Indy 2011: Day 2

This is a regular blog post. If you're looking for show notes to audio or video episodes, they're all here. Just keep scrolling!

The Airspeed crew vehicle likes to think of itself as Blue Angel Zero. There she is, parked next to CDR David Koss's No. 1 ship. Waiting for the crew to top up her smoke oil for tomorrow's demo.

Day 2 (Saturday) at Indy is complete. Worries about the weather were worth having, but - at the end of the day - not worth getting bunched up over. Ceilings started out high and gradually came down. The Blues flew a low or flat show, which was fine with me because I was on my way out to Indianapolis International to catch a photo op with CDR Koss and the pilots of two WWII-era predecessors of the F/A-18C. I opened up the sun roof so I could hear the jet noise better.

The shoot went well and I got a three-minute piece that I might release as an ultra-short video episode.

I love Dave Dacy's big, honking 500-hp Super Stearman. It's clean, it's white, and it's round. It makes the right noices. You can attach a human speed brake to the top wing. What more do you really need?

I hooked up with the Heavy Metal Jet Team in the late morning and got interviews with Snort and Slick for Acro Camp. The interviews look very crisp in HD. And they should. As long as the light doesn't completely stink. you have an airplae that the team has gone to the trouble to paint with large areas of the three most useful background colors. Don't like how the frame looks? Not popping? Take two steps to the left and you have a completely different contrast proposition. Three to choose from. No waiting.

Both Slick and Snort are very, very well-spoken. Great answers to the questions and a sincerity that you can't fake. Having interviewed about a dozen airshow performers for the movie, I have begun hearing substantially the same answer from multiple performers to the same question. It's to be expected. There's probably a limited universe of answers to the same core four or five questions. But both Snort and Slick had new, different, and dead-nuts-on things to say. I had to remember that I was asking questions and not just sitting in my living room watching the movie.

I'm writing this at a Steak n Shake a couple of miles from Indianapolis International. I just offloaded the day's still pictures from the camera and sent a couple off to the media folks at the airshow. Now it's back on the road for Michigan. There's an SR22 at Pontiac that needs to get to the Carolinas and Don Weaver and I are just the guys to take it there!

Frame Grabs from the B-17 Ride at the Indianapolis Airshow

I'm digging through the footage from the Indianapolis Airshow from a couple of weeks ago as I prepare to edit the content down into episodes. And there's some really great footage in there! For the B-17, i mounted a GoPro HD Hero up behind the pilots, as shown above. That's me at the lower right shooting with a handheld. I also mounted a Contour HD in the nose and another Contour HD looking out the left window. I also roamed the aircraft with both a still camera and the Panasonic.

This was the view in the cockpit most of the ride. The crew chief spent a fair amount of time standing behind the pilot and copilot during critical phases of flight, but this was the scene during cruise.

Here's one of the turns during the overflight of the Indianapolis Indians game. All eyes paying attention to the flight path and looking for traffic. (And that included me!)

I have something like an hour of cockpit audio that includes ATC, the calls guiding us in for the fly-over, the coordination with the other aircraft, and the cockpit resource management going on with the crew. I'll be going over the audio during the next couple of days and making notes and getting ready to drop it into both a video episode and an audio episode.

Indy Airshow 2010: Friday

This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio or video, you’ll find them in the other posts.

How is it that I feel so at home at Indy when this is only second year here? Part of it probably has to do with the luck I had last year in terms of the people I met. Billy and Haley and so on. Part of it might also be that I’m reaching a critical mass of acquaintances in the airshow community so that I can be reasonably assured of knowing at least a few people at any given medium-sized-or-better airshow. Folks like Indy chairman Roger Bishop, Fence Check maven Liza Eckardt, and AirPigz creator Martt Clupper.

Whatever the reason, it’s really good to feel so at home on this ramp and among these people.

And, while we’re on the subject of people, let’s talk about Roger Bishop for a minute. Roger is the Enoch Root of aviation new media and social media. At least that’s how it works in my imagination. He’s omnipresent and influential, yet modest about taking credit for the work he does.

And I really admire his management abilities. Not in a smarmy business-school sort of way. I mean that he really seems to know how to delegate and then be in the present and effective during the actual chaos. I’m not saying that his battle plans survive first contact with the enemy any more often than the battle plans of others. But be has a Zen ability to simply, well, manage.

I’m not that guy. I’m proud of the way I just talked things over with Will Hawkins during the filming of Acro Camp and then just let Will and David Allen do things as they saw fit. But I was way too obsessed with getting the in- and on-aircraft cameras and audio devices deployed, collected, and offloaded. The project probably suffered from the attendant lack of top-down observations and nudges that I could/should have made and performed. And I know that I’ve left a lot of work for myself in the editing process because, although we got all of the video and audio, I still have to do some detective work figuring out which audio goes with which video, etc.

This isn’t hero worship and, as I said before, it’s not the smarmy new-MBA buzzwordy heaping of praise into which it might otherwise degenerate. But I said it last year and I’ll say if again this year. Roger’s really on top of his projects and they seem to go as smoothly as possible without him being a walking nerve-ending. Like me.

Much to learn. But, in the meantime, it gives me a really nice airshow in which to bask for a few days.

Airshow. Remember the airshow? This is a blog post about an airshow.

This was my first full day at this year’s show. Media credentialing first thing and then an attempt at a Huey ride. Some piece of equipment on the Huey was not working to the satisfaction of the pilot and crew and they elected to scrub the morning flight. No problem. Safety first. And, in fact, I’m planning to get to the show site tomorrow at 0700 local in case they get to try it again before the airspace.

We hit the 10:00 briefing with air boss Ralph Royce. All of the performers, or their representatives, attend and get a weather briefing, talk about the airspace, identify emergency procedures, and otherwise coordinate the big and complicated ballet that is the airshow. Check out my posts from the ICAS convention in December. An air boss briefing is one of the bellwethers of how well your planning has worked out. If your ducks are single-file by then, the air boss briefing will sound a lot like the one that I attended this morning.

The media chief then slotted Airpigz’s Martt Clupper and me, among others, on a flight of the Yankee Air Museum’s B-17, Yankee Lady. The show time was 5:30, so we had plenty of time to head out and check out the airshow grounds and watch the practices.

I’m taking a slightly different approach this year. Most of the interviews I’m doing are video instead of audio and I’m focusing on aerobatics as opposed to platform and other performer-specific subjects. I got Pitts S-2C driver Billy Werth and Jelly Belly Interstate Cadet driver Kent Pietsch today, which makes three when you add A-10 East demo pilot Maj Johnnie Green. I’m thinking a lot about loading relevant parts of the interviews with these veteran performers into appropriate places in the film. Certainly, some of this material is going to make it into the podcast feed, but this is such a prime opportunity to get film of these performers that I can’t pass it up.

I have another few that I really want to capture. One is Mike Goulian. I got great footage of Mike mentally walking through his program there on the ramp and then the launch and recovery from his practice performance. Being that we used his book as the text for Acro Camp, I think it’d be great to get an interview with Mike into the film. Besides, the book kept me awake at night bed-flying some of the maneuvers and trying to develop some kind of kinesthetic sense for them. Mike owes me. Whether he knows it or not.

A very pleasant surprise at the end of the day. The ride in the B-17 turned out to be a real treat. You could be forgiven for thinking that I prefer the heavy iron. After all, I spent a fair piece of 2008 getting a DC-3/C-47 SIC type rating. And I’d love to help fly the Yankee Air Museum’s C-47 at some point. But, when I’m at an airshow, I’m usually about chasing the crank-and-bank performers that have two-seat aircraft.

But what an experience! As soon as I heard that I had a B-17 slot, I walked over and buttonholed copilot Ray Hunter and asked about camera mount spots. He was kind enough to let me crawl around the aircraft and identify some spots. When 5:30 rolled around, I showed up as early as possible and mounted a GoPro Hero above and behind the pilots, a ContourHD looking out the left window behind the left-seater, and a ContourHD looking out the front window. In addition to that, I plugged into the intercom and radio from the seat just behind Ray and had my still camera and a Panasonic HDC-SD9 in my hands. Five cameras and audio, baby!

I couldn’t see out the window when sitting and strapped in for takeoff, but could stand until we took the runway and again once we reached cruise altitude. I didn’t bring the Mac on this trip and I’m spending the next week at Camp Atterbury, Indiana for CAP Mission Aircrew School as a part of the National Emergency Services Academy, so it’ll be later this month before I get to see how the video turned out. And edit some of it and get it up as a video episode. And I can’t wait to do that. I see a video episode and a long-form audio episode coming out of this.

Shortly after takeoff, we got the okay to unstrap and roam around the aircraft. Martt Clupper got the bombardier’s seat and I joined him in the nose. The plexiglass in the nose is pretty crazed, but it’s serviceable and it was interesting to get that view out in front without having to look through a prop, as I usually do.

Can you imagine being up there in the very front of the aircraft trying to concentrate on a bombsight with nothing but some plexi between you and the flak over Germany? All I could think about was pickling and getting the hell out of there. The Americans did mostly daylight bombing and left the night bombing to the Brits. It was a brute force thing. You fly over continental Europe in broad daylight at a mere 150 knots and just hope that you’re not the one that the Messerschmitt Bf 109s decided to single out. And remember that the allies didn’t always have the P-51 Mustang to escort them. The Mustang came along late in the game. In much of the going in WWII, the B-17s were out there alone with no little friends to stave off the incoming waves of German fighters.

I also wandered back through the bomb bay to check out the rear of the aircraft. The most pleasant surprise was the open-air roof of the mid-empennage. Really weird to stick your head up and partly out of it into the 150-knott wind blast and watch Indianapolis slip below you.

The mission was to form up with several of the aerobatic performers and go do an overflight of an Indianapolis Indians game at Victory Field downtown. Airshow announcer Rob Reider was plugged into the PA at the field and ready to do commentary for the crowd. We proceeded to a lat-long waypoint and formed up from there for the pass(es).

I was back up in the cockpit for the overflight. I need to review the intercom and ATC audio to get a better idea of what happened, but I did hear us getting steering vectors over the target. I could see the 48-story Chase Tower off to the right and the Garmin 530 was showing an obstacle proximity warning during the pass. I’ve always wondered what kind of coordination went into formation join-ups and overflights and this audio is probably going to answer a lot of my questions.

On the way back, I got a chance to stand up in one of the turrets and shoot some video and stills of the other ships in the formation. It was pretty hazy out there. Solid VFR to be sure, but it had been in the 80s and muggy all day and the air wasn’t letting the pretty photons through. A good first subject for color correction when I start learning how to do that.

Probably the most interesting part from a pilot’s perspective is that it takes a lot of hands to fly this beast. Copilot Ray Hunter flew the formation pass and the return and landing. Pilot Dave Cobaugh managed the throttles in addition to command other checklist items. What I didn’t expect is that flight engineer Norm Ellickson stands behind and between the pilots for critical phases of flight and manages some of the controls on the center console. It’s a real collection of hands on the controls. Up to five hands at times. I’m guessing that I’ll be able to understand a little more from the intercom audio about the division of responsibilities. But the general sense that I got is that critical phases of flight are busy times.

The downside is that the GoPro HD Hero that I mounted above and behind the pilots is likely going to feature views of the back of Norm’s head a lot of the time. And mostly at the most interesting times. But that’s okay. Those are the kinds of things you learn as you do this in different aircraft. I pulled the camera down and re-clamped it over Ray’s left shoulder. It was a less stable mount point and the moment of shake was a lot bigger, but we’ll see how it turns out. I also shot a lot of video with the Panasonic and I don’t think that the obscuration of the Hero is going to be a problem.

What a great ride! I was torn between staying put focusing on the cockpit activity and heading to other parts of the aircraft. I think I made the right decision by wandering. IO’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to figure things out from the partial video and the complete audio. And I’ll naturally bring you both in a couple of upcoming Airspeed episodes.

As usual, it’s really late (about 1:00 a.m.) and I need to get some sleep. I pack up tomorrow morning and check out of the hotel and run to make the Huey flight. Then it’s more wandering of the grounds and the Saturday show. I bust out after the Saturday flying is complete to head to MAS, so I’ll be nomadic for most of the day.

Watch the Twitter feed (@StephenForce) and I’ll try to give occasional updates as cool things happen. And cool things happen at the Indy Airshow!

Photos with me in them courtesy Martt Clupper (www.airpigz.com; mcc@airpigz.com).

Indy 2010: Arrival

This is a regular blog post. Looking for show notes and links to episode audio? Check out the other posts. It’s all here!

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!

L-39 Driver Tim Brutsche

Subscribe to Airspeed through iTunes or your favorite other podcatcher. It's all free!

These are the show notes to an audio episode. If you want to listen online, please use the direct link below. http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedBrutsche.mp3.

Many of us go to airshows and love the prop-driven warbirds and the military jet team performances. But there’s a space in there that’s inhabited by a special breed of airplane and pilot. That’s the civilian-owned and operated jet warbird.

One such jet warbird is the L-39 Albatross. It’s a high-performance jet trainer developed in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s to replace the L-29. It was the first of the second-generation jet trainers, and the first turbofan-powered trainer produced.

And the pilot of one such jet warbird is Tim Brutsche, callsign “Dawg.” He has been flying for 34 years, 12 years in jets, and holds an ATP certificate and instrument rating. He has 5,800 hours flying, including 800 hours in jets ,and he is also a certified instructor pilot and a qualified lead formation pilot. He’s also a Lt Col and check airman the Kellogg Senior Squadron of the Civil Air Patrol.

I met Tim several years ago and had the opportunity to talk to him briefly on the ramp at Battle Creek over Independence Day weekend last summer after he gave C/Lt Col Melanie Davis her incentive flight for the Civil Air Patrol’s Spaatz Award. Shortly after ICAS this year, I called Tim to see if I could talk him into sharing some of his experiences flying the L-39 with the Airspeed audience and he generously obliged.

Let’s go to the interview!

[Brutsche Interview]

More information about The Hoppers, the L-39, and other people and organizations we discussed:

The Hoppers

Wikipedia Entry on the L-39

Civil Air Patrol

North American Pride Aviation

Video Episode - JATO Ride in Fat Albert

Subscribe to Airspeed using iTunes or your favorite other podcatcher. It’s all free!

These are the show notes to a video episode. You can watch right here or download the video from http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedVideoFatAlbert.m4v.

I was fortunate enough to get one of the last Jet-Assisted Take-Off (“JATO”) rides in the Blue Angels’ Marine-flown C-130, Fat Albert. The JATO bottles are getting more and more scarce and it’s unlikely that there will be many more rides like this.

Really interesting ride, mostly because of the lack of outside references. I’m used to unusual attitudes, but it’s a little off to experience them when your only outside reference is an 18” window on the far side of the aircraft.

I mounted the camera just above and behind my head. You can see my WTHR ballcap in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. Query the wisdom of clamping the camera to the airframe of a JATO-boosted C-130. The jitter and vibration is really pronounced in several places. But it stabilized whenever the aircraft got to less than about 0.5G. And those were the best sequences anyway.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The media hospitality at the Indianapolis Airshow was spectacular. I remain indebted to Roger Bishop for the up-close opportunities as the show.

The Guy in the Red Airplane

Subscribe to Airspeed through iTunes or your favorite other podcatcher. It's all free!

These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen online right here by clicking: http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedRedAirplane.mp3.

As Airspeed steams into its fourth airshow season, I’m in top gear heading out to shows and having some of the coolest experiences available below Class Alpha airspace. And I just had a day-long experience up in the Alpha on a KC-135R Stratotanker, too. More on that soon. I don’t think that anyone could say that I’ve spared much effort in chasing edges of the aviation envelope so far this year.

I can’t remember who said that life is what happens while you’re making other plans. But he was right. And I had an experience with that very thing not long ago. I was going to hold off on this episode until I got more of the Indianapolis Air Show content out, but I heard something on a recent episode of Uncontrolled Airspace that made me want to pull this one forward.

By the way, I mention the Uncontrolled Airspace podcast way too little here on Airspeed. If you don’t yet subscribe to UCAP, you need to go and subscribe right now. Go ahead and hit pause. I’ll wait. Okay, you’re back? Good. And leave them a nice review on iTunes, too.

Anyway, the UCAP guys mentioned a letter to the editor of a local newspaper by someone thanking the unknown pilot of a red airplane who had done aerobatics near the writer’s farm.

[Mary reads from letter]

This is to tell the man in the red plane that he has a fan.

I've been watching you from the ground. Well, from my farm pastures and yard actually. More often than you know. I am in awe of your skill and the performance you give is wonderful and joyous.

Who are you? Are you a man or a woman? A professional stunt pilot or a pleasure flyer of that pretty red plane? Do you perform for others besides me, or is what I'm seeing just an expression of your own preferences? . . .

Not the usual complaint about noise or some perceived safety issue. A thank-you for the grace and beauty of the performance. That made me pull this episode forward.

First, a little background. As I’ve attended enough airshows, I’ve gotten to see many of the performers multiple times, some more than a half dozen times. And I’ve begin to really hone in on what I love.

No flies on the jet teams. I love them dearly. And no flies on anyone else. But I had an epiphany at Oshkosh last year. I was watching Greg Koontz perform in a bright red Super Decathlon. I had been flying the Citabria for a few months by then and had really begun to love American Champion aircraft. And, seeing Greg fly the Super D so well, I made a connection. That’s an airplane that you might well be able to find, and train in, at your own local airport. Yet here’s a guy flying that very airplane with a grace and power equal to anything else at Oshkosh.

You probably heard Greg’s appearance on the show earlier this year and you could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve begun to regard Greg as a bit of a hero. One could have worse heroes, I suppose.

And I got to really appreciate another part of Greg’s unique appeal at the Indianapolis Air Show earlier this month. At the opening of the show, Greg takes on the persona of Clem Cleaver from Alabama, who barges into the airshow to redeem his coupon for a flight lesson. After some back and forth with the announcer, the air boss ostensibly clears Clem and his putative instructor to get into the waiting Cub, take off, and leave the airspace. But, shortly after the engine of the Cub is hand-propped to life, the Cub begins to roll forward and Clem takes off across the grass beside the runway without the instructor.

What follows is ostensibly a comedy act, but is also some of the best low-level aerobatics that I’ve ever seen. Ultimately, “grandpa” shoots the Cub’s engine with a large rifle and Greg ends the sequence by landing the Cub on a moving pickup truck.

The more you see this routine (and I’ve seen it five or six times now), the better it gets. At one point, Greg, playing the terrified Clem Cleaver, pulls the Cub up to a 45-degree ascent, then pulls the throttle back all the way, pushes over the top, and yells at the top of his lungs. You can hear Greg shouting in the cockpit all the way to the announcer’s stand.

Here’s the shout on Saturday at Indy.

[Koontz 1]

And again on Sunday.

[Koontz 2]

Greg ends that phase of the act by landing the Cub on a moving pickup truck. Then, a little later in the show, he gets out the red Super Decathlon and puts it though its paces, fling outside stuff, high-energy maneuvers, low-energy maneuvers, and even tumbling the airplane (not easy in a Super-D).

Anyway, I know that I’ll never be an F-16, F/A-18, or even Extra 300 driver. So, when I see my idealized self out there flying, I usually see myself flying a bright red Super Decathlon. Just like Greg Koontz.


It’s a happy coincidence that Sutton Aviation at the Oakland County International Airport (KPTK), where I’m based happened to add a Super Decathlon to its line in April. And an even happier coincidence that it’s red.

I had planned to fly some pretty heavy acro to prepare for the T-6A Texan II ride that I had in May at Randolph Air Force Base. I’ve never had a great stomach for acro, but I’ve found that I can work up to about 40 minutes of moderate aerobatic flight with exposure. I planned for two flights a week prior to the T-6A flight and, when the Super D became available, I scheduled it along with instructor extraordinaire and FAA Designated Examiner Barry Sutton. Barry’s an excellent instructor and you’ve heard his commentary in the cockpit here on the show.

We went up for the first time on April 16 and I rag-dolled myself out in only 20 minutes. You can see video from that flight in the Airspeed video episode that posted on May 30. By May 6, I had had a few flights in the aircraft and my tolerance was getting better.

I arrived at the airport to find a gray 10,000-foot overcast and hazy visibility. Solid VFR, but not the best weather for acro because you prefer a nice, sharp horizon to use as a reference when you pull through a loop or roll the airplane.

So we launched and headed for the practice area north of the field. Although much of Oakland County is subdivisions and industrial parks, it gives way to wide open fields and other rural landscape just north of the airport. No federal airways nearby and plenty of vertical and horizontal elbow room so there’s no worry about being over a congested area or getting within 1,500 feet of the ground before being fully recovered. In fact, we add a 500-foot buffer over that and start maneuvers a good thousand feet above that.

Barry has a pilot acquaintance, Paul, at the airport who lives out in the middle of the fields of the practice area and he has mentioned on several occasions that he’d try to contact Barry on the practice area frequency if he saw the Super D maneuvering.

I’ll say at the outset that the cockpit audio here is a little distorted. I usually set the audio levels on the ground and then hand Barry the recorder to stash in back in a Velcro-enclosed pocket. Although there’s a “hold” slider on the MP3 recorder, the slider doesn’t stop changes from being made with the H-M-L sensitivity selector. I usually fly with it set on low, but Barry inadvertently switched it to “high” in the course of stuffing it into the pocket. It’s a little overdriven and distorted, but understandable.

We had just finished a loop and some rolls when Paul came on the frequency. Barry, like many others, had mistaken the T-6A Texan II, a 1,100-hp modern trainer, with the AT6, a variant of the original WWII-era T-6 Texan. No matter. I just thought I’d clarify. Anyway, here’s the call-up.

[Audio 01]

We did the Immelman and a couple of other maneuvers, including a hammerhead, when Barry called up Paul again.

[Audio 02]

So we did the roll and then set up for an inverted pass. Paul had his binoculars out and could just about make out our tail number. We added a hammerhead at the end.

[Audio 03]

Paul asked at the last pass how long the aircraft could go inverted. We follow that up a little and then Paul suggests a heading to get us toward the big empty fields near his house.

[Audio 04]

Paul talked us in and then we did a series of maneuvers. We set up a show line over the fields well offset from his house and came down a bit, but still well above the minimum VFR altitude for the area and well above aerobatic minima.


I’m just going to let the audio run here and let you listen in. We have our box with plenty of clearance both vertically and horizontally for the regs. Frankly, we’re a little too high for anyone on the ground to get more than a basic idea of what we’re doing. The pictures that they sent the next day were clearly taken at maximum telephoto and cropped and we’re still pretty small in the frame. But the altitude is a good thing.

Barry’s giving me direction, but I’m flying the series, which makes me pretty proud of myself. I had been flying acro for quite some time, but hadn’t really done a connected series before. And now I had a chance to do it with an audience. I’m going to let this run with the omission of a couple of maneuvers where I made an attempt to record a Scheyden ad and the audio really distorted.

[Audio 06]

Didja hear that? Kids shouting in the background and lady thanking me for my noble and graceful feats in the sky.

Just before that thank-you, I was feeling pretty green around the gills. Not ready to park a tiger, mind you, but not in the mood to thrash myself any more. And then the voices of Paul, his wife, and the neighborhood kids. Voices that seemed excited about aviation. Voices that made the kind of sounds that I make at airshows all summer. Only the guy in the red airplane was . . . me.

I was instantly not sick. Not one bit. I could have gone another 20 minutes right then and there. All because of the voices from a back yard near some sprawling fields out in the countryside.

Barry and I talked about it on the way back to the airport.

[Audio 07]

Yeah, it’s cool. Really cool.

We did a few trips around the pattern, alternating wheel landings and three-point landings and then finally called up and told the tower that we were going full-stop. On final, a radio call came in. “Cessna niner-four-eight-niner-one 10 miles south with Papa to land, full stop.”

A magic tail number for me. That’s the Cessna 152 in which I did my first solo. It was a private pilot candidate coming in to see Barry for a checkride finish-up. Barry and I parked the Super-D, put away the parachutes, and debriefed and then I wandered back out on to the ramp.

There they were. N132PA, the bright red Super Decathlon; and N94891, the little 152 that took me a long way on the journey from pedestrian to pilot. Both sitting there on the same ramp. A silent meditation of where I’ve been and where I’m going. And the echo of the tinny voice of a fellow pilot, his wife, and the neighborhood kids shouting in the background coming through my headset as I rolled and looped in a red airplane over the fields.

I’ll never be Greg Koontz. Or even a lesser airshow performer. And that’s okay. I’m superhero enough for myself right now. Reading, flying, listening, talking, and, most of all, dreaming. Exploring the envelope. Becoming a better pilot and a more capable human.

If I learned something that day, it’s this. Sometimes you spend too much time fantasizing about what it’s like to fly like Greg Koontz. And sometimes it seems like all journey and no destination – or at least no stops along the way.

And then a flight like this comes along. For 20 minutes, you’re the guy in the red airplane. And the kids are shouting and pumping their fists in the air and pointing at . . . you.

So you stand on the ramp with the 152 and the Super-D and just take it all in. And then you go home and cut the audio and write the script and try to tell a few thousand of your closest friends about what it was like. Just like now.

Most of the time, you’re the scared knucklehead in the 152 or the confused guy with the hood on in the 172 or the guy with the aching right leg in the Apache or the flight-suited CAP major trying to drink from the twin 10-inch LCD fire hoses of the G1000. But, on rare occasions, magic, love, and science meet and you’re the guy in the red airplane flying upside down for the shouting kids.

That letter to the editor showed me that there are red airplanes – and people who watch them – all over the country. I’ve sure as hell been the one watching. And it was nice to be the guy in the red airplane, just once.


Go find a red airplane. Or whatever amounts to a red airplane for you. The life that you dream about might well be happening even as you’re focused on the mechanics and procedures of getting it to come about. Life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Don’t miss those fleeting moments when you actually are some glimmer of the hero that you daydream of being.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m Superman and Harry Potter and Fletcher Seagull, all in good measure. I’m a pilot. And sometimes I’m even the guy in the red airplane.
____________________

Link to letter to the editor of the Fauquier Times-Democrat:
http://www.fauquier.com/letter/751/

Sutton Aviation:
6230 North Service Drive
Waterford, Michigan 48327
248-666-9160
http://www.sutton-aviation.com/

Greg Koontz Airshows:
2546 Slasham Road
Ashville, Alabama 35953
205-616-8176
greg@gkairshows.com
http://www.gkairshows.com/

Music:
Jon Schmidt
Winter Serenade (Sussex Carol)
http://www.jonschmidt.com/catalog/index.php
http://www.mevio.com/music/?artist_id=3736

Air Boss Brief from the Indy Airshow

Subscribe to Airspeed through iTunes or your favorite other podcatcher. It's all free!

These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen online right here by clicking: http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedIndyBrief.mp3.

I got to sit in on the air boss briefing at the Indy Air Show on Sunday to get a sense of what goes on behind the scenes. Here’s audio from the brief, pretty much uncut and as presented.

Thanks again to the Indianapolis Air Show for the great access!

Frame Grabs from the JATO Ride in the Blue Angels' C-130, Fat Albert

This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio (and there’s lots of that here!), please check the other posts.

The highlight of the day was a jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) ride on the Blue Angels’ C-130, known as Fat Albert.


I shot video of the flight, as well as the briefing before and some of the interior of the aircraft.

The in-flight video is a little blurry. I clamped the camera to the rail just above my seat and pointed it at the guys on the other side of the aircraft. I wish I had thought to clamp it over on the other side to get footage of myself, but I didn’t think about it until everyone was buckled in. Notwithstanding that, the folks on the other side were just fine as subjects.

The rail vibrated pretty badly throughout (and thus did the camera vibrate), so much of the video isn’t usable. But the zero-gee parts came out fine. This frame grab is from the top of the initial JATO climb, at which the pilot pushes the aircraft nose over and floats the occupants.


At the conclusion of the flight, they bring Fat Albert to a pretty abrupt stop and open the rear cargo door simultaneously. Everybody gets tossed forward, but not as hard as you’d expect. And, when you look out the back door, you see just how little runway they used to get her down and stopped. We’re talking a couple of thousand feet here.

The entire experience lasts only 12 minutes. It seems much longer. Among the new sensations on this flight are aerobatics with only limited outside references. There’s an approx. 18” window on the opposite side of the aircraft and you can sometimes see outside references (and sometimes not). When you can see the ground, it’s very close and it’s moving at around 350 knots.

I have audio, video, and stills that I’ll be turning into a full episode soon. Just wanted to get some of this material up so that you could see it right away.

Many thanks to the Indianapolis Air Show and to Fat Albert Airlines for this spectacular ride!

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

This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio (and there’s lots of that here!), please check the other posts.

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

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

Subscribe to Airspeed through iTunes or your favorite other podcatcher. It's all free!

These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen online right here by clicking: http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedIndy20090606.mp3.

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/

Indianapolis Airshow and Indy Transponder with Roger Bishop

Subscribe to Airspeed through iTunes or your favorite other podcatcher. It's all free!

These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen online right here by clicking: http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedIndy.mp3.

It’s time for the annual Airspeed prelude to the airshow season! This year, we talk to Roger Bishop, the chairman of the Indianapolis Airshow.

Many of us go to airshows, but too few of us appreciate what goes on months and even years before show day to bring you the experience. We got the inside story from Roger about what it’s like to schedule acts, attend the ICAS meeting, coordinate volunteers, plan for general aviation arrivals and departures, and make the whole thing come together seamlessly on the show days.



Roger is also heavily involved with the Indy Transponder, a premier aerotainment news and information site and we talk about what goes into maintaining and growing that resource.


More information about the Indianapolis Airshow

Indianapolis Airshow website: http://indyairshow.com/
Volunteer opportunities: https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/IndyAirShow/WishList.html
Maps and driving directions: http://indyairshow.com/visitors/directions/
Contact information: http://indyairshow.com/about/contact/

Post-Holiday Phase - On with Planning for 2009!

This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio, please check out the other posts.

New blog header image, first officer gets a tricked-out helmet to go with his STS pressure suit, I finished up the year at the office with a little to spare, and I can finally pull my head out of my butt and start planning in earnest for the coming year of aviation.

As many of you know from following along for the last couple of months, I’ve been pretty grim about the mouth (thanks, Herman Melville!). That’s the way it usually works in my law practice. I slack a little in the first nine months of the year and then face a massive push at the end of the year to get all of my work done. The annual member’s meeting in Chicago and being sick a couple of days in November didn’t help much and I ended up facing (and completing) the biggest December of my career.

But the good news is that I got it all in and, with any luck, I’ll bonus sufficiently to be able to afford some really cool flight activities this year. So, yeah, it’s worth it.

Lots of stuff in the pipeline.

I think I’m going to go get my seaplane rating in April in a PA-12 with Tom Brady at Traverse Air. I had a great time getting my multi with Tom in April 2007 and I think the seaplane rating will be a gas.

I’ll probably start the transition training to fly CAP’s C-182 with the G1000 out of KPTK. That’ll probably begin very soon. Probably a session or two on the ground, then we get into the air.

I might well head down to Griffin to do my recurrent training for the DC-3. If I do, I’ll probably go get some time in the Sky Arrow 600 to the north of Atlanta while I’m down there.

I’ve been invited to C-47 ground school at the Yankee Air Museum in March or April and will likely go do that.

I’ll keep on training with Barry in the Citabria for Aerobatics and additional tailwheel competency. Sutton also has a Super Decathlon on the line that we’re going to go fly soon. It has a smoke system (!) and, although Barry says that doing smoke makes the airplane dirty, I’m going to offer to buy the smoke oil and wash the plane if we can go fly with smoke at some point.

I’m planning to fly my mom somewhere while I’m at Jekyll Island this March. Probably go for a $100 hamburger or something. Should be fun.

I’m planning on five airshows this year, including Sun-N-Fun (Ella’s airshow debut) and Oshkosh. I’m also very excited about adding the Indianapolis Airshow this year. Roger Bishop has some really great plans for Indy and for the time surrounding that show, and I’m going to get him on the sow to do the annual airshow prep episode.

There’s lots more as well. I’m really excited about the upcoming year. I hope you are, too. I’ll see you out at the airport!