RotorFest!

Did you here the distinctive "Whop Whop Whop" of those Huey's big ,thick rotor blades slapping their way through the air over West Chester this weekend?


I love the smell of fried dough and Turkey legs in the afternoon....

No, it was not Lt. Colonel Kilgore with the Ride of the Valkyries blaring out of speakers coming to take over downtown because let's face it, "Charlie don't surf", (Or in the case of West Chester, skateboard.) It was the sounds of RotorFest! The annual October celebration of everything whirlybird at our hometown airport, Brandywine Airport OQN.

I went last year with my brother Joe, in fact right after getting to ride in a Hughes 500 a la T.C. from Magnum P.I., I took him to the Philly Airport so he could get to Europe on his way to Afghanistan for 6 months via Norway and Oberamergau, Germany to get up to speed on how NATO troops make their coffee or some such training...

This year was just as nice as last year, perfect blue skies, absolutely still air, sunny and neither hot nor cold, just absolutely perfect. It seems like I just went last year RotorFest as if it was yesterday, I tell you I'm not happy with the rate of speed life is moving these days. I think someone needs to check the planet's Tachometer, I'm sure we're doing more RPM's lately then we were back in the 70's and 80's. To hell with Global Warming, I say Global Speeding is more of a threat! At least to me anyway.

I took a lot of photos on my little Nikon Coolpix, you know I'm pretty happy with it, and it seems to be robust enough with features that I will be able to do some cool things with it, if I can have the attention span longer than that of a gnat to read the instruction manual. I'll put a lot of the stuff either on my Flickr account or on my You Tube account.

Which brings me to the nerd factor at airshows. You know there are comic book nerds, sci fi nerds, Renaissance fair nerds, D and D nerds, (if you don't know what that is, you're not a nerd), but I think one of the more obscure kind of nerds is the war nerds, and their various subsets. The Civil War reinactor carries a great deal of respect among the mainstream population, but less so the others that obsess over the minutia of military details. Again it's absolutely true that there are a lot of non nerds out there that know the difference between a P-51 Mustang and a B-17, and I attribute that to the fact that there are a lot of people who's grandpa flew them during the war, but fewer people who know the difference between a B-17F and a B-17G (answer: Chin Turret) DOH!

The key here is, at least for me, is to avoid the temptation to put on a T-shirt with some airplane on it and perhaps worse, in addition to maybe having a telephoto zoom lens camera dangling around my neck, a handheld aviation band scanner sticking out of the pocket of a pair of size 46 cargo shorts. (Don't be that guy, Don't be that guy, I mutter to myself)

When I was in the Army Reserves, I got to fly only one time with our aircraft to an airshow in Fort Meyers. We didn't normally do the airshow circuit because of the clandestine nature of our work, so we did our missions in obscurity. This time though, it was right after Desert Storm, so I had a lot of people thanking me for my service. It was sort of awkward because I sat out the war at the Presidio of Monterey, California. (If you are going to miss a war, that's the place to do it) Still it was cool, because I had been that nerdy kid who knew what every airplane on the ramp was, and then later as a Teenager, the pimply faced kid in a Civil Air Patrol uniform standing some sort of guard duty next to some warbird while the millionaire pilot/owner hung out eating hot dogs in the VIP tent hobnobbing with the Blue Angels.

I finally got to see an airshow from the other side of the rope, and I didn't feel like a tool wannabe walking around in a flight suit. I also got to see the kind of kids I was, not the ADD kid spinning himself around and babbling incoherently running up and down the length of the airplane shouting "eheheheheheh, take that mom, ehehehehehe, take that dad, send me to a psychiatrist will you? Take that Doctor Sally Wexler!!" (Get the reference?)

No I was the kid that silently observed everything in quiet awe. I would wait my turn to talk to the pilot to ask some clever question, mainly so I could get the compliment of being such a smart kid.

God I was and still am a nerd.....

Aircraft Accident at Brandywine Airport

Whenever you see a local news helicopter hovering perfectly 800 feet over one spot, it's usually not a good sign, especially if it's over a highway, but really super especially bad if it's over an airport.

I don't have much info, my scooter commute takes me past the Brandywine Airport every day now, and they closed the road so I couldn't see, but there were a lot of cops and firemen, but no real sense of urgency that I could tell. Much more likely than a crash on final would be that this was another case of an aborted take off that went wrong, with a pilot going for the option of putting on the breaks and rolling off the end of Runway 27, rather than struggle to get airborne and having a problem getting over 202.

I'll go past it tomorrow, this is the 2nd time this is happened this year, but with this being a 3,347 foot long runway, and with the heat in July, pilots have to remember to take into consideration air density. The heat means wings have a harder time creating lift. Then with the humidity, there is a lot of moisture in the air, so one needs to be aware of Carburetor ice, so pilots have to have the carb heat on, (but this robs power) and you've got to make sure the mixture of air and fuel is not as rich you normally would have it.

With the price of fuel being pretty high, people are not getting the stick time they should to be in proficient in these conditions. Add the fact that most people don't fly during the winter, there are a lot of rusty pilots out there. If you haven't flown in a while go up with an instructor to knock the rust off, and then be safe and enjoy flying!