot.com/2009/06/indianapolis-air-show-coverage-6-jun-09.html

Frame Grabs from Photo Mission with Billy Werth

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I got up on a photo mission with Billy Werth of Grayout Aerosports yesterday. I was front seat in Billy’s Pitts S-2C as The Indianapolis Star ’s Matt Kryger shot stills and video from the open door of a Charokee in the formation.

Really cool flight. It’s my first experience in a formation. We got close. I mean really close. But that’s what you can do with two really competent pilots. Billy and the photo platform pilot have clearly done this before and they know what angles and attitudes work best. We started out with some straight and level (despite the fronmt-seat placard in Billy’s aircraft that warns (“Intentional Straight and Level Flight Prohibited”) and then did a little inverted flight.

Billy warned me that the fuel filler cap sometimes leaked a little during sustained inverted flight and, true enough, I got a little 100LL on the inside of the windscreen. Good thing I’ve been doing the acro conditioning! I think that the acro around the photo ship along with a snoot of 100LL would have done the average media guy in.

And, when you’re in the beauty aircraft, your tolerance is kind of a limiting factor of the photo mission. You sure don’t want to hurl or have to end the flight because the photo team and the beauty pilot (and the public relations folks) are all counting on being able to do the entire flight and get all of the photos. I'm happy to say that I did it with no problem.


Matt Kryger, a staff photographer for the Indianapolis Star shot the photos and the video from the photo ship and I grabbed a few shots of him as well.

Great flight! Thanks to Billy Werth and everyone at Grayout Aerosports for the opportunity! Audio and video of this flight to come!

Indy Airshow - Interview with Blue Angel Boss and Talking with Roger Bishop

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It’s early morning on Saturday, June 6, 2009 and I’m getting this episode out from Firebase Airspeed Indianapolis, namely the Holiday Inn Indianapolis East.

This is the third day in Indy. I arrived in the wee hours of Thursday morning.

The drive was long. Maybe a little longer because the transmission on my car is slipping in high gear and I watched the tach in cruise at highway speeds to make sure that the RPMs weren't climbing at a constant speed over the road.

Add to that the fact that I'd just put in 4.1 Hobbs on a four-hop training flight - Scenario 3 of the Garmin G1000 transition training - about half of which (including an ILS, an RNAV, an VOR-A, and a LOC B/C) I flew partial panel. Yeah, partial panel in a G1000-equopped aircraft is almost better than full panel in any of the round-gage Cessnas I've flown before, but everything's in a different place and it's workload-intensive, at least at the beginning.

Three hours of sleep and then back at it. But that's okay. Because, a couple of hours later, I was standing on the ramp at the FedEx facility opposite the passenger terminal of the Indianapolis International Airport with Roger Bishop. If you've been listening to Airspeed for long, you know that Roger is the director of the Indianapolis Air Show, held each year at the Mt. Comfort airport about 20 minutes east of Indianapolis proper. And you might have guessed by now that we were waiting for the arrival of the US Navy Blue Angels.


Like any airshow, this weekend is the culmination of months of work by hundreds of people. And this year was unique in recent years for the Indy show because the organizers pulled the date ahead more than two months to make it possible to host the Blue Angels.

As we waited, I gut-checked Roger.

[Roger Bishop audio]

He's unflappable, as usual. There's a lot of confidence in his manner and it's justified.

I first met Roger last year at Podapalooza at Oshkosh. Understated for a guy who heads a pretty substantial airshow. And as knowledgeable about airshow ops as anyone else I've met.

We've kept in touch over the past few months and Roger invited me to come down to the Indy Air Show. Indy is something like five hours from where I live in north of Detroit by the time you count bio breaks, so it's a non-trivial journey. But the dance card for the show is full of military, civilian, and vintage warbird participants and it seemed more than worth the drive.

Roger didn't disappoint and, in fact, surprised. Halfway through the first Red Bull of the morning, my mobile phone rang and it was Roger, offering a ride to the Indianapolis airport to meet the Blue Angels as they arrived.

This show stages the Blues remotely at Indianapolis International (KIND) and the show site is about ten miles to the east at the Mt. Comfort Airport (KMQJ). Although this means that the audience at the airshow proper doesn’t get to see the Blues step, the remote staging allows the Blues a secure place to park the aircraft and conduct operations. And it’s also kind of cool that the Blues can simply have an entire half of the airport when it comes time to launch or recover the F/A-18s. The Indy organizers have arranged for a single ATC frequency for the team between Indianapolis International and Mt Comfort, so that has to be convenient for the team.

First to arrive is Fat Albert, the Blue Angels’ Marine-operated C-130 transport. Shortly thereafter, 1 through 6 arrive at the airport, performing a carrier break over the runway and then recovering the team in short order. The ground team leaps into action and begins checking over the jets, refueling them, filling the smoke oil tanks, and otherwise checking them over after the flight in.

At the appointed moment, I walk out onto the ramp to get some pictures of the aircraft and to talk to Boss, CDR Greg McWherter.

[Boss Interview]

I also get a moment to chase down Maj Nathan Miller, the lead solo, who flies the No. 5 jet. Maj. Miller grew up in Lapeer, Michigan, just north of Pontiac, where I’m based. I found out last year that he and I have a tenuous connection in that Maj. Miller’s first instructor was Barry Sutton, the guy with whom I’ve been flying aerobatics for the last year or so. I pass along Barry’s best regards and the major seems to remember Barry well. Don’t we all remember our first instructors? And, every once in awhile, we get reminded of the common strings that run through aviation.

Roger gave me a ride back to pick up my car and then it was off to the show site. Mt Comfort is ideally situated for an airshow. It’s close to the major highways, but far enough off the beaten track to allow for staging of crowds and a good ingress and egress if traffic gets backed up.

The media coverage and other operations are staged at the field’s FBO, Indy Aero. The hospitality is excellent. No matter how busy it gets, people and paper seem to meet up and move where they’re supposed to be with very little friction.

Roger and I walk a short distance to the airshow office and pick up his golf cart. Then it’s on to a tour of the grounds. The show is laid out in a more or less linear way along Runway 7/35 at Mt. Comfort. The static displays are centrally located and convenient. The vendor areas are laid out along Tent Row with the usual assemblage of food and beverage and souvenirs. I get to see show center and get an idea of where I can roam on the grounds. This is a pretty good show as far as media is concerned. I can roam right up to the taxiway at show center and hang out right there next to Rob Reider’s announcer platform. Or, further down the way, get a quiet place under a big tent with the performers and line crew.

Flightline Radio is here and will be broadcasting the announcements and other content. The equipment went up yesterday and I’ll be walking the grounds with my Flightline Radio receiver Saturday and Sunday.

Roger dropped me off back at Indy Aero and I wandered the grounds for a few more hours before heading back to the hotel to do some writing and editing. I had a bit of an issue with the hotel Internet connection, which delayed the release of this episode, but, if you’re listening now, I’ve resolved those issues.

Indy has been, hands down, the best media experience at an airshow yet. Roger has personally made every effort to make sure that I and the other media will have the opportunity to get up close and personal with the performers and the aircraft and get the word out about this gem of an airshow. I’m very grateful and I’m looking forward to doing additional coverage today and tomorrow.

I should note that I got up yesterday on two media flights. The first was with Pitts S-2C driver and local Indianapolis performer Billy Werth. This was a pretty unique thing for me. Matt Kryger of the Indianapolis Star had arranged for a photo flight and was going to shoot Billy from a Cherokee with the door taken off. The front seat of Billy’s Pitts was available and Billy’s crew offered it to me. Not being stupid, I immediately accepted and got a great flight out of it. It was the first formation flight I’ve ever done and it was cool to be in the beauty airplane, maneuvering around the photo ship. Look for pictures and audio from that flight soon.

I also spent a half hour aboard the Commemorative Air Force’s “Black Sparrow” C-47. I plugged in the recorder at the crew chief’s station in the rear of the aircraft, so I have cockpit audio of the flight, although I haven’t heard it yet.

Get out to the Indy Airshow Saturday and Sunday June 6-7, 2009 at the Mt Comfort Airport just east of Indianapolis. I’ll see you there!

http://www.indyairshow.com/