AOPA Pilot Magazine
June 2004 Volume 47 / Number 6
AOPA Flight Training: Going for the gold
Hone your flying skills with a little friendly competition
An air race is a prime opportunity to polish your flying skills in a friendly, competitive environment; test your mettle against pilots of all ages and skill levels; and make some friends.
We're not talking about high-speed, low-level flying around pylons at the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada. Few new pilots have the level of proficiency and familiarity with formation flight that these adrenaline-charged events require. Cross-country races are somewhat more low-key, but participants will tell you they have their heart-pounding moments. They can be as modest as a six-airport "poker run" in which racers make short hops to several airports, pick up a playing card at each stop, and the pilot with the best "hand" is declared the winner. (Poker runs are particularly popular with flying clubs and local chapters of The Ninety-Nines.) Or they can span several days and several states, presenting new thrills for those still rooted in the notion that a cross-country is 50 nm in a straight line. And while you may race against 10, 15, or 20 other aircraft, your chief competitor — the one to beat — is you.
That's because racers are trying to beat their personal handicaps — the airspeed determined during a timed run in which racers simulate the weight and balance and performance conditions of the actual race. This means that the humblest piston single stands a chance against the sleekest of high-performance airplanes. Pilotage, navigation, and a rock-solid grasp of aircraft performance are what's important.
So don't be intimidated. But do plan to devote some prep time before the event. You'll want to do some practice runs, particularly if you are entering with a copilot.
Last summer was shaping up to be a few listless months of pattern work punctuated by an occasional $100 hamburger until a colleague casually asked if I had any interest in flying a race with her. AOPA Flight Training Contributing Editor Julie K. Boatman had at first mentioned the five-day, 1,800-mile Marion Jayne Air Race, an annual event presented by U.S. Air Race Inc. The race is named for the pilot who holds the world record for most first-place victories in cross-country events and was the first and only woman to race her own airplane around the world twice.
While our work and family commitments — and our wallets — wouldn't sanction the five-day jaunt, the one-day Renaissance 300 air race was a better fit. Set for July 20 in conjunction with the Marion Jayne, it started at Elmira/Corning Regional Airport, a few miles from Hammondsport, New York. The round-robin course would be flown using pilotage and navigation with compass, directional gyro, and sectional chart — no electronic devices or autopilots allowed. Race aircraft would perform low-level fly-bys at two checkpoints and finish at Elmira.
Registration fee in the mail and team number selected, Race 39's pilot and copilot formalized who would do what during the race. Boatman, a CFII with nearly 1,800 hours in her logbook at the time, probably was the natural choice to fly the airplane. But she was a far better navigator than I, and as a flight instructor she understood the inherent benefits that the experience would give a relatively new pilot. So she agreed to handle navigation and radio communications while I flew the airplane, a 1980 Piper Archer II. We were surprised, after the race, to hear anecdotes from past events about teammates smacking each other's hands away from radios, throttle, or mixture control.
Next came practice runs in which we flew to unfamiliar airports near our home field in Frederick, Maryland, using pilotage and dead reckoning. One calm, clear summer morning, we spent a few moments on the ramp discussing the plan: We would fly to a small nontowered airport in Donegal Springs, Pennsylvania, just as if we were participating in the first leg of the race — in other words, taking off, climbing, and flying full throttle, airspeed in the yellow arc.
I could hear my CFI's voice admonishing, "Keep away from the red line. Listen to the engine." But 2,400 rpm wouldn't cut it on race day. At cruise altitude the throttle went to 2,600 rpm, hovering just below the red line. "In smooth air, what we're doing is perfectly fine," Boatman reminded me. Racing isn't like pleasure flying, she explained. There's no time to relax and look at the scenery. You must constantly cross-check the tachometer, airspeed indicator, altimeter, and heading indicator to make sure you're pushing the airplane to its safest limits while staying on course and maintaining altitude so that you don't waste time climbing or descending.
Crossing over York, Pennsylvania, about 15 nm southwest of our target airport, we began descending at 1,000 feet per minute and throttled back slightly to 2,400 rpm. Instructed to fly a normal pattern at full speed, no flaps, I pushed down the nose to keep descending; after turning base and final we would overfly the runway at 500 feet agl. No sloppy rudder inputs allowed — at the higher speed and low altitude, it was imperative that the turns be standard rate and coordinated. I'd need to fly a wider pattern to make the necessary shallow turns to base and final. We didn't want to place too much of a G-load on the aircraft and stress the airframe.
A few days before launching for Elmira, we washed the airplane, used lemon furniture polish (an airplane owner's trick) to dislodge insects from the leading edges, and attached the racing numbers to the empennage. We completed our handicap run, using the autopilot to hold heading and altitude and a GPS to calculate maximum speed, and submitted it to the race board for approval. As it turned out, we later had to fly another handicap run at Elmira. Our first attempt produced too high an airspeed that would have been difficult to top.
Race 39's arrival at Elmira/Corning was a whirlwind of activity as we parked the airplane and registered for the event. Race officials pored over our paperwork (pilot certificates, logbooks, medical certificates, proof of insurance) and then directed us to a mandatory prerace briefing. The pilots of the 17 teams got their first look at the route over the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, and absorbed words of advice and safety warnings from Patricia Jayne Keefer, president of the U.S. Air Race Board of Directors. In seven years and 11 events, 410,241 hours had been flown and 2,889 landings made without incident, and Keefer — who happens to be Marion Jayne's daughter — was emphatic that the safety record should remain spotless. U.S. Air Race Inc. and other organizations require that events be flown in day VFR conditions, among many other precautions.
As race officials performed a final inspection of each aircraft, the teams cleaned away more insects and admired each other's aircraft. Cessnas and Pipers shared tiedown space with Grumman Tigers, Beech Barons and Bonanzas, a Lancair, and a Mooney. Many of the teams were comprised of veteran racers with multiple victories. In fact, some had competed against each other so often that friendly rivalries had sprung up over the years. The veterans weren't at all averse to sharing some strategy or puncturing race-strategy myths. Shelby Bowles brought his Cessna Skymaster up from Waldorf, Maryland, to compete in his fifth Marion Jayne air race. He watched with amusement as teams around him polished the leading edges of their aircraft. "Doesn't do a darn bit of good," he remarked.
First-time racers Maggie Dodson of Harvard, Illinois, and Michele Dacy from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, had flown together quite a bit — Dodson, a CFI, helped Dacy to earn her private pilot certificate in 2001. First-timer Charles Robinson Jr. teamed up with a seasoned racer, Maisie Stears. The pair, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, flew Stears' twin-engine Piper Apache, sporting the Geronimo conversion with its more powerful engines.
Racers climbed out of bed on race day to discover that dense fog blanketed the valley in which the airport sat. The locals knew that the fog would burn off eventually. Sure enough, by 11 a.m., State Sen. John R. Kohl Jr. was waving a checkered flag at the threshold of Runway 24 to signal the first aircraft that it could depart.
Standing on the brakes with throttle wide open waiting for a checkered flag to drop makes you want to jam a foot on the nonexistent accelerator with NASCAR-like enthusiasm. Fortunately, flying instincts returned as we rotated, turned crosswind and downwind, and then descended to fly back over the threshold of Runway 24, starting the clock. We lost precious seconds waiting for the tower controller to release us from flying the runway heading, but consoled ourselves that we had not compromised safety as we maneuvered back on course while commencing a tense cross-check of instruments. The race route crisscrossed over at least three of the Finger Lakes, which look like, well, fingers, with not much to differentiate one from another. Boatman called out course corrections as her flight instructor's eye focused on landmarks — a cell phone tower, runs shaping a ski area — that I would have missed. If there's any consolation in flying a pokier aircraft, it's that you're not as likely to whiz by a critical landmark without seeing it.
We made our fly-bys at Hamilton and Perry-Warsaw airports without incident. If you bungle the approach or overshoot the designated altitude for the fly-by, there are no do-overs — you land and take a penalty. Boatman monitored our course and prompted me to keep the airplane at altitude, to be mindful of thermals, and to anticipate air currents from the area's rolling terrain. A longer race would have necessitated using winds aloft to try to pick up speed, but when you're flying 60- and 70-nm legs, it usually doesn't pay any dividends.
When we reached the finish line at Elmira/Corning, greeted with bottles of water by a cheerful contingent of racers and onlookers, we were exhausted and not at all sure how we'd faired. Race 29, a Beech Baron piloted by Arthur Mott and Tim Bastick, had a door seal rupture shortly after takeoff. They landed, fixed the door seal, and took off again. The delay cost them 90 minutes, but that night the racers voted to let them use the start of their second run as their official time. Race 15, another Baron, had the finish line in sight but broke off the approach; the tower had inadvertently pointed opposing traffic at them and they couldn't see it. The decision probably cost first-time racers Dwight and Cindy Ensley a trophy, but it won them high praise for good decision-making.
When the final numbers were posted, the first-place trophy and cash prize went to Robinson and Stears. Robinson, a self-employed CFI, said he planned to integrate what he learned from his first air race into lesson plans for his students. Second place went to newcomers Dodson and Dacy, flying a Cessna 172. Dacy said she thought years of sail boating experience in her youth had given her a navigational edge. Third-place winners were Denise Waters and Nancy Toon in Waters' Grumman Tiger. Waters, an avid air racer who has flown in the London to Sydney Air Rally, was fresh from a third-place victory at the 2003 Air Race Classic in June.
Race 39 placed twelfth out of 16 teams. A race official confirmed that we'd lost time at the start because we hadn't turned directly on course. "We were wondering" why Race 39 hesitated, Patricia Purcell told us later. Purcell, vice president of the air race board of directors, had been at the starting line recording start times for the initial fly-bys. "We were saying, 'Where are you going? Turn!'" Call it a rite of passage for a first-timer. Next time we should be able to beat our handicap by at least three more minutes.
— Photography by Dede Hatch
Jill W. Tallman is assistant editor of AOPA Flight Training magazine. A private pilot since 2001, she has approximately 260 hours. The 2004 Marion Jayne Air Race will be held August 28 to September 6, starting in California and concluding in Ohio. Two 300-nm events are planned in addition to the five-day cross-country. For complete details and to register, see the Web site. Links to additional resources on air racing are available at AOPA Flight Training Online.
What do you think? Send us your feedback!
Sign up for ePilot
