Can This National Treasure Survive?

Goosebumps form as the first bursts of smoke and contained explosions escape the exhaust stacks of the Sea Fury's huge Wright Cyclone R-3350 engine. After a couple of pops, multiple cylinders start to participate. Soon it's running a cadence that turns pops into a continuous roar. Other contestants join in with their own start-up ritual. Curt Brown, our race pilot extraordinaire, is almost always the first to fire up, exactly at the time prescribed in the race schedule. His precision continues through the run-up, taxi, departure, race, approach, and taxi back to where he started. It's that precision and consistency that always leaves his medium fast Sawbones Unlimited racer in the top tier of the National Championship Air Races held in Reno, Nevada every year.

Sawbones Crew

I'm not sure what it is that keeps me coming back to this event. Certainly the Sawbones team, with its Orthopedic Surgeon owner, and it's former astronaut race pilot, not to mention a bunch of passionate airport junkie's that make up the Sawbones Race Team. Or maybe it's the sheer power and grace of this aircraft, representative of another aviation era where men with slide rules and gumption created bigger and faster fighting aircraft using round piston driven engines and skillful pilots to compete, often to the death, over war-ravaged landscapes and oceanscapes. Or perhaps it's the atmosphere of a couple of hundred aircraft gathered in a high-desert airfield, with all of it's static aerospace-related displays, food tents, and aviation merchandise. Or maybe it's just latent testosterone that reacts with the smell and sound of a combination of gas, oil, and metal orchestrated to hurl risk-taking men and women racers hundreds of miles per hour around a left handed circuit of pylons. Equally as likely is that my attachment is related to curiosity and fascination with those legendary pilots in the Unlimited Class that drive these hopped up World War II relics at speeds well above those originally designed for these aircraft. Names like Tiger Destefani, Sherman Smoot, Steve Hinton, and Hoot Gibson, not to mention our own Curt Brown. Or even back to General Doolittle, when he raced the GeeBee in the forefather Cleveland Air Races in the 1930's and who I met in the 1980's.

Probably all of those things. But I wonder - for how long? Changes in our economy and in collective interests are putting pressure on the association charged with maintaining the tradition of national air races. The costs of putting on this kind of show, maintaining and flying these kinds of airplanes, and managing the risks continue to escalate while audiences, and the revenues they generate, are diminishing. More importantly, the availability of these airplanes, and pilots who can fly them, is declining. Almost all of the pilots, with one exception, are over 60 years in age. Qualifying to fly these airplanes is extremely difficult and expensive, with many hours of flight time required in a sequence of increasingly complex old aircraft. These days it's almost prerequisite that you come from a background similar to the young Steve Hinton Jr., son of a famous race and motion picture stunt pilot, Steve Hinton. The elder Steve flew many restored aircraft in movies like Pearl Harbor, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Always, and won several Unlimited championships in Red Baron, a heavily modified RB-51.  Steve Junior started flying warbirds at age 19, and is the youngest pilot to ever win the Unlimited championship at age 22, with now 5 championship titles to his name at the tender age of 28.

Thanks to Curt, I had a chance to sit in on the Pilot Briefing, held every morning during the race week. Each class, of which there are six, holds it's own briefing at the same time each day, starting very early in the morning. The room, I am told, looks exactly the same as it has in the last 25 years. The benches are hard but sturdy, and the walls have pictures or graphics from races and participants of the past. In the front of the briefing area are large posters with pictures of the race course, and a screen on which the day's Power Point presentation of issues, process, race plan, and safety concerns is displayed. The Air Boss goes through each bullet point in detail, especially when the safety reminders and rules are covered.

The last briefing of the day, starting at 8:00 a.m., is for the Jet Class and Unlimited class combined. Both use the same eight mile course (there are four different courses of different lengths and configurations, each designed for the average speed of the class) and abide by the same rules and race plan. At 8:30 however, the Jet Class leaves the room, and the Unlimited Class has its own session, led by the Class leader, in this case Sherm Smoot. Sherm, age 67,  raced a well known and very difficult-to-fly Yak-11 named Czech Mate previously, but was not racing this year. Sherm covered areas more related to professionalism, and re-emphasized specific safety procedures. For example, he admonished the racers to become more disciplined in their formation alongside the pace plane (the equivalent of a pace car in a Nascar race, responsible for lining up the racers and starting the race). "We need a straight line there, fella's - don't get in front and if you fall back you're only hurting yourself, and it looks sloppy," he said. Or the reminder that because the last turn before the "show line" (the straight away in front of the grand stands) is so tight, with an alley so narrow, if they find they're not set up properly, they can bail out of the course and fly around the back of the grandstands and catch back up with the race course on the other side without penalty. "Crossing the show line is an automatic DQ, guys, so don't bust it," he advised, "It's not contestable."

Pilot Briefing

During the briefing, I sat next to Steve Hinton, Sr., who was to pilot the pace jet, and in front of Hoot Gibson, the eventual winner of the championship. Just listening to Hoot banter with Curt, both former space shuttle astronauts and long standing friendly competitors, was a hoot (oops... sorry). But as I looked around, I could identify all those famous names in racing, some who were piloting, and some who just belonged there. Many who have sat in the same place on the same bench for years of briefings. Folks like Bill "Tiger" Destefani, owner of Strega who sacrificed his engine last year just to try to beat the faster VooDoo at the finish line for the closest finish in race history. Her really retired after that race, after demonstrating to himself through a couple of penalties and a disqualification that it probably was finally time to hang it up. Tiger had claimed on multiple occasions to be done with air racing at Reno, starting in 2003 when he was 57. This year he was back again as owner at age 69, in his 35th year of participation.

RARA, the Reno Air Racing Association, exists to educate young people about aviation, with a major component of that being the production of the National Air Races. This year reflected the trend of cost cutting on the part of the association, along with reduced participation in aircraft, at least in the ever popular Unlimited Class. What not long ago was a field of 22 or so competing aircraft was this year a field of 14. A good deal of that is due to the change in rules following the 2012 air crash that killed a number of people, including the pilot of the P-51 involved, but some of that is due to the incredible cost of maintaining these racers. The purse in these races is relatively small, when compared to other race venues (not even including NASCAR). And the top five are so notably faster than the rest of the field that a plane like Sawbones has little chance to break into the (relatively) real money.

What follows is one of the better characterizations of Reno Air Races I've ever read, capturing the uniquely American features that will likely help it survive. From a January 5, 2003 article by Andy Meisler in the LA Times titled "The Fright Stuff":

On the one hand, air racing at Reno is a semi-secret, under-publicized cult passion. On the other, it's a display of numerous mainstream American obsessions, including adventure for adventure's sake, competition for competition's sake, expensive thrills, pure speed, high-octane fuels, souped-up internal combustion engines, home-brewed technology, World War II worship and the God-given right to flirt with death, preferably instant, without interference from the government or anyone else.