Porterville 6/11-6/12

This Friday and Saturday was Eagle Mountain airshow in Porterville, CA.  My Dad and I decided to take it as an opportunity to test out the camping gear we've been collecting for our upcoming trip to Osh Kosh in July.

We intended to leave Santa Barbara on Friday at about 2:30 since the airspace in Porterville was closed until 3:00 for airshow practice.  As I was walking out to the plane I noticed that Oprah's pilot was outside her plane working on something so I struck up a conversation with him.  Pretty soon he invited me inside while he started up the apu (auxillary power unit, basically a small jet engine that provides power for the plane on the ground) and tested a few things.  The plane is a Bombardier Global Express, an airliner sized $47 million dollar beast.  As I walked on I glanced in the back and there was someone making the BED!! The cockpit was very impressive and other than the yokes and rudder pedals it was hard to find anything very familiar. The visit on Oprah's plane took quite some time and we left Santa Barbara about 4:00.

The trip over to Porterville was fairly quick even though we had a pretty good headwind and were only making about 125kts over the ground. The air was fairly smooth but we hit some decent turbulence over the mountains which was just enough to keep things interesting.

Friday night there was a big dinner with spaghetti and a live singing performance.  The theme of the airshow was the 40's and 50's and the singers were dressed up in a 40's style and sung 40's music.  The dinner also gave me a good opportunity to check out the planes that would be flying in the airshow the next day.  There was a Zlin 50, a Stearman 450 with a canopy, a clipped wing taylorcraft, a Sukhoi su-26mx, a T-6 Texan, and a blue Christian Eagle.  The Christian Eagle had a placard on the front instrument panel which I thought was funny, it said "straight and level flight prohibited".

Friday night didn't bring a ton of sleep for Dad or me but the airshow made up for our lack of sleep in spades. We weren't expecting much in the way of performances but we were very pleasantly surprised.  All the planes that I mentioned flew performances and they were all very good.  The Stearman did an inverted ribbon cut about 15 feet off the ground.  The clipped wing taylorcraft shut off its engine and did a loop and a roll before gliding in for a perfect landing.  The Sukhoi and the Zlin both put on performances that rival some of the things RC planes can do.  The Eagle was piloted by a man named Shamus McCauley who was flying in his first professional airshow performance, and even though he was limited to 500ft he did a very good job.

My dad and I both enjoyed the trip, and the camping went better than we expected.  We might be going to Columbia next weekend for a fly-in.  Other than the possible trip next weekend we don't really have much planned before the big trip to Osh Kosh.  In the next few weeks we're going to get the plane detailed by Artcraft in Santa Maria and we may have a Garmin 430 put in the panel before the trip.  I'll try and get some before and after pictures and post them here.