newt
Well Known Member
Well, this event knocked it out of the park.
On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the Freedom to Fly Formation Display Team, which (as far as we can tell) is the largest aerobatic formation display team in the southern hemisphere, performed at the Pacific Airshow.
To set the scene:
The Pacific Airshow has been turning heads at Huntington Beach for many years now. It's "redefining the airshow experience" by running as a remote show, where the audience can sit on the beach sipping margaritas or splashing with their kids where the waves lap against the shore while air displays are happening over the water. Massive family event, fun in the sun with music and street performers and bars and food instead of spending all day standing on an airport.
The organizers have had a problem, which is that Huntington Beach can only take so many people, so the only realistic way to expand was to run the same event in more than one place. After four years of planning, the Pacific Airshow has come to the Gold Coast, at Surfers Paradise in Queensland, Australia.
We've been there waving the flag for RVs and general aviation. We're RV-6's and -6A's, RV-7's and -7A's, a Subaru-powered RV-8, and a Yak-55. Thirteen aircraft all-up.
We've had RVs on the 6 o'clock news for five days running. TV news coverage was great. This one segment from Sunday got our 13 ship “Balbo,” our 4-ship acro team, and my synchro opposing pass crossover with Malcolm. I don't think there's been any news coverage that hasn't shown our team, and we've also become a regular shot on the Pacific Airshow's social media advertising collateral.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZpeHL3kNY2yF1CNY9
On Wednesday our 500’ smoke-on pass over Gold Coast International Airport got the front page in the newspaper (which is to be expected when you smoke-up a press conference). Time on target was perfect, we arrived just as the Mayor was finishing his speech. Other pilots might hear, "Negative Ghostrider, the pattern is full," when they ask to buzz the tower, but ATC just gave us a clearance.
Thursday was the official practice day, and that’s when it started to be apparent that a formation of 13 airplanes fills a camera frame well enough to be automatically photogenic. Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook lit up with pictures of RVs doing loops and rolls and tail-chases at 300’ over the water in front of 1200’ apartment buildings.
We got a fantastic reception from the organizers. Ken Ashmore said his team was sceptical about an RV formation, but as soon as he saw us perform he felt vindicated. Sean D Tucker said we’d done something really quite special and had a great future. Wayne Boggs gave us an individual call-out during the roll call in the Sunday briefing to say what we pulled together was “world class, just out-standing.”
We put on a great spectacle, with action and movement and smoke everywhere. We structured the routine to start gently and build up into a crescendo of movement and action that culminated in our opposing pass. Big feedback item from lots of people we talked to was, “There’s so much going on, we didn’t know where to look!” which was exactly the kind of impression we wanted to set. We sprayed out enough smoke to leave the display box IMC for the next act
On the last day, our usual fifteen minute walk to the hotel took more than an hour because we kept getting stopped by people who wanted us to autograph their shirts and take selfies with them. Utterly surreal for a team of earthmoving contractors, retirees and IT consultants to be mobbed like that. I don’t know how proper famous people do it without losing their cool, but it was a lot of fun for a few hours during the airshow.
The best bits for me was when I was signing a hat or a poster for some 12 or 13 year old, and telling their mum and dad in an exaggerated whisper, “Hey, you’d better hope she doesn’t find out it’s legal to get a pilot license at 15 and start training at 14. She could be flying before she gets to drive a car!” and seeing her face light up with realisation while mum gritted her teeth thinking about the expense. Might have hooked a few in, time will tell. That's what it's all about.
The crowd estimate from Queensland Police on the last day was somewhere between 100,000 and 125,000. We have video taken from apartment buildings where you can hear the crowd on the beach cheering as we make our initial run-in. It sounds like a distant English soccer pitch just after a goal, more than a hundred thousand people shouting like lunatics for a bunch of mates who mess about with RVs on weekends.
The team is:
Jeremy Miller (Yak-55)
Gavin Nour (RV-7A)
Ollie Geraghty (RV-7A)
Brayden Rowley (RV-7)
Eddie Seve (RV-7)
Kevin White (RV-6A)
Don Harvie (RV-6)
Mal Kains (RV-6A)
Glenn Bridgland (RV-7)
Pete Grogan (RV-7A)
Martin Russel (RV-7)
Mark Newton (RV-6)
James Weightman (RV-8)
We’ve put in a lot of effort, training and planning with the professional assistance of a crowd of very accomplished volunteers around us.
In no particular order, because prioritising these fine people would be unfair:
Trent Stewart, an airshow pilot who’s performed in Australia and by invitation in China, was our ground coach, helping us nail the sight-lines and timings. When we got it bang-on, we could rely on him to say, “Gotta tell you, guys, I felt some movement right there.”
Matilda Mendham, our volunteer crew chief, ran around like a woman possessed to service our airplanes with fuel and smoke oil during our briefing sessions at training camps and during the show itself. We couldn’t have done it without her, but we’re going to have to learn because we want her flying with the team next time.
Lorenzo Hariman and Dominic Hubert, our team photographers, were invaluable with video footage during debriefs. We’d go out and fly our 13 minute routine then spend an hour and a half going through 8K video from cameras that cost more than our airplanes to analyze our defects and look for improvements.
Angela Stevenson, our commentator and musical coordinator, did a fantastic job. She filled the crowd with information about who we were and what we were doing. She ran up to high-five me after the Saturday show because she’d lined up some music that went “doof doof doof bass-drop,” and synchronised it perfectly so the bass drop happened at the exact moment of the crossover break during our opposing pass. She said it was a career highlight she’d never be able to do so perfectly ever again, then she went and did it again on Sunday.
Tony Self from Australian Flying Magazine did a 6 page spread on the team in the 60th anniversary edition in Sep-Oct 2023, and made us look fantastic.
Our wives and partners have put up with absences and distractions for months, and deserve special thanks. We’re back, and now have time to fix broken light bulbs and mow the lawn.
And Jeremy Miller, our instructor, mentor, coach, choreographer, and formation lead. Pulling something like this off has been one of his career ambitions, and we’re all pleased and proud to help him fulfill it. He’s shown the world what general aviation pilots can do when they’re dedicated, well-trained, instilled with a disciplined professional safety culture, and equipped with tremendous quantities of smoke oil.
We also need to thank our sponsors. It costs a lot to run a team of 13 airplanes for three training camps (we calculated that our 13-ship passes are consuming $1.30 worth of smoke oil per second). We had sponsors to cover training fuel, smoke oil, meals and accommodation. Our sponsors included Segway Ninebot, AvPlan EFB, UPRT Australia, Mach-5, Cloud 9 Roofing and Guttering, Skyfuels, Full Throttle Photography, and Punkinhead Canopy Covers. Special callout to the Sports Aircraft Association of Australia (SAAA), our equivalent of EAA, who have been absolutely fantastic and very supportive right from the start.
Build or acquire an Experimental Amateur-Built Aircraft, fly it, train in it, and you too can aspire to fly with some of the very best pilots in the world. That's the message we want to convey to our audience: That's what we've done, you can do it too.
It’s been an amazing weekend. We’re looking forward to being invited back next year, when the event is going to be even bigger.
Over three days, we showed a few hundred thousand Australians what RVs flown with safe professionalism by general aviation pilots can do, and they loved it. There’s going to be more. In the words of Airboss Wayne Boggs, “I guar-ran-tee it.”
- mark
On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the Freedom to Fly Formation Display Team, which (as far as we can tell) is the largest aerobatic formation display team in the southern hemisphere, performed at the Pacific Airshow.
To set the scene:
The Pacific Airshow has been turning heads at Huntington Beach for many years now. It's "redefining the airshow experience" by running as a remote show, where the audience can sit on the beach sipping margaritas or splashing with their kids where the waves lap against the shore while air displays are happening over the water. Massive family event, fun in the sun with music and street performers and bars and food instead of spending all day standing on an airport.
The organizers have had a problem, which is that Huntington Beach can only take so many people, so the only realistic way to expand was to run the same event in more than one place. After four years of planning, the Pacific Airshow has come to the Gold Coast, at Surfers Paradise in Queensland, Australia.
We've been there waving the flag for RVs and general aviation. We're RV-6's and -6A's, RV-7's and -7A's, a Subaru-powered RV-8, and a Yak-55. Thirteen aircraft all-up.
We've had RVs on the 6 o'clock news for five days running. TV news coverage was great. This one segment from Sunday got our 13 ship “Balbo,” our 4-ship acro team, and my synchro opposing pass crossover with Malcolm. I don't think there's been any news coverage that hasn't shown our team, and we've also become a regular shot on the Pacific Airshow's social media advertising collateral.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZpeHL3kNY2yF1CNY9
On Wednesday our 500’ smoke-on pass over Gold Coast International Airport got the front page in the newspaper (which is to be expected when you smoke-up a press conference). Time on target was perfect, we arrived just as the Mayor was finishing his speech. Other pilots might hear, "Negative Ghostrider, the pattern is full," when they ask to buzz the tower, but ATC just gave us a clearance.
Thursday was the official practice day, and that’s when it started to be apparent that a formation of 13 airplanes fills a camera frame well enough to be automatically photogenic. Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook lit up with pictures of RVs doing loops and rolls and tail-chases at 300’ over the water in front of 1200’ apartment buildings.
We got a fantastic reception from the organizers. Ken Ashmore said his team was sceptical about an RV formation, but as soon as he saw us perform he felt vindicated. Sean D Tucker said we’d done something really quite special and had a great future. Wayne Boggs gave us an individual call-out during the roll call in the Sunday briefing to say what we pulled together was “world class, just out-standing.”
We put on a great spectacle, with action and movement and smoke everywhere. We structured the routine to start gently and build up into a crescendo of movement and action that culminated in our opposing pass. Big feedback item from lots of people we talked to was, “There’s so much going on, we didn’t know where to look!” which was exactly the kind of impression we wanted to set. We sprayed out enough smoke to leave the display box IMC for the next act
On the last day, our usual fifteen minute walk to the hotel took more than an hour because we kept getting stopped by people who wanted us to autograph their shirts and take selfies with them. Utterly surreal for a team of earthmoving contractors, retirees and IT consultants to be mobbed like that. I don’t know how proper famous people do it without losing their cool, but it was a lot of fun for a few hours during the airshow.
The best bits for me was when I was signing a hat or a poster for some 12 or 13 year old, and telling their mum and dad in an exaggerated whisper, “Hey, you’d better hope she doesn’t find out it’s legal to get a pilot license at 15 and start training at 14. She could be flying before she gets to drive a car!” and seeing her face light up with realisation while mum gritted her teeth thinking about the expense. Might have hooked a few in, time will tell. That's what it's all about.
The crowd estimate from Queensland Police on the last day was somewhere between 100,000 and 125,000. We have video taken from apartment buildings where you can hear the crowd on the beach cheering as we make our initial run-in. It sounds like a distant English soccer pitch just after a goal, more than a hundred thousand people shouting like lunatics for a bunch of mates who mess about with RVs on weekends.
The team is:
Jeremy Miller (Yak-55)
Gavin Nour (RV-7A)
Ollie Geraghty (RV-7A)
Brayden Rowley (RV-7)
Eddie Seve (RV-7)
Kevin White (RV-6A)
Don Harvie (RV-6)
Mal Kains (RV-6A)
Glenn Bridgland (RV-7)
Pete Grogan (RV-7A)
Martin Russel (RV-7)
Mark Newton (RV-6)
James Weightman (RV-8)
We’ve put in a lot of effort, training and planning with the professional assistance of a crowd of very accomplished volunteers around us.
In no particular order, because prioritising these fine people would be unfair:
Trent Stewart, an airshow pilot who’s performed in Australia and by invitation in China, was our ground coach, helping us nail the sight-lines and timings. When we got it bang-on, we could rely on him to say, “Gotta tell you, guys, I felt some movement right there.”
Matilda Mendham, our volunteer crew chief, ran around like a woman possessed to service our airplanes with fuel and smoke oil during our briefing sessions at training camps and during the show itself. We couldn’t have done it without her, but we’re going to have to learn because we want her flying with the team next time.
Lorenzo Hariman and Dominic Hubert, our team photographers, were invaluable with video footage during debriefs. We’d go out and fly our 13 minute routine then spend an hour and a half going through 8K video from cameras that cost more than our airplanes to analyze our defects and look for improvements.
Angela Stevenson, our commentator and musical coordinator, did a fantastic job. She filled the crowd with information about who we were and what we were doing. She ran up to high-five me after the Saturday show because she’d lined up some music that went “doof doof doof bass-drop,” and synchronised it perfectly so the bass drop happened at the exact moment of the crossover break during our opposing pass. She said it was a career highlight she’d never be able to do so perfectly ever again, then she went and did it again on Sunday.
Tony Self from Australian Flying Magazine did a 6 page spread on the team in the 60th anniversary edition in Sep-Oct 2023, and made us look fantastic.
Our wives and partners have put up with absences and distractions for months, and deserve special thanks. We’re back, and now have time to fix broken light bulbs and mow the lawn.
And Jeremy Miller, our instructor, mentor, coach, choreographer, and formation lead. Pulling something like this off has been one of his career ambitions, and we’re all pleased and proud to help him fulfill it. He’s shown the world what general aviation pilots can do when they’re dedicated, well-trained, instilled with a disciplined professional safety culture, and equipped with tremendous quantities of smoke oil.
We also need to thank our sponsors. It costs a lot to run a team of 13 airplanes for three training camps (we calculated that our 13-ship passes are consuming $1.30 worth of smoke oil per second). We had sponsors to cover training fuel, smoke oil, meals and accommodation. Our sponsors included Segway Ninebot, AvPlan EFB, UPRT Australia, Mach-5, Cloud 9 Roofing and Guttering, Skyfuels, Full Throttle Photography, and Punkinhead Canopy Covers. Special callout to the Sports Aircraft Association of Australia (SAAA), our equivalent of EAA, who have been absolutely fantastic and very supportive right from the start.
Build or acquire an Experimental Amateur-Built Aircraft, fly it, train in it, and you too can aspire to fly with some of the very best pilots in the world. That's the message we want to convey to our audience: That's what we've done, you can do it too.
It’s been an amazing weekend. We’re looking forward to being invited back next year, when the event is going to be even bigger.
Over three days, we showed a few hundred thousand Australians what RVs flown with safe professionalism by general aviation pilots can do, and they loved it. There’s going to be more. In the words of Airboss Wayne Boggs, “I guar-ran-tee it.”
- mark
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