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

Frame Grabs from Photo Mission with Billy Werth


This is a regular blog post. Looking for show notes or links to show audio? Please check out the other posts.

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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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/

Another G1000 Training Session in the CAP C-182T Nav III


This is a regular blog post. You can find show mores and links to show audio in the other posts.

I’m back in the Civil Air Patrol Cessna 182T Nav III completing the transition training. I went up with Capt Tim Kramer for 2.8 hours and flew from Oakland County International (KPTK) to Lansing (KLAN) (ILS 28L), then to Saginaw (KMBS) (RNAV 23 from MOGRE), then to Flint (KFNT) (VOR 18) before returning to KPTK (LOC B/C 27L).

We got a good 0.9 in actual IMC with about half of that in genuine inside-the-eggshell conditions and a little rain on the windshield. Maybe 20 minutes was in my favorite conditions, namely poking in and out of the tops just above an overcast layer. A little ragged down below and not as well-defined as I like up top, but really cool nevertheless. And we benefitted from that inasmuch as there wasn’t a lot of convection to beat us up.

The next flight will be the instrument failure and partial-panel stuff. The interesting thing is that, given the backup systems on the airplane, the worst failure of the core avionics still leaves me with as much, if not more, instrumentation than I’d have in a regular round-gage C-172. Yeah, the instruments are in different places (you have to look down at the center of the dash to see the backup attitude indicator, altimeter, and airspeed indicator) and your scan is a little different, but it’s still reasonably intuitive.


At the end of the next flight or during one additional flight, I need to get up and knock out any of the required 25 landings that I haven’t done yet (and I need that – I’ve been having issues with my sight picture for the flare and flaring a little high) and do the stalls, steep turns, engine-outs, and other airwork that I’ve not done yet in the airplane.

At that point, Tim gets out of the airplane and Maj Alex Craig gets in to administer my Form 5 ride, which will, if I pass it, qualify me to fly the C-182T for CAP as a mission transport pilot and to fly the airplane for currency.

This is such a wonderful and capable aircraft! And, as a CAP pilot, I fly it for $36/hour dry and instruction is free. You’re going to get tired of me harping about this but, if you’re a pilot or other aviation enthusiast and you’re not a CAP member, what are you waiting for? I guess I’ll keep on harping until the ranks of CAP roughly equal those of certificated pilots in the US.

The next flight is scheduled for Wednesday and then I’m off to Indianapolis for the Indy Air Show! Can’t wait!