For some pilots, flying solo doesn't cut it. Pilots like Christian Goetze and Wolfgang Polak spend much of their time in the air in formation flights, with two or more planes flying in close proximity to each other. This is an aesthetically attractive, if demanding, form of flying. Here, Polak flies just feet away from Goetze's plane in the skies over California.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)I don't have a lot of rules, but here's a new one: when someone offers you the chance to take part in a formation flight, jump at the opportunity.
For me, that chance came a couple of weeks ago when Christian Goetze, a co-worker of my wife's, offered to take either or both of us up with him on one of two flights he was about to do.
To be perfectly frank, I didn't really even understand exactly what formation flying was, despite, for example, watching the Blue Angels flying from their home base in Florida last summer, but there's no way I was going to not find out.
Unfortunately, I missed out on being part of a five-plane flight a few days later, but on November 19, I climbed into Goetze's 1991 Grumman Tiger for my formation flight education.
Taking off out of the small airport in San Carlos, Calif., we flew straight up into a thick bank of fog. Our destination? The skies over Livermore, Calif., where, I was told, we'd be making a rendezvous with a friend of Goetze's, his fellow formation flier, Wolfgang Polak.
Sure enough, not long after ascending out of the thick fog and into a stunning early morning blue sky, a tiny speck on the horizon gradually got bigger, and bigger, until Polak, and his 1977 Grumman Tiger, suddenly swooped around us in a big turn, and then approached slowly on our right side, eventually ending up so close to us that I could see his headset and the little round ball covering the microphone.
Which, I can tell you, is a rather sobering sight if you've not experienced such a thing before.
Luckily for me, these two pilots seemed like old pros at this flying mere feet away from each other, and on top of it, it was a gorgeous day up high in the sky where we were, with little turbulence to make for a bumpy flight, and therefore, little reason for the two pilots not to keep their planes so close to each other that they could almost have handed each other notes.
Ostensibly, the purpose of the flight was so that Goetze could take his plane in for its annual servicing. Having Polak bring his plane along too meant that Goetze had a ride back to his home airport in San Carlos, and heck, since they had some time to kill on the way to Columbia--and a newbie passenger onboard--why not play around a little?
"You want to do some maneuvering on the way?" Asked Polak over the radio.
"Sure, why not," Goetze replied.
To start off with, Polak, in the lead, and now on our left side and a little above us, began doing a series of hard turns. Goetze, as the trail plane, aligned his rudder with Polak's wing tip, a system, Goetze explained, in which geometry keeps his plane automatically aligned with Polak's.
I wasn't sure I understood that exactly, but sure enough, for every move Polak made, Goetze followed suit, and we were mirroring him almost exactly.
For a few minutes, with Polak leading, and Goetze and I trailing, we climbed, dropped, turned, and dipped. I was furiously taking pictures, focusing entirely on Polak's plane, and before long, totally losing track of the ground. The sensation of gravity kicking in was extreme, but at that point, I really couldn't have told you whether we were going up, going down, flying flat, or even where the ground was.
During some maneuvers, the only way to tell what we were doing, relative to the ground, was to see how the horizon was changing. Here, Polak, in the lead plane, makes a sharp right turn.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)Then, Polak gave some sort of hand signal to Goetze, they agreed over the radio that there would be a count of five, and suddenly, Polak did a sharp turn away from us, disappearing into the sky and out of our sight.
"One, two, three, four, five," Goetze counted, and then, "hold on," and he turned his own plane hard, a thrilling and somewhat unexpected move that pushed me back against my seat.
At first, we couldn't find Polak in the wide open sky, but then we saw him. We flew back toward each other, and then were alongside again. This time, we were in the lead.
"OK, now we'll do a break and rejoin," Goetze tells me. "OK, bye bye."
He turns hard on the wheel, and the plane jerked hard to the left and away from Polak. And seconds later, Polak turned hard as well, and followed us.
And we repeated what happened before when Polak had been in the lead: A couple minutes of trying to spot each other and then a slow and steady rejoining.
As Polak flew alongside and a little behind, I asked Goetze how close he was. He explained that there were probably three to five feet between the nose of Polak's plane and the tail of ours, and maybe five feet of lateral separation. The planes don't overlap, he said.
I asked why not.
"It's too dangerous," Goetze told me. "We're not the Blue Angels. We don't have ejection seats."
Six Blue Angels F-18s flying together in perfect formation during a practice performance at their home base in Pensacola, Fla.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)A few minutes later, I noticed that, trailing us, Polak wasn't looking ahead at all. Rather, he was looking intently at us.
Goetze explained that the trailing pilot always looks at the leader, looking for anything that he might have to respond to.
"If I flew into a mountain," Goetze said, "he wouldn't notice."
Next up, Goetze starts doing what he calls "lazy-eights."
Essentially, this was a series of "S" turns, where he would gently pull the plane up as he began left turns, and out the window, I could see that Polak was mirroring our moves precisely.
The lazy-eights are so smooth and I'm focusing so much on the sky in front of me that it's hard to tell that we're doing them. Only the constantly changing horizon in front of us lets me know that we're not flying straight ahead.
Clearly, Polak is the more experienced pilot because as we pull out of one of the turns, Goetze got on the radio and said to Polak, "You're just disgustingly good at this."
"Sorry about that," Polak responded.
Goetze explained to me that in formation flying, the basic structure is the two-plane "element," in which one is the leader and the other the follower.
In what's called "acute" flying, the follower stays slightly behind and below, at a 45-degree angle.
"If he's too far behind, you can't get the 45-degree angle," Goetze said.
And as for why the follower doesn't fly even with the leader, but a little below, he added, "If I was to gently turn, he would have no reaction time, and I would run into him."
That, even I can understand, would not be a good thing.
Next up, Goetze told me about the two kinds of what he called "overhead breaks."
These are maneuvers in which both planes in an element--or more planes if there are more than two--turn simultaneously.
First, there's the "welded wing" turn, in which the follow plane climbs or descends into the turn with the lead pilot's wing. This means that as the leader turns left, the follow planes will climb above as they turn, while if the leader turns right, the follow planes will drop down as they turn.
An "echelon" turn, on the other hand, means that all the planes in a formation turn as one, keeping on the same level, or row.
"We only do (echelon turns) away from people," Goetze told me. "The Blue Angels will do echelon turns into each other, because they're crazy."
We were now approaching Columbia, and Goetze began to get ready to land.
But once he dealt with a few administrative details, he explained how formations work if there are, say, four planes, or two elements.
He held out his hand, with his fingers together and the thumb tucked away, demonstrating that the middle finger in such a formation would represent the lead plane in the lead element, with the index finger being the following plane in the lead element. The other two fingers, then, represent the second element.
With this general configuration in mind, he explained that there are all kinds of maneuvers possible in formation flying, but that they always do them in pairs. If there happened to be just three planes, the third would be its own element, he said, and would pretend to have a wing man.
By now, it was time to land, and so we broke formation so that our plane could hit the ground first, with Polak following close behind.
Goetze said they would have landed in formation--the runway in Columbia was probably wide enough--but they didn't want to scare me.
The six Blue Angels F-18s fly together in perfect formation during a practice performance at their home base in Pensacola, Fla.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)PENSACOLA, Fla.--If you've ever watched a Blue Angels show, you may not have known that when the F-18 pilots are screaming across the sky, less than 2 feet apart, they're probably not looking straight ahead.
Rather, they're most likely looking sideways at the fighter just off their side, ensuring that they know exactly where it is as they rocket forward at several hundred miles per hour.
That seems like a smart thing, even though it is kind of disconcerting to think the pilots aren't exactly looking where they're going, since no one wants these high-performance jets touching while in flight.
This week, as part of my Road Trip 2008 project, I stopped in at Naval Air Station Pensacola here for a chance to watch the Blue Angels practice their demonstration show from way up close.
In fact, when I was planning Road Trip 2008 and found out the Blue Angels are based in Pensacola, I rearranged the entire second half of the journey to attend one of the practices, which happen on a few specific dates in between the air shows all over the country.
I was invited to watch the show from the flight line, meaning I was able to get much closer than the public gets for the practices. This was nice since, while I've seen the Blue Angels fly probably more than a dozen times in San Francisco and once in Seattle, I was never very close to them.
This time, I was allowed onto the tarmac where guests get to stand, meaning I was probably a couple of hundred yards away from the planes when they were at rest (see video below for a view of the tarmac, the Blue Angels planes, and the maintenance hanger).
The show itself was spectacular, especially from up close and with many other planes as backdrops, including "Fat Albert," the team's C-130 that ferries its equipment and support crew to various stops around the country.
Afterward, I got a chance to sit down with Lt. Frank Weisser, the No. 7 Blue Angels pilot.
Of course, if you're a student of the Blue Angels, you know there are only six planes in the performances. Weisser, as the No. 7 pilot, serves a three-year term with the team--while the others stay for two years--because his first year is spent taking care of VIPs, organizational duties and talking to the press. After a year, he will step into one of the regular pilot's roles.
Two Blue Angels F-18s fly directly at each other during their practice performance at Naval Air Station Pensacola.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)I was curious how someone becomes a Blue Angels pilot, and Weisser explained that there's an application process, just like for any job. But the requirements are a little more stringent than for most: to qualify, you must have flown at least 1,250 hours as a pilot of an F-18 or F-14.
Each year, the team adds three new pilots, but there are probably only about 50 applicants, since the pool of people who have the required hours is pretty small.
Those selected as finalists then join the current team at air shows around the country so everyone can get to know each other.
"That's important for us because we're together for 300 days a year," Weisser said.
The front of a Blue Angels F-18 as seen from the side.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)The team's commanding officer, Weisser also explained, has even more strict requirements: he (or she, though the Blue Angels has never had a female member of the performance team) must have already commanded a squadron of F-18s.
One thing that surprised me is that the Blue Angels spend about two to three months training each year in the desert outside El Centro, Calif., a small town in the southeast corner of the Golden State. This was particularly interesting to me because they fly there from January to March, and for years, I traveled to near El Centro for the week between Christmas and New Year's. I guess I just missed the team when they were there all those years.
Back here in Pensacola, I was curious about whether the practice shows, both here and at various sites around the country, are any different than the formal shows they do.
Weisser said that the practices, no matter where they are, are identical, in fact, to the formal shows. And over the years, the shows have changed very little.
"We have to do it that way so we stay safe in the air," Weisser said. "There's such a small room for error, that we can't change the show...(And) one thing we pride ourselves on is our (consistency). Had you seen the show today and been on the team in the '60s or '70s, it would look very, very similar to you." (See below for a video of some of the Blue Angels' practice.)
After being on the Blue Angels, the idea is that the pilots return to whatever squadron they were part of before. The team is very adamant that pilots don't use the experience as a springboard to, say, getting a plush job flying for FedEx or some private carrier.
As I mentioned above, the planes can get as close as 12 inches during the shows, flying at speeds of between 300 and 400 knots. For a civilian who's never flown, this was a rather astounding fact. But to Weisser, it's just how things are for the team.
The team, of course, is actually two teams. The first is a group of four of the pilots who fly as part of the "diamond," always working together during a show. The second are the two solo pilots. Essentially, he explained, the Blue Angels fly two separate shows at a time.
But regardless of which team pilots are on, being able to fly as a Blue Angel is a boon for their careers, in large part because of how often they get behind the stick. They fly nearly every day, either in a formal show or in practices, and during their training months in the California desert, they fly as many as 15 times a week.
"You get to fly a ton," Weisser said, "and everyone who's a pilot loves to fly and wants to be in the air as much as they can."
Though I won't be in the cockpit of any high-performance fighter jets, Road Trip 2008 will continue for the next week or so. Please stay tuned to this blog, and to my Twitter feed.
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