BAC Strikemaster Gun Cam Frame Grabs

Yesterday was the first performance day at the Battle Creek Field of Flight Airshow and Balloon Festival. I spent the day on the ramp getting planeside interviews with some of the performers for use here on Airspeed and for vignettes for Acro Camp. When the performers withdrew into Duncan Aviation for their briefing, I wandered over to an L-29 Delfin and a BAC Strikemaster that are part of Jerry Conley and Andy Anderson’s jet combat act.
After the briefing, one thing let to another and the team offered to put my HD Hero in the nose of the Strikemaster. I used one of the flat adhesive mounts and put it on the landing light just inside the bubble window in the nose of the aircraft.

The result was great “gun cam” footage of high-speed passes like this one. They used pyro on the ground as a part of the act and this pass gives you a great view of a few of the pyro charges going off.
Here, the Strikemaster swoops back on the airport after a few ore of the pyro charges have gone off.
If you look to the right on the horizon line, that’s the L-29 headed in the opposite direction. With a closing speed in excess of 900 mph, it just flashes by. I think slow-mo treatment in the video episode will bring this out nicely.
Here’s a nice shot of the threshold of Runway 23 (soon to be Runway 23R) on the final approach to land. That’s Western Michigan University’s flight school on the left, the ANG Base on the right, and the crowd line about halfway down on the left.
And, of of course, your friendly host shooting a few pictures of the camera installation just before retrieving it from the airplane after landing.
I spent the rest of the day over at the CAP static display handing kids into and of a C-182T. I took my camera along and left it in the tent that CAP shared with the Yankee Air Museum B-25. When I got back at the end of the day from helping to put the airplane away, everyone (including the camera) was gone. It turns out that the B-25 folks grabbed the camera and kept it safe overnight. So the camera is in friendly hands, but a couple of hours’ drive away. Thus, no pictures from the still camera in this post. They’re going to ship it back to me in time to head to California for an Air Force ride next week. I’ll pull the best of the pictures off and get them up here as soon as the camera shows up in the UPS truck.

Battle Creek 2010 – Media Day


Yeah! It’s Battle Creek time again! The Battle Creek Field of Flight Airshow and Balloon Festival is going on now through Sunday in Battle Creek, Michigan.

I spent the day on the field (when I wasn’t up in a balloon) and shot stills and video and caught up with my friends there. And, naturally, I got a preview of the attractions this year.

Randy Harris of Bearfoot Aerobatics really flies beautifully. I think his Skybolt 300 is one of the most photogenic airplanes on the field this year. It was really catching the sun today in a way that not a lot of aircraft do (especially when you consider where the sun is when you’re facing north on a crowd line but the acro is flown along Runway 5-23 – You have very narrow angular area where the sun makes it worthwhile to shoot). The airplane puts out a lot of smoke, too, which makes the presentation even more dramatic.


The F-22 Raptor is headlining the show this year. It’s no secret that I’m a huge raptor fan and I got up close and personal with both of the specimens that were on the ramp. David “Zeke” Skalicky, Maj, USAF, is flying the Raptor this year and he put her through her paces. I can do some of that stuff in a Citabria, but I have to do it at 60 KIAS and then I have to recover from the ensuing spin. The handling is just too sweet for words. My only complaint is that the aircraft doesn’t come in a two-seat variant.

The Raptor is flying with a F-4 Phantom II for the heritage flight. I’ve never been a Phantom fan because I’ve always seen it as a misguided foray away from the core Boydian energy-maneuverability philosophy that makes this kind of flying worthwhile. The Phantom was a missiles-only ship for most of its operational service life. Only later did they add the gun. Maybe the Raptor (which is about as automated an aircraft as we have that still has a seat in it and fights BVR and drops JADAM) ) is the more proper expression of what the Phantom’s designers had in mind.

I’m hopelessly romantic about the idea that one ought to crank and bank and engage in combat where the actual maneuvers of the airplane matter. Regardless of whether the Raptor fights BVR, it can move like nothing else out there and perhaps there’s poetry in flying the Phantom in the formation – Maybe the Raptor is the redemption of the Phantom. Or maybe I’m full of crap. Either way, the Raptor is much more fun to watch than the Phantom. Even if the Phantom has two seats.

Am I over-thinking this? Come on, Steve, it’s an airshow! Enjoy yourself! Truth is, I really am enjoying myself. The formation flight is beautiful and well-executed and I’m having a great time.


I interviewed the safety officer for the demo team in front of the airplane for Airspeed and Acro Camp. It was a good interview and he was enthusiastic about the airframe. I need to get his name from his tag in the video. The team was ready to brief the demo and the captain was very kind to take a few minutes to do the interview at that point in the day. I don’t have the hardware to pull the video off the cards here in Battle Creek, so it’ll have to wait until I get back the Airspeed HQ.

Last thing about the Raptor. I know that everyone thinks that a jet team like the Thunderbirds of the Blues is necessary to anchor an airshow. And nobody loves jet teams more than I do. But I think that the F-22 is a wholly satisfying anchor demo for an airshow. For the reasons stated above and because it gives the show an opportunity to really craft the mix of other acts on the schedule. This is a really satisfying airshow with 100LL and JP-8 burners and pyro and other elements. I’m really looking forward to watching this tomorrow with a crowd pressed up against the snow fence.


The Iron Eagle Aerobatic Team was also there to play. Formation acro is just such a quantum leap from single-ship acro. And these guys get really close and match each other so nicely. It’s just a joy to watch. Satisfying prop whine, lots of smoke, and dramatic coverage of the show line. What’s not to like?


Bob Carlton demonstrated some truly beautiful stuff in his Super Salto. It’s a sailplane powered by the PBS TJ-100 jet engine that puts out 225 pounds of thrust, which is more than enough to aloow the sailplane to self-launch and makes it the only sailplane on the airshow circuit capable of performing a low-level, jet-powered airshow program. I didn’t expect to enjoy Bob’s routine as much as I did. Maybe it’s the same thing I feel when I’m watching John Mohr or Greg Koontz. Although the Super Salto has a jet engine, it’s not that powerful and I’d imagine that it requires some pretty good pilot chops and attention to energy management to make it do the things that Bob makes it do.
Get the heck out here and enjoy this show! The weather is supposed to be great, the schedule is well-rounded, and the grounds are ready to go. Adults are only $10 and kids under four feet are free!

Balloon Flight with Dale Wilson in Seventh Heaven


I didn’t expect to get up in a balloon today. Or this year, for that matter (or at least not during this particular year’s iteration of the Battle Creek Field of Flight Airshow and Balloon Festival). After all, I had a spectacular experience with Dave Emmert four years ago or so. But, then, again, the show was audio-only at that point and now I travel around with something like five HD video cameras and am getting a little better every day at editing video and making video episodes.

So I showed up this morning bleary-eyed with about two hours of sleep under my belt, intending to say hello at the media center, shoot a few pictures to back an arrival blog post, and then go sleep in the parking lot of a Starbucks for a few hours.

But, through a happy twist of chance, Dale Williams had an open slot for a flight in his balloon, Seventh Heaven (N7252W, a Firefly AX7 with about 76,000 cubic feet of envelope volume). Might I be interested? Do bears dookie in the woods? Heck, yeah!


I met Dale and his happy band of balloon chasers just outside the gate and we headed off to Emmett Township, south and east of the airport. This was a three-point target exercise where we’d launch wherever we wanted at least 2,500 meters away from the first target and then try to drop streamers on each of the three targets.

It turns out that Dale and Dave Emmert are friends and, the more I think about it, I seem to recall Dave talking about Dale during the recording of the prior episode. In any case, Dave was there on hand as we tried to figure out where would be best to launch Seventh Heaven. As before, this involves some science, some magic, some consent by landowners, some hemming, some hawing, and some BS. Various groups released small helium balloons (called “pieballs”) to try to obtain a near-realtime guess about the winds. Our group was no different and we released one and then watched it intensely.


There seemed to be consensus about where the ideal launch point would be, given the winds aloft. Many of the teams ended up along the same stretch of road where we were.


Then came the process of attempting to obtain permission from the landowners to launch from their fields and/or yards. Imagine someone knocking on your door at 0700 on a Friday and a asking permission to grow a 76,000 cubic-foot multicolored bubble on your lawn. We actually knocked on the door of the house in front of which we stopped. No answer.

I’m still surprised at the spaces in which balloon pilots will launch. The yard looked small to me, but these guys were talking about whether they could get two balloons up from the space.

I got a kick out of one team that launched before we did. They set up in someone’s front yard and the balloon actually required a lane of the road to fully inflate.


We obtained permission to launch from a recently-mown field and we were in the second wave of balloons to do so. It begins with a gasoline-powered fan to inflate the envelope (the bag that most of us think of as the “balloon”), Then you begin blasting away with a 2 million (yeah, that’s million) BTU burner and the envelope stands up pretty rapidly and is ready to fly.

I climbed in and off we went.


We spent a lot of time around 1,400 feet AGL, which is where the winds that we wanted seemed to be. Balloonists “steer” by changing altitude. As nearly as I can tell, the ideal situation for a balloonist is two wind currents at roughly 90 degrees to one another. You let the higher one push you along and then you descent into the lower transverse one (at the right moment, by the way) to hook around to the target before ascending into the higher one again to set up for the next target.

Dale prefers to be closer to the treetops. I agree with him. It’s really amazing just cruising along less than 100 feet off the canopy of trees. As I alluded earlier, this is going to be primarily a video episode and you’ll definitely get a sense of the drift from the video. Maybe mot Will Hawkins quality, but it should be pretty good.

We essentially missed the first target, but scored on the second. The third proved to be out of reach, so we began looking for a place to land.


We found it in the form of a residence off to our left. If the places in which balloonists launch surprise me, the places at which they land amaze me. But, then again, I suppose that someone brand new to airplane flight might be surprised that I can put an airplane down reliably on a runway that’s 75 feet wide. It’s all in the experience.

Dale deftly maneuvered the balloon onto the back yard of the residence. We missed the power lines, the ornamental shrubs, and everything else. A couple of bounces and we were on the ground.

You leave the balloon standing up until the crew gets there. There are several reasons for this. First, your footprint is pretty small. Second, your crew can wrangle the balloon to the ground relieving you of most of the worry about dropping the balloon onto something like the ornamental shrubs. (Or the dog. Yes, there was a dog. Or, rather, a horse shaped like a German Shepherd. Named Ozzie.) And, if there are obstructions between where the balloon is and the chase vehicle, you can just lay on the burner until the balloon is neutrally-buoyant and you can have the crew walk the balloon over fences and other stuff to reach a more suitable place to deflate it.


It turns out that we weren’t even the first balloon to set down in this yard. I guess it’s just something that comes with owning a house near Battle Creek. Ballooning is more intensive here than in most other similarly-situated geographies and the balloon festival and airshow brings in competitors and fun fliers from all other the region. Not the worst thing to have come out of the sky every once in awhile.

And, in fact, the people to whom we talked from the balloon (yeah, you can do that) seemed un-fazed by the balloon floating less than 100 feet above their heads. I even had a casual conversation with a lady in her driveway about how she could e-mail me and I’d send her the picture that I had just shot of her and her house. I got her e-mail a couple of hours later and I e-mailed her a couple of pictures in the middle of writing this post.

I have some video editing and production to do, but this ought to make for a good episode. I’m looking forward to putting it out.

Spins with Barry

I have a really cool Air Force ride coming up in California in a couple of weeks. Think helmet, mask, and speed jeans. (Yeah!) And, although I’ve filmed other people doing aerobatics a lot lately, I haven’t flown a lot of aerobatics. Out of respect for the crew chief (and personal pride), I decided to get up and crank an airplane around for an hour or so.
So I scheduled the Citabria and Barry for a couple of hours. We went out and did some falling-leaf stalls, an incipient spin or two, and then some genuine spins. Good kill-proofing no matter who you are and I highly recommend doing it at least once a year. And it was also enlightening in terms of the control inputs required. I really over-controlled the first couple of recoveries, but got pretty good about just relaxing on the subsequent recoveries.

And, of course, I hung some cameras in (and on) the airplane. I might use some of the footage as B-roll for Acro Camp. But the primary use is likely to be an episode about spins. The in-cockpit camera leads this post. This one is a view from the wing camera. This is the first time I’ve flown a forward-facing wing camera with no airframe in the picture. I think it worked out beautifully and I’ll probably shoot more with this POV. The only change might be that I’ll land abnout five feet to the right of the centerline so that the camera (mounted on the left wing strut) is directly over the centerline, this giving the viewer a sense of floating in over the center of the runway.
I also flew a camera mounted directly above my lap to show the control inputs associated with the maneuvers. The stick disappears below the dash at some points, but the angle generally gives a good view of the controls. “Knees and nuts!” as my CAP NESA MAS instructor likes to say.

I’m off to the Battle Creek Airshow tonight and hope to get out to the balloon launch first thing tomorrow morning. Thus, I leave you with these teasers. More soon from Battle Creek!