NBVC Point Mugu Airshow 2007

Point Mugu (a.k.a. Naval Base ventura County) puts on a really great military airshow. It's just a shame that they don't get to do it very often. Sometimes the show is cancelled, and sometimes the marine layer causes visibility to be unacceptably low, especially starting in the mid afternoon. But in 2007 all the planets aligned: They decided to put on an airshow, they had an amazing line-up of cool military jets, AND the visibility was barely good enough for the Thunderbirds to perform (although they did have to pause their act on a couple occasions so as to be able to locate each other from miles apart, and set up their passes).

The airshow included an F-15E demo and an A-10 demo, as well as the last F-117 demo ever to be flown in California (since the Stealth will be retired next year). The SuperHornet demo was flown during the pre-airshow practice on Friday, but a maintenance issue grounded all US Navy SuperHornets sometime between Friday's practice and Saturday's airshow, so we did not get to see the fantastic demo the Navy has choreographed, one that shows more high-angle-of-attack, high-sideslip, slow-speed manouver than any other jet demo in the Americas. But that's ok, because this meant that the F-22 demo, which was supposed to be only 6 passes, was expanded into 18 passes to make up for the missing SuperHorner demo. And oh, what fantastic passes those were - they alone were worth the trip. The show also featured an L-39 demo with a wall of fire, four aerobats, some C-130 fly-bys, and of course the USAF Thunderbirds, as well as a surprise landing of a USAF C-17 that was flying in the area but had some engine trouble.

And the air was so humid, that every little drop in air pressure around the aircraft caused the water vapor in the air to condense: wingtip vortices, prop-tip vortices, LERX vortices, lift over the wings, and trans-sonic shockwaves. When the F-22 was at a high-enough angle of attack, even the relatively small amount of lift from the nose and fuselage was enough to hide the whole jet inside a huge cloud. Absolutely fantastic.

If you were in LA that weekend, I don't know what plans you could possibly have had that caused you to miss such an awesome military airshow.

So let's get started with the review. First, the static displays. Not a lot of pointy fighters - just an aggressor F-5 and an F/A-18 - but plenty of relatively unusual naval aircraft, such as an E-2 Hawkeye radar plane, a P-3 patrol plane, a C-2 used to carry people and cargo onto aircraft carriers (below there is a shot of the C-2 cockpit), some cool helicopters... There was also a T-6 Texan 2, a B-52, a small Yakovlev, a FedEx 727, a business jet... The highlight, in my opinion, was the Navy's drone-launching C-130, nicknamed "Taco Bell" due to the fact it's painted as brightly as your typical fast-food restaurant. This Herc can carry small unmanned jets under its wings, and drop them in mid-air. They then fly (either autonomously or by remote-control) into a weapons-testing/training range (which is patrolled by a P-3 to make sure no one else is flying in there) and are shot down by whatever weapon is being tested or by whomever is being trained in that weapon's use. The airpsace over the waters outside Pt Mugu is one of the few places in the US where a fighter pilot can come and actually fire a live missile that actually blows something out of the sky. Most of the base's personnel, equipment, and activities, are here to support this kind of testing and training. The target-drones used include the Northrop BQM-74 Chukar and Ryan BQM-34 Firebees, seen below. Both drones have been produced since the early 1960s, being often upgraded for higher performance and better controls as well as for uses such as cruise missiles and recon. Ryan just recently stopped making Firebees, and Chukars are still being made. Both are still being shot down on a regular basis.

The first loud vehicle to roll down the runway was not an aircraft but a jet-powered car, called the "Star Raider". I had never seen this one before. I have seen jet vehicles at airshows, and they are usually big trucks (like Kent and Les Shockley's Shockwave) or small dragsters (like Bill Braack's Smoke-&-Thunder ), but this one went out of its way to look like a spaceship. Whatever. It looked kinda cool but kinda fake (like the Robosaurus, I guess, which also makes the occasional airshow appearance), and its speed run was quite brief. But still, it's nice to see something different.

And now, the flying displays. The airshow organizers were kind enough to save the best for last, so we started with the aerobats. They may not stimulate the adrenal glands quite as much as a loud fighter jet, but imagine yourself sitting in that cockpit while the airplane tumbles end-over-end in a strangely-angled fall, and you can get an idea of what a wild ride the pilot must be experiencing. And it doesn't take a lot of knowledge about aviation to realize that it takes great skill to tumble an airplane, to make it corkscrew upside down, to do hesitation rolls or knife-edge flight, to skid an airplane so much it's flying sideways, or to hover it in place with the nose pointed straight up and the prop acting like a helicopter's rotor.

Michael Hunter started us off, in his Laser 230. Mark is the world's only insulin-dependent airshow pilot. During the late 1990s, Mark led a group of diabetic people (and supporters) who proved to the FAA that diabetes was not a debilitating disease, that it could be controlled while an aircraft is safely operated. This led the FAA to allow diabetic people to become pilots. His organization is called "Flight for Diabetes". His airshow performances are sponsored in part by Accu-Chek, a blood glucose tester that is so easy to use, Mark uses his to measure his own blood sugar level in a brief pause between aerobatic manouvers. Pretty effective marketing, if you ask me.

Next up was Bill "Granpa" Cornick, flying his Pitts which he calls "The Green Goblin", or sometimes "Big Bad Green" (depending on whether Marvel's trademark lawyers are hassling him, I suppose). Bill is over 70 years old but can yank his Pitts through the air as well as anyone, putting it through all the usual manouvers plus some amazingly tight yaw turns ar a variety of attitudes. I'll be lucky if I am still able to do stuff like that when I'm 70.

Then we had Spencer Suderman fly his HAVOC-sponsored Pitts. Another great performance, with one of the most dizzying inverted flat spins I have ever seen.

And, lastly for the aerobats, Rob "Tumbling Bear" Harrison put his Zlin 50 through a series of insane manouvers, flying sideways or even backwards for brief periods, tumbling and skidding and rolling and looping the Zlin in ways you would not believe. Rob is one of my favorite aerobatic pilots. Luckily, he flies at several airshows in California and Arizona every year, so I have plenty of opportunities to photograph him. You might think I'd get tired of taking pictures of this almost-painfully-yellow Zlin (the other photographers even give me a hard time about photographing this aerobatic act over and over), but I am always looking for that perfect shot that really captures the crazy motions of his airplane.

And now it's time for some jet noise! Rich Perkins started up his L-39, which he calls the "Firecat", then taxied by and took off. Right after takeoff, he reported some landing gear trouble, so he flew some distance away and circled around while he figured out what was going on. Apparently he got it under control, because he then flew back to start his act, and - BOOM! - a huge explosion went off on the ground right as he flew by on his lowest pass, almost cutting the grass. Rich had coordinated his act with a pyrotechnics team, who has det off a "wall of fire" behind his flight path. The picture does not capture the sound, the heat, or the shockwave generated by the blast. It was really cool. Rich also did several passes in his L-39 doing loops, rolls, banana passes, and knife-edge flying.

I had the chance to meet Rich in Santa Rosa two years ago (he saw me with my huge lens - it was my first airshow with it, actually - and asked me if I would mind getting some pictures of him talking with spectators, working on the L-39, fueling it, flying it, towing it, etc, and I said Yes). I asked him about the unique paint scheme of his jet. He said that he knew early on that he wanted an unusual pattern similar to reptile stripes, so he drew lines defining those areas on a computer image of the L-39. He filled in those areas with your typical cammo colors - green and brown, beige and pastel yellow, light blue and daek blue, etc - until his wife walked by, saw what he was doing, and suggested he try orange and bright yellow. He asked her if she was crazy, but she insisted, and when he tried it he knew he had found his paint scheme.

With the civilian acts all out of the way, it was time for some military metal (or plastic, more and more lately) to roar into the air. Let's start with the F-117 Nighthawk, often simply referred to as the Stealth. It was the first airplane designed primarily so as to be able to evade radar, as well as IR sensors and other detection. At the time, the computer software being used to calculate radar reflections could only process shapes made of flat polygons, so this is how the airplane was designed. Its faceted structure also only reflects radar in a few directions, rather than everywhere, similar to, say, what a prism or a disco ball does with light. Since the late 70s, engineers have learned how to make curved shapes that do this, and have learned how to make powerful and efficient engines that are hard to spot in IR, leading to stealth airplanes that have much higher performance than the F-117. Engineers have also been able to figure out which curves and which internal structures are good for stealth, minimizing the need for the kinds of radar-absorvent materials which cover the F-117, a coating that is toxic and very hard to maintain. For all these reasons, now that over eighty F-22s are in service, the fifty F-117s are being retired next year. The crew that does F-117 airshow demos will stop doing them at the end of this year. Since they will only do a few demos all year, this will actually be the last one in California. So many local aviation fans came here to get what will probably be their last look at a flying, "living" F-117.

So what have the latest advances in stealth technology and propulsion technology allowed for? In one word, the Raptor. (Or is that two words? I don't know if I should count the "the"). Thanks to two monstrously powerful engines, it can accelerate faster than any other combat airplane - it can even break the sound barrier while flying straight up, making it to 60,000 feet in about a minute. It's also the fastest operational jet in the western world: It may not be quite as fast as a stripped-down F-15, but unlike other jets it carries its weapons internally, so it is not slowed down when you load it up with missiles and bombs. Its huge control surfaces, advanced fly-by-wire system, and thrust-vectoring paddles around the engine exhaust, mean it's as agile as a small aerobatic airplane, at any speed or attitude. And its payload is about ten time that of a B-25 bomber from World War two. As if these performance numbers were not incredible enough, the F-22 is stealthier than the F-117 - it can sneak up on a target (or a group of targets) undetected and destroy them before they knew what hit them. F-22s have been redefining the rules of air combat. They are like superheroes: When they are involved in simulated combat, they can immediately shoot down all of their oppinents before being detected, even when four F-22s go up against twenty or so F-15s or F-16s. No fighter squadron wants to practice against an F-22 squadron, because they get nothing out of it: they just fly around, seeing nothing, until boom they're dead. Makers of military equipment often refer to their products as being "transformational" to the nature of the work of the people who use them. This is rarely as true as it is with the F-22, which is essentially a fighter pilot's invisibility cloak.

The F-22 demo crew will only start doing full airshow demos in a few weeks (Langley is to be the first airshow to feature the full F-22 demo), but their evolving choreography has already been partly approved, and they could do six passes at Mugu. The takeoff is followed immediately by a vertical climb. The pilot reduces power until the aircraft decelerates to a stop, hovering there with the nose pointed straight up. (Remember, thrust vectoring pushes the engine exhaust around, giving the pilot complete control of the airplane's attitude at any speed, including "zero"). Other passes include a minimum-radius high-g 360-degree turn, a high-speed pass (the first sonic shockwaves to form appear around the bottom of the engine intakes, giving the Raptor a "goatee" of condensation), a pass where the missile bays are opened and closed (this happens quickly enough to remind a friend of mine of those videos advertised late at night where girls flash their breats... He said "Wow, it's Planes Gone Wild!". LOL), a banana pass (or "dedication pass"), and a pass at slow speed and high angle of attack with a sudden pitch-up at show-center to, again, show how quickly the Raptor can be snapped around, at any speed or attitude.

And since the SuperHornet didn't fly, we got to see the Raptor demo three times!

And in case you didn't catch this link in the previous paragraph... Do go check out this video of the F-22 demo. You'll be glad you did. It's unbelievable stuff, watching this big loud jet do backflips, and hover in place with the nose pointed up in the air. Wild.

While we waited for the next jet demo, a C-130 Hercules took off and did a few passes. It may be a big airplane, but it's very powerful, and able of steep climbs and tightly-banked turns. (Anyone who has seen the Blue Angels fly "Fat Albert" around will know that a C-130 can do). If you notice, water vapor is actually condensing over the wings of this airplane, as well as in corkscrews from the propeller-blade tips.

A C-17 then came in to land, briefly interrupting the airshow. I guess they needed some work done on the engine.

An A-10 then flew in for the next demo. The A-10 demo crew had spent the weekend at Riverside, where another airshow was going on at the same time. (The F-117, in turn, went over there to do a demo). The A-10 demo, while not as fast as the other jets', consisted of pretty much the same manouvers (minus the vertical climbs): tight turns, rolls, Cuban 8s, fast and slow passes, knife-edge and banana passes, as well as simulated bomb drops. The A-10 may be a heavily-armored flying tank built to be flown in the thick of battle, with redundant systems spread all over the airplane, big unswept wings, thick bulletproof shielding all around the pilot, and with efficient, quiet, airliner-like smokeless turbofans... but it can move almost like a little areobatic airplane, while making less noise than any other airplane that flew in this airshow!

Then it was time for the F-15E demo. The Strike Eagle is a version of the F-15 optimized for ground attack: It has more powerful engines and more fuel, as well as a beefed-up structure, so that it can carry more weapons and fly faster at lower altitudes. It has all kinds of bomb-targeting systems and ground-mapping electronics. It also retains the amazing fighter capabilities of the original F-15, being able to shoot down an airplane from further than the eye can see. Since the exact performance numbers of the F-22 are classified, the F-15 still holds many records related to acceleration, time-to-climb, speed, and other things that indicates it has very powerful engines and a light weight. The takeoff at the beginning of this demo was amazing (sorry I didn't get a good picture of it - here it is at Beale and Nellis), almost like a rocket launch. The jet is amazingly loud, tearing the air apart over a long demo of rolls, fast passes, tight turns, slow-speed flight, steep climbs, knife-edge flight, and other amazing manouvers. It may not be quite as aerobatic and agile as the F-22 at slow speeds, but at higher speeds it's amazingly nimble. In terms of speed and power, both the F-15 and F-22 were being flown at the edge of what aviation rules allow - which is much, much less than what they could do in battle, and have done during test flights over Edwards and Nellis. What I'm getting at is, while the F-22 may be a more impressive design, the F-15 and F-15E demos are not much less impressive than the F-22's.

A P-51 Mustang - arguably the most capable fighter of World War 2 - was started up, and took off. The F-22 then took off and caught up with it, and the A-10 and F-15 (which were still in the air, circling the base) joined that formation as well. The four planes did a series of passes in different formations, in what is known as a "Heritage Flight". This is one of my favorite moments of any airshow: With beautiful instrumental music being played, the four airplanes gracefully and slowly flew in front of us and overhead, allowing us to appreciate the evolution of airplane design from 1940 to today's frontline combat aircraft to tomorrow's next-generation stealthy superfighter. It doesn't get much better than this.

Or does it? To close the airshow, the USAF aerial demonstration squadron, the Thunderbirds, did their act. The Thunderbirds (and the Blue Angels) are arguably the coolest airshow act in the US: Six F-16 pilots flying their jets less than three feet apart, putting the whole formation through loops and rolls, separating in bomb-burst-like formation breaks and then re-joining, flying by at almost the speed of sound, doing tight turns, opposing passes, fast rolls, slow passes, passes overhead from behind, hesitation rolls, slow rolls... All the while roaring with over a hundred thousand pounds of thrust. Some of the fastest, most precise, most exciting flying in the world.

(Unlike the Blues, the Thunderbirds include many women in their crew. Pilots 3 and 6 are women, as is the team's Public Affair Officer, number 12)

Their act started with the Diamond (Thunderbirds 1 through 4) taking off in a tight formation. Thunderbird 5 then took off and did a dirty roll as soon as he left the ground, and Thunderbird 6 took off and did a half Cuban-8, reversing direction in the air before she had gone over the end of the runway. Things only got more exciting from there.

Now, here's one last Thunderbird picture, which is my new favorite, of all the images I have ever shot. The weekend of the Pt Mugu airshow was the first time I used my new (well, used, so "new to me") Canon 1D mk2 at an airshow, an absolutely top-notch camera with a lightning-fast AF system and a big sensor with very low noise/grain and superior dynamic range. It can shoot 8.5 pictures per second, all of them very sharp and very smooth, and each one is about the same file size as your average MP3. Displays tell you everything about what the camera is doing (down to how much RAM it has left while it writes to your cards, and which of multiple cards it's writing to, as well as which AF mode you're on, which focus points the camera is using, how the different areas of the frame are being weighed for exposure, which parameter is varied during exposure bracketing, etc), and you can control every last little setting. This was the camera that made professional media photographers, especially sports photographers, switch over to digital. And this picture of the Thunderbird 6 sneak pass shows just what this camera can do. No other camera can focus at something that is coming straight at you at the speed of sound, and handle the exposure and image stabilization (and everything else) at the same time. And all the other pictures taken throughout the airshow were all in extremely sharp focus as well. Well, ok, not quite all of them, but more of them than I would expect from any other camera, even my 20D. So here's that picture in wallpaper size. The left one, which is darker, is for brighter monitors (like my LCD monitor), and the right one, which is lighter, is for darker monitors (like my parents' CRT).

So that's my review of the Pt Mugu airshow. I hope you enjoyed looking at these pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them, although I know this is extremely unlikely ;]

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, criticisms, fan mail, etc, then please feel free to email me and say hi!

And don't forget to check out my other airshow reviews.

Coming up next: Chino Planes of Fame (May 19-20), the New York City Jones Beach airshow (May 26-27), Hiller Vertical Challenge (June 16), and two of the biggest airshows in Europe; Duxford Flying Legends and Fariford RIAT! (July). Stay tuned!

Valeu!

Cheers,

- Bernardo

PS: Randy Kirk and his family accompanied me to this airshow. Randy, who is a family friend of my roommate, found out about me through my roommate's brother's blog, and since then we have been having lots of friendly and enlightening debates online. Randy is a really great guy who has lived (and is still living) an exceptional and interesting life, and I have been learning a lot and having a lot of fun interacting with him, online and in the real world. He first wrote me because of that blog post on my roommate's brother's blog, and he told me he had never been to an airshow but would like to go to a good one especially if an expert such as myself helped him to get the most out of the experience. I was more than happy to comply, especially with such a cool airshow hitting our neighbourhood. Below are a couple of shots of him and some (but not all) of his kids by the aggressor F-5 on static.

During the show, two of his kids borrowed my 20D and a friend's long lens, and they got some good pictures too. I'll ask their permission to post their pictures here.