Midair at Reno Air races

[knot4u]

Ask Reno next October if nobody cared. It started in the middle of the desert and no one cared, eventually Wide World of Sports covered it on CBS. But it was a different time, the really sad thing to me is the greatest battles never got much coverage outside of some magazines or newspapers. There was a small production company called Skyfire in the late '80s to early '90s that made videos that you could buy on VHS that would interview the pilots and crews during one of the most competitive and fastest periods of the races (I have some somewhere). It's all copyright material and whoever owns the rights won't let it out on YouTube. There was an Unlimited Gold race in 1991 when almost the entire field was full of fire breathing monsters and no one broke, some say it was the best race ever, it was the fastest race ever up to that point and it was actually pretty close. This is the only video I can find (I should also say that the area this video is videoed from is pretty close to where the T-6s that hit each other this year ended up). Enjoy, or not...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3lrJkoBseg

Edit: Wide World of Sports was ABC not CBS. ESPN tried to cover it for a few years (first time I ever saw my face on network TV) but it always seemed to fall flat and they gave up. There was a movie made about it in the '90s but it seemed as if it was a script hijacked by a studio and any authenticity had been carefully groomed out, the end result was an embarrassment for everyone involved other than the cinematographers, the camera work is outstanding. I've never seen it, but I've seen the trailer and I'm sorry to share it...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf-izM6ypzQ

 

[WacoFan]

My hunch is that it's over. Even if you could insure the event. And find a suitable place for a course that would satisfy both spectator views as WELL as safety. And could have this magical place be somewhere that is somewhat easily accessible to travelers. Even at that...Utah? Forget "gambling" - in Utah buying a caffeinated beverage counts as "sin". Even with all those challenges - Aviation has a marketing problem generally. Sure, people like the job of pilot and the check, but I just get a sense (for decades) that the overall excitement around aviation isn't what it used to be. Remember being sick and going to almost any drug store (or grocery store toy aisle) in the 70's and 80's - and finding model airplanes? It was awesome - I ALWAYS got a model airplane when I was sick enough to get a RX and needed to stay home. Not anymore. Hell, it's hard to find model airplanes outside of a hobby shop and good luck finding a balsa wood model. Air Progress, Air Classics, and Flying Magazine as well as Kitplanes would show up monthly at Kroger. Airwolf, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Call to Glory, Blue Thunder (RIP Dick Butkus) were all aviation heavy TV series. Where is marketing for aviation? I'm not talking about being an airline pilot - where would an air minded kid today find content that was mainstream enough they didn't really have to look hard for it? This is a problem.

 

[///AMG]

I dunno, maybe I’m just playing devils advocate here, but it seems like there is so much money and years invested in the races……I feel like it would be a bit surprising if it just went away forever. Are all those teams just going to park the planes in museums without even a fight to keep racing? At least I hope they don’t. I lived 40 mins from stead for 3 years, and told myself each year I’d make it happen and then life got in the way and i never did (in spite of making it to tailhook in Sparks generally the week prior each year). If for that reason alone, this cant be the end

 

[bimmerphile]

RARA is a broken organization trying to keep the races as ‘their thing,’ it’s just a host organization for different race classes. I think they will have trouble getting other classes to show up if they don't have a paradigm shifting leadership change to make it more viable- they’ve done nothing in the past 15 years to make it attractive to invest in a full blown unlimited racer of yesteryear. Several classes have gone out and gotten their own Air Race Organization certs from the FAA and will be doing their own thing going forward.

 

[knot4u]

I dunno, maybe I’m just playing devils advocate here, but it seems like there is so much money and years invested in the races……I feel like it would be a bit surprising if it just went away forever. Are all those teams just going to park the planes in museums without even a fight to keep racing? At least I hope they don’t. I lived 40 mins from stead for 3 years, and told myself each year I’d make it happen and then life got in the way and i never did (in spite of making it to tailhook in Sparks generally the week prior each year). If for that reason alone, this cant be the end

The fast planes haven't raced for years, I'm unsure if it was a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze (some of the owners have really deep pockets), a racing environment that seems almost hostile to the teams that all of the fans come out to see or just a societal change where hanging everything out to win is considered dangerous and distasteful. I remember talking to Lyle once about what it cost to go to Reno, our team was run on a shoestring budget and he said he basically went broke every year he went there even if he won. The entire crew, including John Penney, were volunteers. We had sponsors, some were monetary and some gave us product, some did both. Lyle was a retired Naval Aviator (flying Skyraiders off of carriers during Viet Nam) and a retired airline captain, with a pension from both, if he'd never gotten involved in air racing he would very likely ended up a wealthy man. But he just poured everything he could into that Bearcat and he and that airplane are icons, I'm proud of the time I spent working on it. I did get paid one time, Moya Lear (Bill Lears widow) used to give out a prize to whoever set a new qualifying record, one year we went out and ran 491 MPH and it was a new record. Lyle had every right to hang on to that money but he gave it back to the crew. I think I got $1200, if I averaged that out to $/hr it probably would've been around $0.96/hr, but I appreciated the fact that he did it. Rare Bear has been parked for years, same with Strega and Voodoo. Bardahl Special and Miss America were trying to get rowdy this year but it's not the same and it ended up not happening for tragic reasons. There are still rumors of projects, there's a new Tsunami being built by some of John Sanbergs family, Darryl Greenameyer was building Shockwave and Dave Cornell was building American Spirit (I actually went to Daves barn behind his house in the SFV and crawled around that thing, it was like Days Of Thunder). But it all stopped, with the exception of the Tsunami project, a decade ago and there are no really fast racers left. It's over.

 

[bimmerphile]

The fast planes haven't raced for years, I'm unsure if it was a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze (some of the owners have really deep pockets), a racing environment that seems almost hostile to the teams that all of the fans come out to see or just a societal change where hanging everything out to win is considered dangerous and distasteful. I remember talking to Lyle once about what it cost to go to Reno, our team was run on a shoestring budget and he said he basically went broke every year he went there even if he won. The entire crew, including John Penney, were volunteers. We had sponsors, some were monetary and some gave us product, some did both. Lyle was a retired Naval Aviator (flying Skyraiders off of carriers during Viet Nam) and a retired airline captain, with a pension from both, if he'd never gotten involved in air racing he would very likely ended up a wealthy man. But he just poured everything he could into that Bearcat and he and that airplane are icons, I'm proud of the time I spent working on it. I did get paid one time, Moya Lear (Bill Lears widow) used to give out a prize to whoever set a new qualifying record, one year we went out and ran 491 MPH and it was a new record. Lyle had every right to hang on to that money but he gave it back to the crew. I think I got $1200, if I averaged that out to $/hr it probably would've been around $0.96/hr, but I appreciated the fact that he did it. Rare Bear has been parked for years, same with Strega and Voodoo. Bardahl Special and Miss America were trying to get rowdy this year but it's not the same and it ended up not happening for tragic reasons. There are still rumors of projects, there's a new Tsunami being built by some of John Sanbergs family, Darryl Greenameyer was building Shockwave and Dave Cornell was building American Spirit (I actually went to Daves barn behind his house in the SFV and crawled around that thing, it was like Days Of Thunder). But it all stopped, with the exception of the Tsunami project, a decade ago and there are no really fast racers left. It's over.

Shockwave was purchased by someone with experience and the know how to make it happen... a friend has an unlimited project in the works too. May be some time but I think the unlimiteds will evolve into a post warbird era. Might not end up pylon racing but there's always record attempts.

 

[knot4u]

Ask Reno next October if nobody cared. It started in the middle of the desert and no one cared, eventually Wide World of Sports covered it on CBS. But it was a different time, the really sad thing to me is the greatest battles never got much coverage outside of some magazines or newspapers. There was a small production company called Skyfire in the late '80s to early '90s that made videos that you could buy on VHS that would interview the pilots and crews during one of the most competitive and fastest periods of the races (I have some somewhere). It's all copyright material and whoever owns the rights won't let it out on YouTube. There was an Unlimited Gold race in 1991 when almost the entire field was full of fire breathing monsters and no one broke, some say it was the best race ever, it was the fastest race ever up to that point and it was actually pretty close. This is the only video I can find (I should also say that the area this video is videoed from is pretty close to where the T-6s that hit each other this year ended up). Enjoy, or not...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3lrJkoBseg

Just wanted to point out something many people might miss, that green Sea Fury with the gold spinner actually got lapped twice in that race by the top three racers, that's how fast the fast guys were.

 

[trafficinsight]

Until they tell me it's over I'll hang onto it not being over.

One bright spot is that I watched an interview with them and those locations submitted bids to host... this isn't just RARA (or whatever they become) saying "we want to race here." It's those locations saying "we want you to race here."

 

[knot4u]

Shockwave was purchased by someone with experience and the know how to make it happen... a friend has an unlimited project in the works too. May be some time but I think the unlimiteds will evolve into a post warbird era. Might not end up pylon racing but there's always record attempts.

I hope they do it. I've got a pretty good idea where Shockwave went, Greenameyer, Boland and Law are/were very smart people. It will be fast, will it be "that" fast? Maybe. But thinking it's going to be perfect right out of the box is naive. In 2023 dollars it's going to cost millions to break a record no one cares about. I hope the owner has deep pockets, it's a vanity project. I guess that's air racing summarily defined.

 

[knot4u]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm8y2t9m87I

 

[bimmerphile]

I hope they do it. I've got a pretty good idea where Shockwave went, Greenameyer, Boland and Law are/were very smart people. It will be fast, will it be "that" fast? Maybe. But thinking it's going to be perfect right out of the box is naive. In 2023 dollars it's going to cost millions to break a record no one cares about. I hope the owner has deep pockets, it's a vanity project. I guess that's air racing summarily defined.

it's definitely going to be a huge question mark as a one off design, in line with Tsunami's woes if not more complicated

 

[knot4u]

it's definitely going to be a huge question mark as a one off design, in line with Tsunami's woes if not more complicated

Tsunami was a true home built one off. Shockwave seems more like Dreadnought (a proven air race champion, not the fastest but probably the most reliable Gold Unlimited racer in history, they call it the Buick for a reason) on steroids. Critical Mass and September Fury, or 232, were both Sea Fury's that tried to utilize what had been learned had been learned on the Bearcat (slow nose case, and some of the other mods made to keep a 3350 running hard from disassembling itself without warning), they were both fast. If I recall 232 won a fast race and they should be proud. A Bearcat is big compared to a P-51, both are small in comparison to a Sea Fury, especially a Sea Fury with a 4360. I understand that we could make 4000 hp with questionable reliability and Dreadnought could do it all race and on the way home without ever going past take off power. But that's a big, heavy engine and airplane. Did you know the tall vertical stabilizer that Dreadnought used (because even as big as a Sea Fury is that 4360 needs a lot of authority) during it's fastest periods was damaged by a photo airplane and was replaced with a stock one and it's never been as fast as it used to be? I'm uncertain if an F-86 tail is up to the task, it sounds wonderful at top speed but you have to taxi, take off and accelerate, turn around a point below a certain altitude at each end of the course and repeat that a few times and then slow down and land. You can't set a record if you can't get off the ground. Claiming you went 600 mph means nothing to the FIA (the people who keep track of these things). Here's a video of the Bearcats 528 mph run...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaiekUo-j3g&t=269s

 

[knot4u]

And Voodoo breaking it (kind of)...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jha18gdhI6Y

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_WDFpaE2IY

 

[knot4u]

My apologies, the Voodoo video I thought I was sharing has disappeared. They went very fast, probably faster than the Bearcat but the engine started to lay down on the last couple of runs. Sounds familiar Lyle was running 545s when he ran out of nitrous (there was plenty of capacity but the tanks weren't full, that's a campfire story). Trying to do this is almost impossible if your government isn't backing you. I'd be happy to help but not if it's half assed.