How do you begin to take in everything there is to see?

Look over here - a row of antiques, fabric covered, half the age of aviation itself! Think about it. Wilbur and Orville got off the ground in powered flight in December 1903, and only 40 years later, some of the airplanes on the flight line rolled out of the factory, and here it they are in 2011, almost 70 years later, still flying.

Most have been rebuilt many times, but they are still steel tubes, wooden strips and fabric covering, many with engines with less horsepower than most big motorcycles.

Never mind in some cases you could get here faster in a car. Never mind you have to talk someone into pulling the prop over to start the engine, and your communications, if any, is a hand-held radio at best.

There is no electrical system.

Look over there, and it's a row of military single engine aircraft, the proverbial and perennial basic trainer in many forms, but epitomized in the USAAF North American AT-6 Texan or its US Navy counterpart, the SNJ, and the more modern version, the Beechcraft T-34 Mentor, in piston and turbine.

A shiny TEMCO T-35 sits apart, gleaming in polished aluminum, too attractive to everyone to escape the day without fingerprints everywhere.

The old Soviet Union is here, only nowadays the USSR (or CCCP as is clearly evident in the plane's instrument markings) has dissolved, and the jet trainer  L-39 
Albatross is acknowledged to have been made by Aero Vodochody, a company now Czechoslovakian.

The Russians are here again, with a Chinese twist - it's the Yak-52, designed and manufactured in Russia by Yakovlev, and now under license in China. The one in the picture has Chinese language labels on the flight systems, instruments and controls.

Another row is filled with private aviation's fleet of piston Cessnas, Pipers, and Beechcraft. Once in a while a Mooney pops up, sometimes a Ryan Navion. Across the taxiway the rows of biz-jets and jet props are mostly Lear and Cessna, Pilatus, Bombardier, Saab, Sabrerliner.

But we are here to have none of that.

We are off to Warbird Alley - and we're in good company. 

The huge gray plane is the mighty Lockheed C-130 Hercules, a multi-role giant with a giant list of capabilities - troop transport, gunship, material and equipment transport, and greatly appreciated here in NC recently, capable of transporting the MAFFS modular airborne fire-fighting system, internal foam/water pumped overboard from the rear cargo opening.

The rear cargo door is wide open, and the side door is, too, and after a short climb up and inside, and a step up two more short ladders, and you're on the flight deck. It's gigantic, with a panel that reaches across the front and spills over onto both sides, and more overhead. 

I'd like to sit in the seat myself, but every time I visit the C-130 there's a seven year old kid in it who won't budge, and a parent nearby. Not that I would dream of strong-arming the kid out of the seat . . .

"It's just like the panel in a Cessna-172," I tell myself, "but with four of everything."

The basic six are there, the quad array of engine monitors, and seemingly almost everything else from the Starship Enterprise.

It's nice, but that's not what we came to see, either.

See, the guys I hang with are 'round' engine snobs, with one big exception.

'Round' engines are radials, in which the cylinders are arranged around the crankshaft, unlike 'inline' engines in which the cylinders are arranged along the crank.

Always in odd numbers - three, five, seven, nine - and repeated in multiples - an eighteen cylinder engine has two rows of nine cylinders, a twenty eight cylinder has four rows of seven cylinders, and there have even been 36 and 56 cylinder monsters.

Air cooled, supercharged, powerful - these were the workhorses for power lifting bombers and were the engine of choice in the familiar Boeing B-17, North American B-25 Mitchell, Martin B-26 Marauder, Consolidated B-24, the Douglas A-20 Havoc and the Douglas A-26 Invader, and finally the Boeing B-29.

Radials found their way into some pre-eminent fighters, too - the Republic P-47 and Vought F4-U Corsair. Pilots loved 'em because there was no hot anti-freeze coolant to scald you to death in a crash or puncture, and the huge chunk of aluminum and steel out front made a wonderful shield from frontal attack. Many planes came back with whole cylinders shot away but the engine still producing power!.

BTW: a radial engine's crankshaft rotates within the crankcase with the propeller attached to one end. The crankcase is bolted though an engine support to the airplane structure. Rotary engines' propellers are bolted directly to the front of the crankcase, and it and the cylinders rotate around the crankshaft, which is bolted firmly to the aircraft structure. Spinning cylinders make for superior cooling, and incredibly snappy performance as long as the turns are in the same direction as the engine's rotation, but much less so when against the torque of rotation.

George and his crew like to rub elbows with the other popular airshow participant, the B-25 Mitchell, and in another category, the exception to the 'round engine club' the P-51 Mustang.

Everyone likes the Mustang, rushed into war in a record number of days, from design drawing on paper to rollout in 102 days. Early performance was not spectacular, until the Allison engine was replaced with the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, and then it became one of the best fighters in the war. 

At a recent airshow, from inside the A-26, there was a scene that must have been pretty typical through the last days of WW-II. Just across the taxiway were parked two P-51 Mustangs, a -D model and an earlier model, likely a -B. The early Mustangs had what was called a 'razorback' rear fuselage behind the pilot, with side windows that offered limited visibility to the rear. Quickly, the Brits modified them with the rounded 'Malcom Hood' now making possible much improved visibility to the sides, down and rearward. A Willy's Jeep completed the scene.

"Everybody off the plane who doesn't belong," George says, as preparations for the airshow flyby begin. Sometimes the airboss will allow planes to fly in tandem, spaced closely, sometimes he wants as much separation as possible. Sometimes the turns will be to the left, sometimes to the right. All these details have been worked out carefully in the pre-flight briefing so the pilots know what to expect, and finally all the stuff that isn't warbirds is through, and now it's time to take to the air.

People come to airshows to see planes in the air, and that's what George and Jerry and Fred came to do - perform a series of low passes along the length of runway so the spectator crowd can see and especially hear the plane and its mighty radials pounding out 4,000 hp and slice through the air at over 300 mph.

Air at these speeds compresses in front of the airplane, and becomes something more like a liquid. Try this - hold your arm and hand out the car window at 30 mph, than again at interstate speeds, 70 mph. Much more pressure on your arm. At 300 mph your arm will fold alongside. *

Gentle breezes and burbles of air take on a stiffness, a hardness, that the plane has to punch through, and you can see the reaction in movies, in which the pilots are bumped around in their seats similar to driving down a rutted dirt road with corduroy ridges.

Steady nerves, sensory awareness and experience come into play as the pilot maintains separation, altitude, and airspeed, and tracks down the runway to the thrill of spectators who get the experience only a large thundering radial engine can produce. 

And then it's over. The planes are back on the ground and the crowd trickles away.

Once again the gas truck tops off the tanks and we're off, back to home base to secure the plane, and start the cycle over again for the next adventure.

AIRSHOW GYPSIES

I'm 68 and with one exception think I'm one of the younger crew members.

"How much longer are you guys going to fly the plane," has come my way a couple of times, and I answer, only half-way joking, "As long as we have room inside with all the walkers we're gonna' need one of these days." **

Generally, to get a plane to attend an airshow, the airshow sponsor pays a flat fee, agrees to gas up the plane on arrival, during the flybys and again just before departure, and in addition, provide ground transportation and a place to stay.

The vehicle must be large enough to carry the entire crew - between 6 and 8 people, and their luggage.

If you're young you surely can remember what it's like, and recoil in horror at the prospect, of having that many grandfathers trying to figure out how to get to the restaurant, motel, and back to the airport.

Don't kid yourself - as soon as the plane's in the air, everyone in the back pulls out every age, size and shape of GPS, eTrex to iPad, chart and roadmap, just in case the Garmin 530 in the panel and Jerry's Velcroed GPS pack it in. 

But try to find our way to the motel? Across the Interstate and access roads? You ought to be there.

"Are you guys fliers?" an incredulous guest asked once in the lobby of a motel.

"Yes, the hope of our nation from the greatest generation," I thought, leaving out that the greatest generation was easily four or five generations ago.

So there you have it - a bunch of guys living the dream, and there couldn't be a luckier bunch on earth. For George because it's his plane, for Jerry and Fred who bring expertise and real capability, and the rest of us in the 'utility' crew who do the preflights, wipe it down after a flight so viewers won't brush up against oil-coated landing gear doors ad nacelles, clean the windows, set up the displays, take everything down and get ready to go again, just waiting for George to park his truck and say the words we want to hear:

"OK, pardners - saddle up . . ."

We all clamber aboard but one who stays outside through engine start (observer, with a fire extinguisher should a flooded engine backfire), and after number two is running hauls the chocks from under the nosewheel and races to the open airstair door to be let aboard and off we go.

* From WIKI: Power

The power required to overcome the aerodynamic drag is given by:

Note that the power needed to push an object through a fluid increases as the cube of the velocity. A car cruising on a highway at 50 mph (80 km/h) may require only 10 horsepower (7.5 kW) to overcome air drag, but that same car at 100 mph (160 km/h) requires 80 hp (60 kW). With a doubling of speed the drag (force) quadruples per the formula. Exerting four times the force over a fixed distance produces four times as much work. At twice the speed the work (resulting in displacement over a fixed distance) is done twice as fast. Since power is the rate of doing work, four times the work done in half the time requires eight times the power.

** walkers - you know, the aluminum support framework you see propping old people up, but with squadron decals and a basket in front for wrenches, hydraulic fluid and miscellaneous equipment - GPS, charts, headsets