Fly Me Friendly

Well, it’s been a couple of days now and I’m pretty much recovered from the Avalon Airshow (although my feet are still a bit sore now & then :)

The big thing about this airshow was that it all just worked (aside from the traffic jam on Monday :). This was the first time that we had an AGO rep in the box with the “Ring Master,” allowing them to discuss the impacts of changes to plans, placement of aircraft and so on. In the past, this had happened via relaying between multiple people over radios and so on. Now that an experienced ground control person was involved from early planning through to execution, good decisions were made, people knew what was going on and bottlenecks were, on the whole, avoided.

This was reflected in comments from pilots saying how well it worked and that it was the best organised airshow they’d been to. It was also reflected in my general feeling that a lot of the chaos, madness & stress I’d experienced in past shows wasn’t present in this year’s show. Sure, we were running about and busy at times, there were occasional stuff ups but, on the whole, it just flowed.

A couple of negatives were the lack of radios for the ground staff (it’s frustrating trying to sort things out when there’s not enough people around with a good picture of what’s going on – doubt they can ever fix this one) and (the biggest annoyance of all) serving tuna sandwiches for the lunch. Not all the sandwiches were tuna on a given day, but if you were a bit late getting back to the Green Room for lunch, the “real food” would have already have been eaten. Bad luck if you hate fish, eh?

Another interesting item from this airshow included a friend of mine launching a new flight simulator based company, Flight Experience. They have a fixed-base 737-800 simulator and are offering flights to people – you can come in and see what it’s like on the cockpit of a new jet. You can also get type endorsement training and so on. Their big market though is people who just want the experience.

Once again I was able to bring Kitt and Nykolai down to have fun at the show on the Sunday, although they weren’t really impressed with the traffic hassles. Perhaps next time we can look at getting them in & out via train to Lara and the shuttle bus over. At least they had a great time and I got Nykolai into the cockpit of the Kittyhawk thanks to Steve Death (the pilot).

All up, I enjoyed it immensely and will definitely volunteer again (if I’m in Melbourne, etc :)

As yesterday was hot n windy, today was cold n windy with rain. What a change. The carparks were a sea of mud, as were the public areas around the airfield. It dried quickly but it took until the afternoon to settle down.

With the wind came FOD (Foreign Object Damage – bits of garbage blowing around the place) – a small plastic bag was seen being sucked into the right-hand engine intake of one of the RAAF F18s as it taxied back to its parking spot. Fingers crossed it’s not done any damage as this aircraft is part of the Lion formation aerobatic team (also known as the Green Lemons). They put on a very spirited demo in tight formation and with flares, earning them 10 from those of us judging the shows.

The day started off with a flurry of warbirds coming in, then settled down until about 11am when we had to get the Mustangs, Yak 9 and Kittyhawk into starting positions. Once they were started and had moved out to the warm up area, we pushed the A-37 Dragonfly into place so he could start up his jets then move out. About then it started to rain so we headed for the tents, coming out again to retrieve the first lot and then the Dragonfly.

After that it was “time off” for lunch as we had no more work on the warbird tarmac until the Southern Knights formation team went out in their Harvards. A quick push out to start up and they were off. We all headed down to the crowd line to get photos of the RAAF F-18 & F-111, USAF F-15, the F-18F Super Hornet and a fly by by a B-52 (including one pass at high speed at 500′ – wooo :)

Somewhere in there the Super Constellation came out (with brakes squealing) along with the Catalina and three Dakotas. They did a streamed take-off and then a few fly bys although Connie had to pull out and just land as they’d been forced to shut down #2 engine due to some problems (gotta love those big old radials :)

After all that, I wound up working the intersection (where Bravo meets Charlie’s loop section), handling aircraft coming back and going out. Eventually it all settled down and we closed up our tent (known as “The Green Room” ‘cos we’re section Green on the map).

One more public day then I’m back again on Monday to help get everything out that hasn’t managed to get out on the Sunday night.