Fun with Planes

I don't know how many of you out there are familiar with the Red Bull Air Races - before three years ago, I didn't know anything about it, so I'm guessing most of you are sitting there shrugging, maybe moving your head side to side as if to communicate with your computer screen "Nope. Never heard of it." Which makes me feel the need to point out that it's a one-way screen and it can't hear you. But whatever.

The Red Bull Air Races have come to San Diego for three years in a row now, and Nick and I happened to be out of town each time - until this year! Knowing it's probably the last year for the Races in San Diego (they sign 2-3 year contracts with each city, and they seem to like to rove around the world, so I wouldn't expect them to come back) and it's also our last year in SD, we made sure to get out and see it. It's a three-day event, with warm-ups on Friday, prelims on Saturday, and the elimination rounds on Sunday.

With the "main event" scheduled for Sunday, Nick and I decided to use Saturday to check out multiple viewing points. The Navy had put out a notice that they would have tents set up at the South end of the Carrier pier on NAS North Island, so we thought we'd take a look.

Here's a map from the Air Race website that shows the race track and I've marked our viewing point from North Island with a blue X:

We were amazed when we got to North Island - in addition to probably 25 tents set up to give families some shade, there were also two big sets of bleachers, a jumbotron showing the live feed with audio (cool, because it was a combination of views from the cockpits of some of the planes cut with feed from the Red Bull helicopter as it was flying around videoing the races), and there were also a number of food vendors selling very reasonably priced "fair food" - you know, bbq, burgers, snow cones, funnel cakes, hot dogs, nachos, blah blah blah. The coolest thing was that the Navy Exchange (the "department store" on base) had a tent set up selling sunscreen, towels, beach chairs, t-shirts, soda, and snacks without a markup. When's the last time you paid 50 cents for a soda?

Unfortunately, it was very overcast and the ceiling was low that day, meaning that for safety, only one plane could be in the pattern at any one time ... so it was a good 5-10 minutes in between flights. What was supposed to be a 2 hour qualifying round ended up being more like 4. Still, it was cool to see the planes come in from the Northwest and fly right by the carriers toward the start line. You can see the broad side of The USS Reagan, number 76, as well as the nose of the Nimitz (CVN 68 for all you Navy buffs out there. Although you can't see the number in this photo, if you squint you can see a bunch of people gathered at the bow to view the races):





(Those black sausage things are huge floating barriers that keep bay traffic away from the ships at North Island. Big black guano-covered security floaties, if you will.)

As the marine layer got thicker, the wind picked up, making it a chilly windy viewing experience. I was ready to go, feeling our mission for the day was complete, but Nick wanted to at least see a Red Bull plane. After we got to see the "Hungarian Godfather" of racing, Peter Besenyei, a 70-something-year-old racer who flies one of the two Red Bull planes, we headed out and decided to go to one of our favorite cafes on Coronado, Tartine, for a bite. The restaurant is located right by the ferry landing on Orange and 1st and as we were hunting for parking we noticed the mass exodus of people from a small spit of green known as a "park" located nearby on the waterfront. Our first thought was "Suckers! Nah-nah-nah-NAh-naaaahh, we got to see it from the carrier pier and you fools had to pack into this park!" (Channel Erin by saying that line in a sing-song voice.) And then, as we were enjoying our sandwiches, we noticed that the planes got, like, really close to said park. After eating, we walked over to the park and ate our words for dessert. The view was awesome. So we scrapped our plans to view Sunday's races from North Island and decided to just go out early and stake a spot in the little grassy area (the red X on the map above).

Well, we thought we were being pretty hard-core, getting there 2 and a half hours before the start of the races, but apparently the memo went out to every pro or semipro San Diego photographer, because they were all there before us! We still had great seats, and I ended up just standing by some bushes just behind the rest of the jumbo-lens people.



Nick, listening to the audio feed on the radio:


The jasmine bushes I stood in. The thorny kind, not the sweet-smelling kind, unfortunately. (but pretty!)


You can see that Sunday had considerably better weather, although it didn't start that way! There was a very thick marine layer in the morning, and the forecasters said it would burn off between noon and 1 pm ... and guess what? For ONCE, they were right! A Navy helicopter flew the American Flag over the bay around noon and it looked like this:


But there were only a few fluffy clouds remaining by the time the races started an hour later, and it ended up being a beautiful sunny San Diego day (mid-70s, light wind).

We got lucky with the weather, we got lucky with parking, and with location ... but the luckiest thing that happened that day was because of a random conversation I struck up with a photographer standing next to me. He had the whole setup - killer tripod, Canon 5D, and a 100-400L IS lens. I have been thinking about renting a really nice lens for an upcoming vacation (more news on that later), and I'd been debating among Canon's 70-200f/4L IS, which is a favorite landscape lens, the 70-200F2.8L IS, which is also good but twice as heavy, and the 100-400L IS. (They all run around $1200-1500, so I'm definitely not looking to buy one! I can rent one for 2 weeks for around $120.) I told him about the vacation and was picking his brain about the lenses, and then he said (in broken English) that he had the 70-200f/2.8 with him and would I like to see it? As he pulled it out of his pack, I realized that he was offering to let me shoot with it for a while ... this is a $1500 lens. He officially became the nicest man I've ever met. Sorry Dad, sorry Nick ... a $1500 piece of personal property?! Kid, candy store, the whole deal. So all of these pics below are with that lens. Boy it was heavy - I thought I was going to end up with carpel tunnel! One more lucky thing that I didn't consider when we scouted the location on Saturday was that we ended up viewing the whole thing with the sun to our backs. So, really, those suckers who paid $25++ a ticket for a seat right across the bay in Seaport Village didn't even have views as good as ours!!

If you look at the first pic of the post, showing the race course, you can follow along -

Here's Rakhmanin, coming in through the starting line:


Not sure if this is Peter Besenyei or Kirby Chambliss coming through the chicane:


The first of the blue gates (the pilots had to come through the blue gates completely level, whereas they had to go through red gates on their wingtip):


I didn't get any good shots of planes going through the second blue gate, but here's one making the turn after the second blue gate and coming up the bay toward us (I love the reflection of the smoke on the water):


Coming around past us, they banked hard to head toward the quad gate:






Finishing the bank and heading into the quad gate:


The planes had to flip 180 degrees to go through the gate on their other wingtip, making a cool curly-q smoke pattern:




Here's Mike Mangold on his first pass, going past vertical and acquiring a 2-second penalty (the penalties are 2 seconds for not being perfectly vertical / horizontal or going through the gate too high or too low, 6 seconds for clipping a gate, and an instant disqualification for pulling 12 x g or more):


Right after the first pass through the gate, pilots had to bank hard to pull the tightest circle they could without over-G-ing to go through the quad gate the other way:








Tenths of a second made a difference here, so the strategy of exactly HOW to go through the gates to minimize the turn radius without pulling too many Gs made a scientist's mind like mine spin. Engineers, I leave this one to you ...

After the second pass through the quad, pilots pulled another tight turn to go through the start/finish gate and begin their second lap. You can see Nigel Lamb, a Brit (as if that weren't obvious based on the name alone!!), in the Breitling plane come through the smoke and the Breitling gate. Hey Breitling - good branding!:


Heading back to the chicane on the second lap, the planes passed by the USS Midway Museum. You can see behind the Midway a Carnival cruise ship, one of several that made last-minute changes to their itinerary to avoid Mexico port calls (courtesy of H1N1 - rightly so, I might add). I'm sure downtown businesses and the Port of San Diego appreciated the unexpected revenue!


The Red Bull helicopter, flying around the course taking video and stills:


Of course, there are a lot more pictures (this is just a sampling), which I tried to group by plane. You can access the set on Flickr here.

I'll end this post with a few pics of water security: