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#NotAtSnF11

April 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

These are the show notes to an audio episode. You can listen to the show audio by clicking here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/airspeed/AirspeedNotAtSnF11.mp3. Better yet, subscribe to Airspeed through iTunes or your other favorite podcatcher. It’s all free!

I’ve been fortunate over the last three years to make appearances on Sun ‘N Fun Radio, the event radio station for the Sun ‘N Fun Fly-In in Lakeland, Florida. And, the last two years, I’ve done it even though I was a good 900 miles from the show site.

With the assistance of David Allen at the station’s site, I looped in podcasters from all over the US and from Australia for #NotAtSnF11, a show featuring people who are not at the show but who wish they were. Although this has all of the material that went out over the air, we kept the tape rolling so that you guys get to hear what does on behind the scenes during one of these shows.

Participants this year were as follows.

Steve Visscher and Grant McHerron of Plane Crazy Down Under

Chris Holub and John Conway, two thirds of the In the Pattern

Will Hawkins from The Pilot’s Flight PodLog and A Pilot’s Story

Bill Williams of The Pilotcast

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CAP NESA MAS Narrative Episode Nearing Completion

March 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

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

Part 2 of the NESA coverage is coming along, slowly but surely. It’s about 12,000 words at the moment and shows little sign of slowing before it has topped 15,000. It’ll be another characteristic epic-length Airspeed episode. And that’s a good thing.

As many of you know, I attended the Mission Aircrew School at CAP’s National Emergency Services Academy at Camp Atterbury in Indiana this year as part of the Mission Pilot track. I really don’t want to hurry the episode out of my head. There’s a nice stew of ideas in there and the prose only gets better with reflection. I rarely take an entire week off from work for any reason. The last time I did that was in 2005. So you can tell that I went down to Camp Atterbury with a mission to do the school and to get it right.

That resulted in a great experience and a lot learned in my first real taste of CAP operations. Flying a SAR pattern to within 50 feet laterally and vertically by GPS raw data without touching the yoke except to turn for the next swath of the lawn. All while sweating profusely with a demanding IP in the back and having to take a leak most of the time. Genuine bandwidth challenges.

And the reflective belts, all-ranks club, death by PowerPoint, and all of the other elements that have given Dos Gringos’ SOS new meaning. Yeah, I almost made a red hat disappear while I was there. So the episode is coming along and it’ll likely be one of the next two to hit the feed. And I’ll update you if it’ll be longer than that.

Information about this year’s NESA is available at http://www.nesa.cap.gov/.

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Video Episode: The "Hammer-Spin" Sequence from Acro Camp

March 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

These are the show notes to a video episode. You can see the video by subscribing to Airspeed through iTunes or your favorite other podcatcher or by clicking on the embedded Vimeo video above (helpful if you’re reaching out through a .mil firewall). In any case it’s all free!

The movie is coming along! After spending most of February dealing with a bacterial infection in my leg (which, by the way, the doc says is looking great and won’t affect my fitness to fly in any way), I’m back to burning the midnight oil (and whatever else is nearby and flammable) and editing Acro Camp, Airspeed’s first feature film.

The sequence in this episode is Jim Rodriguez’s “hammer-spin” from the third day of flying at Acro Camp. Jim had just begun to get the hang of the hammerhead in the Super-D when he went up with Don in the Berz Flight Training Pitts S-2B. And he found out the exciting way that the Pitts doesn’t need anywhere near as much forward stick.

The cool thing is that he also found out that the Pitts is pretty well-behaved when you get off the power and let go of the stick. It comes right out of the spin and wants to know what else you want to go do.

There’s a lot of editing yet to be done. But I think that I have the workflows pretty well nailed down and it’s going a lot more quickly than it was this fall. We have between one and three cameras and a cockpit audio track to load in for each flight and this was the first flight that I went and put together with that workflow. It worked like a charm.

On the musical front, I just got in a treatment of Acro Grass, one of the themes that we’ve crowdsourced to Airspeed fans, from Grammy-nominated audio ace Scott Cannizzaro and it’s amazing. It’s been spewing from my iPod all day now and I think I like it better each time.

If you’re musically inclined and want to lay down some tracks for consideration for inclusion in the film’s soundtrack, there’s still time. I’m in no danger of finishing the film soon, so you probably have at least through April to get your tracks in.

I’m also working on the CAP NESA audio episode. As is obvious to anyone who knows me, the NESA experience made a big impression and I really want to capture the whole experience. Thus, the writing is taking its own sweet time. But it’ll be a characteristically epic Airspeed episode when it comes out.

More soon. Stay tuned!

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Valiant Air Command TICO Airshow 2011

March 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment


This is a regular blog post. Need show notes or links to show and video? Keep scrolling. It’s all here!

I spent Friday at the Valiant Air Command TICO airshow at the Space Coast Regional Airport in Titusville, Florida. I went primarily to meet and hang out with the Starfighters, who operate the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. My primary objective was to shoot the F-104 and get a couple of interviews to use on Airspeed and for Acro Camp.

That meant being there most of the day with the team there on the ramp, which is actually in the aerobatic box for the show. Oh, no! Please don’t throw me in that briar patch! How ever will I cope!

So, whenever nothing was happening with the blue-and-white Century Series jet, David Allen and I shot the rest of the show in both stills and video. The only downside of shooting from the ramp was the fact that the showline is positioned so that you have to shoot up-sun. I can’t really complain about that, but it did result in most of the usable shots being of those performers with more to-and-fro (as opposed to back-and-forth) elements to their demos.


Take, for instance, this one of the Maj Mike “Cash” Maeder and Capt Steven “Buda” Bofferding tearing it up in the F-15E. Great noise and great three-dimensionality to the demo. And, although I could be mistaken, it looked to me as though there’s a lot more inversion and a lot more high-G maneuvering in this year’s routine.


Because of the aforementioned geometry of the show, the remainder of the shots are heavily weighted in favor of the Heavy Metal Jet Team, which flew its inaugural demos this weekend.


This one probably benefited from the geometry. It’s still pretty up-sun, but I don’t think that one could shoot down the length of the solo’s barrel roll from any other angle.


Among my new favorites is Mark Sorenson, who flies a Yak-55 named Titus that’s painted in tiger livery. Mark embraces the playful presentation of the airplane and he loves to show off the airplane to kids.

Dave and I helped Mark wipe down the aircraft after he returned from flying and I had a chance to talk to him at length. We met initially at ICAS in December, but the proper place to hang out with a pilot is on the ramp or in the hangar while scraping bugs off the leading edges of a pretty airplane. I’ve maintained a loose correspondence with Mark’s brother, who’s an F-15E driver at Nellis AFB. I frequently wish that my family was a little more aviation-intensive like the Sorensons.

Mark operates ground-based smoke-ring generators that put huge black smoke rings up into the box that he then flies through. I didn’t get to see the smoke rings on this occasion, but I’ve seen the video and I’ll bet that it adds a more three-dimensional feeling to his presentation. Mark doesn’t fly many shows to the north, where I am, so I doubt that I’ll get to see him fly at another show. But you never know.

More information about the Valiant Air Command TICO Airshow is available at http://www.vacwarbirds.org/.

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Endeavour Rolls Out

March 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for snow notes or links to show audio or video, please keep scrolling. It’s all right here!

How many times should one try to start a blog post before giving up on erudition and just writing something that poses a grave danger of sounding like a fifth-grade book report? The number is at least three, but it’s greater than the number of tries that I ultimately made before writing this.

I normally head down to Jekyll Island, Georgia each march to visit my folks, who spend two months there each winter. About every other year, I detour to Kennedy Space Center to feed my space monster. I need to touch home there on the Cape to recharge the batteries.

I was thinking about that awhile ago and called up Mike Robinson of the Starfighters to see if he might want to drink such beer as I might buy upon passing through. Mike, ever the considerate guy that he is, suggested sliding my schedule to the left by a week to include the TICO airshow here at the Space Coast Airport. And, being that the Starfighters have a NASA connection, he allowed as how I might be able to see some of their operations there at KSC.

Say no more. I moved the dates and came down this weekend instead of last weekend.

And then, by happy chance, it happened that the roll-out of STS orbiter Endeavour for STS-134 was slated to occur this evening. Long story short, I spend a bit of this evening at the VAB watching Endeavour roll out to Pad 39A.


The launch assembly crawls out of the VAB and then hits the gas and begins to move at a more blistering mile-per-hour pace. Once it’s well and truly out of the VAB, the spotlights illuminate it and it stands out in dazzling white.

The parking lot is full of people. Most, like me, are shooting pictures, babbling like kids, or drooling. It’s going on 9:00 at night, so just about everyone on this side of the fence is here because he or she wants to be here. Everybody’s a fanboy and it shows.


STS-134 is a run to the ISS to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) and spare parts, including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank, additional spare parts for Dextre and micrometeoroid debris shields.

Also, as matters stand, it’s slated to be the second to the last STS mission. Which makes it bittersweet to see it roll out. Discovery just landed from its final flight yesterday. So everyone is aware of the era ending.


I suppose that I shouldn’t be bothered as much as I am. I’ve always been the first guy to complain that the STS has given us a space pacifier that has kept the public’s mind off the fact that our manned space program hasn’t left low earth orbit since 1972.

But the STS has been the county’s flagship space program for most of the time during which I was growing up so, like it or not, the STS has a place in my heart. It’s weird to see an orbiter recede into the night like that.

There are much more profound things to say about this evening. Probably in some larger context and in more concise form. For the time being, I think it’s probably enough to acklowledge how grateful I am to the Starfighters for the access to the rollout and the chance to see the great lady up close. And to walk among a crowd of people that is just as excited as I am about being there.

Big day tomorrow here on the Space Coast. More soon!

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