Flight fantastic
At Australia’s biggest annual airshow, aviation enthusiasts wheel out glistening fighter jets and cherished vintage aircraft still capable of cutting shapes across the sky.
At Australia’s biggest annual airshow, aviation enthusiasts wheel out glistening fighter jets and cherished vintage aircraft.
IN HIS MIND Matt Hall dips his Extra 300L downwards, punching past 10G as he tumbles. When 10 times the normal force of gravity comes to bear on the body, even for a few seconds, it causes enormous strain.The pressure drags lips and skin back across the face, eyes bulge and blood is pushed from the brain with remarkable force. Skilled pilots learn to push the blood back up by clenching their legs and breathing aggressively, but few are as good as Matt.
In reality, the former fighter-pilot’s face is clenched in concentration as he walks up and down the hangar enacting an ‘aircraft-free’ version of his aerobaticc routine for the Wings Over Illawarra airshow.
In 2016 Matt came second in the world’s ‘Formula la One of the skies’, the Red Bull Air Race, but for yearsars he has served as a fighter pilot in both Australia and the USA. His mental rehearsal is a product of sports psychology that helps him finetune his reactions to 0.01 of a second.
“I imagine every single roll, every single piece of G, when I’m going to breathe – down to that level,” he says.“Basically, what I’m doing is rehearsing in my mind, so that once I’m airborne,I’m not having to think about what I need to do or what’s happening next.”
Nearby, engineers tinker in the belly of Mabel II, a 1946 P-51 Mustang fighter plane. In other communities this might be a clash of aesthetics – vintage meets racer, classic meets sports. But the aviation fanatics, young and old, vintage, military, aerobatic and racer, all get passionately behind one philosophy: getting their planes into the air – and Wings Over Illawarra is one of the biggest shows at which to do it.
As the light fades, the Lockheed L1049 Super Constellation, or ‘Connie’ – Qantas’s first trans-Pacific passenger aircraft type, and perhaps the show’s star attraction – billows fire and smoke into a yellowing sunset as it burns off pooled oil in its engines.
“Does it always do this?” I ask.“Yep, that’s normal,” says Eric Favella, who’s standing next to a shed full of thousands of beautiful, but faded and dog-eared, technical manuals for every plane imaginable. As I browse, Eric tells me he was an aircraft maintenance engineer at Sydney (Kingsford Smith) Airport, from 1956 until he retired in 1997.
The late ’90s was when theth Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) retrieved the Connie from a shed filled with scrap in Tucson, Arizona. Despite the plane’s 1950s vintage, the point was always to get it flying.“We’d go to an airshow and people would say, ‘How did it get here [to Australia]?’” Eric says, laughing.“Well, we flew it in - that’s the whole point!”
And fly it they did, across the Pacific in 1996 – although Eric says Qantas initially made them remove the logo from the tail, because they were afraid it would be the last thing the news cameras saw before it sank beneath the waves.
The weekend show bustles around the Society’s open hangar and the grassy fields of Illawarra Regional Airport; this year’s event drew 22,000 visitors, all here to enjoy the 70-odd vintage and military aircraft on display.These enthusiasts are thrilled at the hands-on nature of some of the exhibits, and are able to climb in and examine the cockpits of planes, including a supersonic F-111 and 1954 CA-27 Sabre.
The Illawarra now has Australia’s biggest annual airshow and it’s clearly the work of engineers, because the schedule runs to the second, with the commentary team booming out historical information to complement each on the aerial displays. In an effort to attract visitors, the city of Shellharbour, 90km south of Sydney, offered HARS a home when it lost its hangar at Kingsford Smith in 2000, and the show has since grown rapidly.
The Society’s members – mostly retired pilots and engineers – tinker with about 50 historic planes here, including some classic biplanes dating back to the 1920s. Outside their hangar – and incongruously dwarfing it – is a grounded Boeing 747, donated by Qantas. This is also the venue for a cocktail party fundraiser replete with canapés on the Saturday night.
The airshow itself began in 2007 as an airport
The event drew 22,000 visitors, all here to enjoy the 70-odd vintage and military aircraft.
open day with a crowd of 5000–6000 and a small display of HARS aircraft, but in 2013 it was taken over by Mark and Kerry Bright, who ran the airport’s nowclosed cafe for nine years. In the past three years they have swiftly progressed from fly-bys by just a handful of aircraft, to managing major displays of planes, including World War II fighters, jets and military aircraft.
Of the 30-plus aircraft to fly in the 2016 show, about one-third are provided by the Royal Australian Air Force.These include a 265-tonne transporter, capable of carrying 40 SUVs, and a lean-looking 1984 Hornet, a cousin to the plane thatTom Cruise flew in Top Gun.
Other craft to take to the skies range from a 1943 Boeing Stearman and a WWII Spitfire fighter, to a 1960 CAC Sabre jet. The Australian Army’s Red Berets also show off their paragliding skills and aerobatics acts tumble around the sky leaving smoke rings in their wake.
Sitting in an office in the hangar is Mark Hall, 53, a Hong Kong-based pilot who flies Boeing 777s for Cathay Pacific. He hails from Mooloolaba in Queensland, and spent a small fortune to co-own and fly the P-51 Mustang fighter, housed at the Caboolture Warplane and Flight Heritage Museum near Brisbane.
A syndicate owns the Mustang and takes punters on $1000–$3000 joy rides during the show, the takings from which basically just keep the plane running.“It has cost more than $100,000 in scheduled maintenance this year alone,” Mark says.
After buzzing past and almost kissing the ground in his aerobatics plane, Matt Hall takes the older Mustang for a spin and does graceful victory rolls for the crowd. As the show draws to a close, the Connie fires up once more. For the first time this weekend, both the volunteer engineers (who have been running around doing checks and tweaks to the planes) and the visitors stop to watch as it slowly takes off and circles over the golden sandstone of the Illawarra Escarpment like a huge metal bird.
Admiring its shape, I can see this aircraft brings tears to the eyes of the older pilots – and I notice Qantas has relented on the logo, which is once more emblazoned across the tail.