Ever wonder what happens to high-performance aerobatic airplanes at the end of an airshow season? They get taken apart, that’s what.

Brian Norris, who handles aircraft maintenance for veteran show pilot Sean D. Tucker, writes in an email:

We ended our 2012 airshow season on Saturday, November 3 in Thermal, California.  We then repositioned the airplane to the Team Oracle hangar at our home base in Salinas.  On Monday morning, November 5th we began the teardown at 9:06am.  We worked until noon, then took a one-hour lunch break.  We then re-attacked the plane at 1 pm and finished with the initial teardown at 3:19pm.  Of course, the airplane has been torn apart even further since then, but this is the first swipe at it.

After the team (Norris, Tom Dygert, Clyde Greene, Jimmy Graham, and Chad Colberg) disassembled the Oracle Challenger III, they started in on their postseason to-do list. Norris runs through the steps:

- The entire airframe is being inspected and all hardware replaced
- All sheet metal and carbon fiber is stripped and repainted
- The fuselage fabric is replaced and repainted
- The fabric from the wings is removed, the wings are inspected, recovered and repainted
- The prop is sent back to Hartzell to be overhauled
- The engine is sent to our engine shop and completely overhauled

Norris says they hope to have the airplane back together and ready for its first test flight by the third week of February.

Photographer Dennis Biela captured the teardown in this two-minute time-lapse video.

Plenty of fans returned for the 2012 Reno air races, although the stands weren’t full, except in Section 3, home of the orange shirts. Photos: Caroline Sheen

The crowning event of the 2012 National Championship Air Races in Reno, held at the last moment on Sunday afternoon—the race for the Unlimited Gold trophy that we race fans eagerly wait for all year—was, it must be said, a little dull. And everybody loved it. The tragedy at last year’s race wasn’t far from anybody’s thoughts, so this year, with nerves on edge, we were happy with predictable. Predictable was good.

We could predict that Strega, the streamlined P-51 Mustang piloted by young, handsome, perfect Steve Hinton, Jr. would win. We could predict that at least one racer’s engine would refuse the punishment that a Gold race dishes out, and, yeah, based on how pilot Stu Dawson was babying the engine on the F8F Bearcat Rare Bear during the early races, we thought it might be the Bear that would pull up before the race was finished. And so it did, leaving Hoot Gibson and the Sea Fury 232 in second place. We were all pretty sure that another Sea Fury would perform well: the Sanders brothers’ Dreadnought, which won the Gold in 1983 and has been a presence in the Unlimited class ever since. It was nice to see Dreadnought move into third place and join the stars in the 2012 winner’s circle.

Hoot Gibson in 232 chases Stu Dawson in Rare Bear. In the box seats, Larry Cruz (far right in Strega number 7 T shirt) cheers them on.

But the real stars of the races this year were in the stands. Larry Cruz of Puyallup, Washington, who last year was in a box seat only a few feet away from the spot struck by Jimmy Leeward’s Galloping Ghost, came back to cheer the racers from the exact same seat. Cruz spent months in the hospital recovering from his injuries: a severed hand, crushed leg and foot, fractured skull, and dozens of wounds from flying pieces of airplane. When photo editor Caroline Sheen and I visited his box, a constant parade of people stopped in to shake his one hand and wish him well. Cruz and his friends had the Margarita machine going.

Not all the people who witnessed last year’s horror made the same decision as Cruz and Cherie Elvin’s family, who returned despite their mother’s death and injuries to other family members. Several news organizations reported that advance ticket sales were 8 percent lower than in previous years, and one look at the stands on Sunday, when there usually isn’t a single empty seat, made it clear that only about 85 percent of the fans had returned.

A banner hanging on the back of the grandstands holds messages for the families of those who died in last year’s crash.

In an empty space in the pits, where the Galloping Ghost was parked last year, were bouquets of flowers. There was a Missing Man formation flyover, a moment of silence for those who died, a counselor on hand for people who were still struggling with their feelings, words of comfort spoken to the crowd by Nevada senator Dean Heller, and hundreds of quiet conversations among the race community, remembering where they stood and what they saw and heard that awful day, and offering to one another sympathy and encouragement. And there was Section 3, the group of famously rowdy fans all wearing orange T-shirts and all committed, according to several who spoke to us, to coming back next year for the 50th anniversary of the National Championship Air Races.

The Hawker Sea Furys owned and raced by Brian and Dennis Sanders are celebrities at the 2012 races. (Photos: Caroline Sheen)

The 2012 National Championship Air Races are underway — an event that many believed had run its last race last year after pilot Jimmy Leeward crashed into the crowd, killing himself and 10 spectators. Last year’s tragedy changed things here in Reno, in ways that are barely perceptible to race fans. The most noticeable change was psychological; those of us who watched the P-51 Strega handily win the Unlimited Gold heat Friday afternoon breathed a little easier at the race’s end, reassured that a race could be flown without calamity. (It was during a race of the Unlimited class last year when Leeward’s airplane got away from him.)

At the recommendation of the National Transportation Safety Board, the air racing association has modifed the course, bringing its boundary 150 feet farther in from the grandstands and softening the turn around the pylons closest to the race’s finish. The airplanes don’t seem farther away than they were last year, but they are. The fuel trucks that had been lined up along the ramp are gone, moved to a location farther from the race course.

Hoot Gibson and his Sea Fury.

The new course is “workable,” said race pilot and former astronaut Hoot Gibson, who flew Sea Fury 232 to second place in the heat that Strega won. On the smaller course, the race pilots pull more Gs than in the past. “It’s not causing me any difficulty,” Gibson said, “but I was a fighter pilot and I’ve had 41 years of experience pulling Gs.”

What’s not workable, according to Gibson, is the 250-foot altitude limit, also a recommendation of the NTSB. The altitude limit is the result of a calculation: how far a piece flying off an airplane would travel. The so-called “scatter radius” is smaller at a lower altitude and the imposition of the limit would theoretically keep a piece of an airplane from flying into the crowd of spectators. In the 48 years of racing at Reno, an airplane part has never flown into the crowd, so the altitude limit seems a solution in search of a problem. And it’s a dangerous solution. “If you get three airplanes rounding a pylon together, the only place you can go is up,” Gibson said. “This is a safety issue and they’re going to have to fix this next year. You’re asking for a mid-air.”

The racing association is also looking harder at modifications that owners make to the raceplanes. Leeward’s aircraft was barely recognizable as a P-51; the air scoop had been eliminated and cooling system changed from air to water cooling, and the wings had been shortened. But technical inspectors here, the crew chiefs who have to submit the paperwork, the board members in charge of reviewing the documentation—all had difficulty describing what exactly had changed in this regard: Racing association technical inspectors have always checked the aircraft before they’re raced; the results of that inspection have always been documented and reviewed by association teams and Federal Aviation Administration officials.

In the pits, the teams are upbeat, happy to be racing again. Pete Blood of Billings, Montana, who maintains the Tigercat Here, Kitty Kitty, called this year’s gathering “the best healing event.”

The world rarely notes what goes on at the Reno air races, unless a tragedy like last year’s shoves the event into the headlines. Most of the people reading those headlines have never seen an air race and can’t fathom why, despite the danger, the race community is so passionate about keeping the sport alive. This year especially, when the race teams and fans converge on Reno for this unique event, they’re back among friends who understand.

Peter Garrison dissected the phenomenon of flutter in his 2001 article, “The Hammer.”

Seldom reported and little understood, [flutter] occupies one of those dimly lit and unsafe places that decent people prefer not to visit. The idea that an airplane could shatter—disintegrate—for no reason other than its own motion through the air—better to let sleeping horrors lie.

Garrison went on to explain that flutter is a form of resonance, or sympathetic vibration, as seen in an out-of-balance tire. However, “Out-of-balance tires seldom lead to structural failure of the car because automobile suspensions are vastly overbuilt for the loads they normally encounter. But airplanes, which must be kept as light as possible, are not superfluously stout. They are capable of failing with sudden explosiveness when flutter sets in.”

In our April 1987 article on the Dash 80 (the prototype Boeing 707), test pilot Dix Loesch recalled that the Dash 80′s tail also was prone to flutter, and that “flutter was a black science then [in the 1950s]. When the flutter guys started talking to their bosses, everybody else just sort of looked at the ceiling.”

The vibration frequency of an aircraft section in the throes of flutter is so fast that it can’t be detected by eye. It’s visible only in slow-motion videos like these:

Crowds surround Howard Hughes' Lockheed Model 14-N2 Super Electra, after the aviator's 1938 round-the-world flight. Courtesy NASM.

In 1938, Howard Hughes and his crew set a world record by circumnavigating the globe in just 91 hours (3 days, 19 hours). They took off from New York City in a Lockheed Super Electra, and co-pilot and navigator Thomas Thurlow wasn’t too happy with Hughes’ piloting:

When Howard first cracked the throttles, it felt to me like the ship was tied. I pushed with everything and swore at Howard for not pouring on more power in a hurry. I felt uneasy when we hit the runway and were doing only a scant twenty, if that. From then on the run lasted for an eternity. I was relieved when the ship felt light, but at the same time I knew we were about out of runway.

The aircraft was fitted with cutting-edge radio and navigational equipment, including a “navigation robot” invented by W.L. Maxon, which could calculate the user’s exact geographic location. Thurlow, then a lieutenant with the U.S. Army Air Corps, was “loaned” to Hughes for the record-setting attempt, as he understood how to use the Maxson navigator better than anyone.

The crew at the end of the record-setting flight. Lieutenant Thomas Thurlow is on the far right. Howard Hughes is second from left. Courtesy Tamara Thurlow Field.

It was the first time the device was used on a civilian airplane. If successful, it would be installed in Army bombers. “While the Hughes flight is a remarkable tribute to powerful and reliable motors,” noted the July 23, 1938 Science News Letter, “it is to this robot navigation computer that much of the success of the flight is credited. No matter how well a plane may fly, or how easily, it matters little if the navigators cannot, at all times, exactly fix the plane’s position and plot the proper direction over distances of thousands of miles.”

Thurlow’s granddaughter, Tamara Thurlow Field, has just published Thurlow’s diary of the attempt (Flying With Howard Hughes). While the diary isn’t very long, it provides a candid look at the billionaire pilot, and gives new details about the record-setting flight. Thurlow mentions that Hughes became uneasy as the aircraft approached Paris: “It is a natural reaction suffered by pilots who have not done a great deal of navigation flying in which the navigator has complete directional control of the airplane and the only knowledge of position,” wrote Thurlow. “I was amused, but felt guilty about it. Howard’s responsibility was a great one, and the obvious fatigue from which he was suffering was not helping matters any.”

The team’s effort would win Hughes the Harmon Trophy as well as the Collier.

Jimmy Leeward's P-51, the "Galloping Ghost." (Photo: Julia Kirchenbauer)

On Wednesday the National Transportation Safety Board issued preliminary findings on the cause of the accident that took the lives of race pilot Jimmy Leeward and 10 spectators last September 16. Based on its preliminary findings, the Board made seven recommendations to increase the safety of air racing. They all seem reasonable enough, and many race fans, wondering whether or not air racing would even continue after last year’s horrific accident, probably breathed a little easier when they saw words used in the recommendations like “evaluate the feasibility of ” and “develop a system that.” What many of us feared were words like “stop.”

One finding in particular demonstrates the value of external review. It came in a letter to Thomas Camp, the president of the National Air Racing Group Unlimited Division. The raceplanes in this division are almost all modified warbirds, like P-51 Mustangs or Hawker Sea Furys, that weigh at least 4,500 pounds. (Leeward’s P-51 “Galloping Ghost” was racing in this division when it crashed.) In the letter to Camp, the NTSB pointed out that the division’s rules for highly modified warbirds are not the same as those for airplanes custom-built to race in the division. Owners of custom-built airplanes have to prove that their aircraft are structurally sound within the anticipated flight envelope, but the warbird modifications are not required to be flight tested “while operating within the speed and flight regimes that would be encountered on the race course.”

According to Reno Air Racing Association spokesperson Valerie Miller-Moore, the association will consider the NTSB’s recommendations with those of a blue-ribbon panel the association put together last January. That panel, says Miller-Moore, was also directed “to look at the event as a whole, at everything and anything,” and was given maps of the course and layouts of the stands. Members of the panel are race pilots Steve Hinton and Jon Sharp, former NTSB chairman Jim Hall, and former FAA associate administrator for aviation safety Nick Sabatini. Miller-Moore says the association expects the Blue Panel report within two weeks. Though declining to specify which ones, she also says that the association has already implemented some of the NTSB recommendations.

The racing association has scheduled the 2012 event for September 12 through 16.

“SteadFast’s” World speed Record Flight. from Principal Photography on Vimeo.

NTSB member Robert Sumwalt at today's hearing.

As far as Washington hearings go, today’s National Transportation Safety Board panel on air race and air show safety was cordial. But the questions and answers suggest a battle brewing.

Panelists, including FAA officials and air show professionals, described procedures and regulations already in place to assure safety at shows and races. Board members were, politely, looking for more—some response to last year’s terrible show season, when a pilot and 10 spectators were killed at the Reno air races and five pilots were killed in airshow crashes. It appears that just strengthening existing procedures may not cut it.

The sternest moment of the morning session came when NTSB Chair Deborah Hersman pressed Reno Air Racing Association officials to explain how the prescribed 1,000-foot buffer zone between spectators and the race track had been decided. She assured RARA president Mike Houghton and rules chairman Michael Major that this was an area the NTSB would look into.

Several board members wondered whether special medical certificates should be required for the more physically demanding flying done by racers and show pilots, and that’s a good point. Others questioned FAA Flight Standards officer John McGraw about how much oversight the FAA had delegated to airshow professionals in certifying pilots and aircraft. A reasonable concern, although one would think that airshow professionals are precisely the right people to certify pilots and aircraft. Their survival as a profession depends on it. Plus they know their stuff—probably better than FAA officials, who are responsible for overseeing many different types of operations.

Even though International Council of Air Shows president John Cudahy emphasized that airshows hadn’t had a spectator fatality in more than 50 years, the NTSB was searching for a change to recommend. Increased setbacks? More regulations? More thorough inspections of aircraft modifications? Increased standards for pilots? Air boss George Cline may have given them one answer. As an air boss, Cline has overseen safety standards and operations at airshows for 20 years, but he is not certified—because there is no certification program for an air boss. Create the standards for certification, Cline suggested. Not a bad idea, but I have a feeling it won’t stop there.

Pipistrel-USA takes first place at the Green Flight Challenge. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Thirteen teams signed up for the Challenge, but only three teams made it to the actual race without dropping out or being disqualified.  Performed over the course of a week, the challengers must meet requirements in three separate tests: noise, performance, and speed.

Two teams were up to the task, fulfilling all requirements.  The electric powered Pipistrel scored first place, announced at the awards ceremony Monday afternoon.  According to its website:

The Taurus Electro G2 [model of Pipistrel] can use a shorter runway, climbs faster and performs much better than the gasoline-powered version when it comes to high altitude operations. All this is possible thanks to the specially-developed emission-free Pipistrel’s 40kW electric power-train.

One other plane was up to the challenge, though with slightly lower scores than the Pipistrel: the e-Genius. Also a two-seater electric plane, the German plane uses a 60-kilowatt motor and is backed by Airbus.  Though it didn’t take top honors, the team will still take home $120,000 for second place and an additional $10,000 for the Lindbergh Quiet Aircraft Prize.

The Green Flight Challenge was founded by the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFE) Foundation and is sponsored by Google, while NASA provides the total $1.65 million in cash prizes through their Centennial Challenges Program.

From the Chicago Daily Tribune, November 28, 1920: “At last the pride of the Army air service, the Verville-Packard chasse biplane, has established its worth by romping ahead of thirty-four starters in the first Pulitzer trophy aeronautical race, held Thanksgiving day at Mitchel field, Mineola, [Long Island, New York].” The airplane was piloted by Lieutenant Corliss C. Moseley, who flew the course in 44 minutes and 29 seconds: “Never in the history of official flying in America has a man traveled with such great velocity,” the paper reported.

First Prize from the first Pulitzer Air Race, awarded to Lieutenant Corliss C. Moseley in 1920. Courtesy Bonhams.

The race met with great enthusiasm. “A wonderful showing,” exclaimed Charles Dickson, the president of the Aero Club of Illinois. “Why, I tell you that before the middle of next summer our skies will be filled with planes…. We’ll have passenger and express lines stretching out from Chicago like the spokes of a giant wheel. Everybody will be flying.”

Finishing second was Captain Harold Hartney, who completed the course in a Thomas-Morse scout in 47 minutes and 3/100 seconds. Third was Albert “Bert” Acosta—the only civilian—in an Italian Ansaldo S.V.A. More than half the race finishers flew de Havilland DH-4s, aka “the flaming coffin,” nicknamed for its temperamental pressurized gas tank.

The gold trophy from this first Pulitzer Air Race will be auctioned at Bonhams on Sunday, September 4, and is expected to fetch between $15,000 and $20,000. The race was the highlight of the National Air Races in the early 1920s, much like the Indianapolis 500 was for automobile fans. Sponsored by the New York World and the St. Louis Dispatch to promote aviation, the Pulitzer race ran from 1920 to 1925; the large silver trophy (listing all winners from 1920 to 1925) is part of the National Air and Space Museum’s collections.

The Pulitzer Trophy, designed by Mario Josef Korbel, exemplifies early Art Deco style. The trophy lists the winners from 1920 to 1925. Courtesy NASM.

Moseley would go on to help found Western Air Express in Los Angeles in 1924.  Authors A.D. Hopkins and K.J. Evans write in The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas, that in 1925, Western Air Express “was not yet in the passenger-carrying business.” But on one flight to Las Vegas that August, as his heavily laden biplane struggled to get off the ground, Moseley saw a hand grabbing on to the wing’s outer leading edge. The hand belonged to a 16-year-old “hobo who had been admiring the plane.” After Moseley coaxed the boy onto the wing (he was too frightened to get into the cockpit), Moseley continued on to Los Angeles where, the authors report, “the boy had been stripped of every stitch of his clothing except his cuffs and collar” by the 90 mph winds. The stowaway “was never named, but was reportedly given a train ticket back to Las Vegas.”

And some clothes, we hope.

Grace Sefton Mayer with her biplane. Photo courtesy of the Grace Sefton Mayer Family.

“Here is a group of feminine flyers who don’t just fool around with flying,” reported the Los Angeles Times in January 1934. “They hardly ever powder their noses. They don’t even carry mirrors. They’d rather poke their not unhandsome little noses into a balky carburetor than riffle up a pack of bridge cards seven days—and evenings—a week. They deserve everything they get.”

The paper was referring to the Ninety-Nines, a group of female pilots who had organized in November 1929. (The name comes from the number of charter members—it was originally “the 86s,” then “the 97s” and, finally, “the 99s.” Early rejected monikers included “The Climbing Vines,” “Noisy Birdwomen,” “Homing Pigeons,” and “Gadflies.”)

Grace Sefton Mayer. Photograph courtesy of the Grace Sefton Mayer Family.

One of their number was Grace Sefton Mayer, the fourth Pennsylvania woman to qualify as an aviator. Not well known today, Mayer was a gifted soprano who was equally comfortable singing folksongs (in eight languages) as well as the classics. She also played the violin in the New York Philharmonic and sang in the New York Opera. Mayer learned to fly in Florida, receiving her pilot’s license on March 3, 1930. While her family doesn’t have any records or photographs to show if Mayer ever participated in any races, they do know that she flew throughout the 1930s, but gave up flying in later life.

Photograph courtesy of Bonhams & Butterfields.

On March 21, Bonhams & Butterfields is auctioning off a five-strand coral bead necklace originally owned by Mayer. (The necklace is expected to bring between $4,500 and $6,500.)

The Ninety-Nines are still active; their Web site notes, “Today Ninety-Nines are professional pilots for airlines, industry and government; we are pilots who teach and pilots who fly for pleasure; we are pilots who are technicians and mechanics. But first and foremost, we are women who love to fly!”

His other ride: Brown after his STS-77 shuttle landing in 1996.

Where do old astronauts go? Some of them simply can’t shake that need for speed, so they strap on exotic aircraft and sign up for the Reno National Championship Air Races. Of the three astronauts who have taken up air racing — Hoot Gibson, Bill Anders, and Curt Brown — Brown, a two-time Reno champion, is the most recent headliner, having flown the fastest speed ever recorded in the 47-year history of the race: 543 mph, during qualifying laps on Tuesday, Sept. 14, in his modified Aero Vodochody L-29 Delfin.

When, in 2009,  Guy Clifton of the Reno Gazette-Journal asked Brown which was more fun, racing at Reno or flying the shuttle, Brown replied:

“Well, I have more fun here because it’s me. I don’t mean that in an egotistical way. I give NASA and all the folks credit – we’re just the tip of the spear. A lot of engineers and really smart, dedicated folks that make all that happen. We just get the privilege of being on the vehicle. But out here, it’s just me and the plane out on the course. I have a great ground crew getting me ready to go. But once I take off, I don’t have mission control trying to help me, I have me trying to help me. To me it’s more rewarding. And here in Reno it’s kind of like an inside joke with pilots: We get to do things that are totally way illegal anywhere else in the world at any other time. Out here we can really go fast, close to the ground, have fun with other airplanes. Even if we blow a motor up, the FAA doesn’t care, we just pop up, we land. You can’t do that anywhere else.”

The H1 and its owner in 1932.

At an “Ask An Expert” lecture by John Anderson, National Air and Space Museum curator of aeronautics, I learned that although Howard Hughes’ H-1 racer is displayed wearing its cross-country “long” wings, the high-speed-dash wings, which are shorter, are in storage at the Museum’s Garber facility in nearby Suitland, Maryland. Curators initially thought about removing the cross-country wings and installing the high-speed wings, but Associate Director Peter Jakab said,”It was an enormously complex job.” The H-1 has worn its long wings ever since.

I also learned that in the mid-1970s, the General Services Administration took ownership of Hughes’ H-4 Flying Boat. According to NASM’s catalogue of aircraft: “A three-cornered deal was arranged among GSA, the Smithsonian, and Hughes. The Smithsonian was given title to the Goose for a ‘legal instant’ and the deal immediately concluded with the exchange of the Spruce Goose for the H-1 and $700,000.”

NASM ought to put the short wings on eBay. Wouldn’t all us prop-heads love to hang them on a wall?

T-6s vie for the lead at Reno (Photo: David Peters)

For the first time in the 100-year history of air racing, fans can watch a live broadcast of the sport from the aerial race course in Reno, Nevada. This Sunday, September 20, the final races in all six categories will appear at LiveAirshowTV. With cameras in the grandstands and in the control tower at Reno Stead Field, Jeff Lee, LiveAirShowTV president, plans to give fans at home the experience of being at the races—with a little extra. Lee will have a camera in the Extra 330 flown by aerobatic performer David Martin and in the cockpit of at least one of the big warbirds—P-51 Mustangs, F8F Bearcats, and Hawker Sea Furys, among others—racing in the Unlimited Category (the big guys weighing more than 4,500 pounds that everybody comes to see). The Unlimiteds get up to about 500 mph as they roar around pylons set on an eight-mile oval course.

But it’s gonna cost ya.  The live broadcast is a subscription-only offer at LiveAirShowTV.com. Lee says fans should sign up now—or at least before Sunday—so they won’t miss any of the action: before and after interviews with race pilots, a live broadcast of the Blue Angels flying their routine at Reno, and of course the races themselves.