The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  All airshow pilots are born to fly. Like concert pianists or heart surgeons, they’re so uniquely qualified by skill and disposition that there can be no other suitable occupation. The best create their own void and fill it. Some attempt to fill voids left by others. Pilots attempting to fill that left by Charlie Hillard will achieve quite a bit if they just come close.

  51

  CLOSE SHAVE

  A quarterback worth the title jumps up ready to play after an outside linebacker nearly cuts him in half. The same applies for a hockey player, who seeks not pity but merely sweet revenge after being checked into the boards.

  Airshow performers are also athletes. Anyone who doubts the statement needs only fly hard aerobatics for ten minutes or so. Most performers, not wanting spectators to see them sweat, smile at setbacks and danger. Making it look easy is part of the job. Some shrug off the most serious of misfortunes. Take the case of Lindsey Hess, who crashed while upside down during a ribbon cut in his Pitts Special S-2A in Stoneville, North Carolina, on April 27, 1996.

  Hess’s two sons, Jaye and Gary, held the poles on which a ribbon had been attached across the runway. Their father would fly past them inverted and slice the ribbon. It was the show finale, the capper. The elder Hess had done it hundreds of times in his career but that day, the Pitts struck the runway at about 120 mph while upside down. The little biplane instantly transformed from aircraft to a nightmarish inverted sled. It began a 500-foot slide on its back, grinding off the upper parts of the aircraft, exposing Hess’s head dangerously close to the ground. To his sons, it must have looked as if their dad was skidding toward eternity.

  Worse, when the little Pitts came to rest, it began to burn. But what appeared from a distance to be certain disaster defied the expected outcome. As his two sons ran toward the wreckage, a mostly unhurt Hess climbed out and walked away. His escape was remarkable, but it’s what he said afterward that created headlines in the next day’s edition of the Wilmington, North Carolina Morning Star: “PILOT VOWS TO CONTINUE AFTER AIRSHOW DISASTER.”

  The headline left something out. Hess didn’t mean he would continue flying airshows eventually. He meant that day! Right then!

  “The combination of everything, it was a miracle basically to come out without a scratch or to not have any bones broken,” Lindsey Hess told the Morning Star reporter at the scene. “I have no problem. If I had a show today and I had (another) airplane, I’d do it!”

  Twenty years after the crash, with no existing record of whether or not Hess got back on the horse, a call was placed to Keith Hess, another of the pilot’s sons. Despite the senior Hess’s vow that day to continue airshow work, he did not replace his Pitts S-2A. He continued to fly but gave up performing.

  “My dad never even scratched an airplane in twenty years of flying airshows all over the world,” said son Keith. “I think he just thought it was time to quit.”

  Perhaps Hess, looking back on a fulfilling career of flying upside down close to the ground, thought about it and concluded that, while miracles are rare, airshow miracles are much rarer. And the surest way to anger Providence is to ignore the implied warning that comes with all miracles.

  In 2017, Lindsey Hess was eighty-six years old and doing well.

  52

  RARE BUTTERFLY

  VETERAN airshow pilot Wayne Handley may also have cashed in a miracle on October 3, 1999, in Salinas, California, when he slammed into the ground in the Oracle Turbo Raven, arguably the most innovative aerobatic aircraft ever built.

  Handley suffered severe injuries in the crash but made a 100 percent recovery. He briefly returned to the airshow circuit but retired after a half-dozen performances. Handley jokes that medications during his lengthy recovery from the Turbo Raven crash caused him to promise the women in his life that he would give up airshows.

  The Turbo Raven was the fastest-climbing propeller-driven aircraft ever built. Handley set climb records for brake-release to three thousand meters in one minute and nine seconds and to six thousand meters in three minutes, six seconds. He also performed seventy-eight consecutive flat inverted spins in the aircraft, a record later eclipsed. While his flat spin record stood, Handley, a man blessed with a dry sense of humor, advised anyone trying to beat the inverted flat spin record to add the extra spins to the top of the attempt rather than the bottom.

  A 750-horsepower Pratt and Whitney PT-6A turboprop engine with an inverted fuel and oil system powered the Turbo Raven. The engine spun a three-bladed propeller that was fully reversible, even in the air. Especially in the air! It’s part of what made the aircraft so different than anything seen before—or since—at airshows. The Turbo Raven’s positive thrust-to-weight ratio allowed it to laugh at gravity and long-accepted limitations and norms of propeller-driven flight going back to the Wright brothers.

  Wayne Handley about to perform in the incomparable Oracle Turbo Raven. Courtesy of Wayne Handley.

  The Turbo Raven could be airborne in two hundred feet and climb straight up, seemingly forever—unless Handley chose to stop the climb, hover, and even back up a bit before continuing the ascent. The ship had a maximum speed of 300 mph and a dizzying roll rate of 450 degrees per second. Its maximum climb rate was 10,000 feet per minute.

  The Turbo Raven project began as a concept painting that hung on the wall in Handley’s office. The idea of a purpose-built turboprop-powered aerobatic airplane was an inspired idea, but an impractical one due to its prohibitive cost. Enter Larry Ellison, billionaire founder of Oracle Corporation. Ellison’s corporate pilot saw the painting and mentioned it to his boss. Ellison, a licensed pilot with expensive toys and lavish lifestyle—one of his homes is modeled after that of a Japanese emperor—put up the money and the game was on. A number of talented people, including Handley, designed and built the cutting-edge composite aircraft, which first flew in 1998.

  The untimely crash of the Turbo Raven, a year to the day after its first flight, became one of the most-debated accidents in airshow history, largely due to the complexity of the free-spinning turboprop engine and its propeller. Handley contends that the engine flamed out on descent, depriving him of the energy needed to arrest his sink rate. When the Turbo Raven struck the ground, the propeller was in the “beta” range, a flattened pitch position that effectively turns a propeller into an air brake. In hindsight, Handley thinks he should have feathered the propeller, which would have taken it out of beta. He also blames himself for not having the engine igniters “on” or at least in “auto.”

  Self-recriminations aside, Handley still chafes fifteen years later at the National Transportation Safety Board’s finding of “pilot error,” which was based solely on the assertion that the engine was running when the aircraft hit the ground, a claim echoed by the engine and propeller manufacturers.

  Fortunately, Handley survived the accident to tell what happened on that day, beginning with the takeoff. His words offer a rare look into the anatomy of an airshow mishap, insight that is sadly not available from most of the performers in this book. In Handley’s words:

  My Turbo Raven act started with the airshow announcer delivering me a clearance that went something like this, “Turbo Raven, you are cleared to your present position, maintain runway heading and no turns allowed. Be back on the ground in one minute and squawk 911.” I would read back the clearance and bring the torque (power) up to 80 percent, check the instruments, and release the brakes.

  Once rolling, I would come in with full power, wait for 80 knots and rotate. After a ground roll of about 200 feet I would pull up and over into a one-half Cuban eight. About then the announcer would remind me that my clearance was to maintain runway heading and I would explain that it was still the same runway. After tracking outbound for a few seconds in order to buy a little space, I would pull to the vertical and initiate a half-roll at seven hundred feet and push over the top at 1,500 feet. At that point I would pull the prop into reverse pitch and establish a descent angle of 50–60 degrees nose down while main
taining an airspeed of 75 knots. To accomplish this, I would pull the prop into reverse pitch until I felt the airflow around the tail surfaces being disrupted. At 800 feet I would bring the prop back into the normal range and accelerate up to 90 knots for my landing flair.

  On the day of the accident, the prop only came up to beta pitch and there was no power. My last thought before impact was how much thrust I could develop prior to impact. The amount of thrust would determine how hard I would hit. Normally I only brought the thrust lever up to idle, but this time I pushed it up to the full power stop and there was no response.

  In those last three to four seconds before impact I flew the edge (just the tickle) of the stall buffet to the ground and tried to will the nose up to the landing attitude. I’d seen other pilots ask too much of the wing under similar circumstances, stall the wing and increase their rate of descent. In some of the accident video you can see that I was working the elevator and rudder, but not the ailerons. I was trying to milk as much lift as I possibly could out of the wing.

  The plane hit in a level attitude with a high rate of descent. My guess is that the impact was in the twenty “G” range. I feel as though my body absorbed about 98 percent of what it could. My L-2 vertebrae was crushed and several ribs broke parallel to my spine. Some of the upper vertebrae cracked also, but were not a factor during my rehab. The seat supports failed about 80 percent, which was perfect. If they had not failed at all, or failed 100 percent, my back would have received a more severe shock. I am now three inches shorter because L-2 was used for parts when the surgeon fused L-1 to L-3.

  While I was in the hospital the FAA and NTSB did their investigation. The engine was sent to Pratt and Whitney for the postmortem and their findings were that the engine was developing a “significant” amount of power at the time of impact. I totally disagree; there was no thrust at the time of impact.

  A few months later I was given video that was taken from head-on by a photographer standing about 1,500 feet up the taxiway that I crashed on. The prop was turning 2,200 RPM when I came over the top of the maneuver and started down, the camera speed was the equivalent of 1,800 rpm, so the strobe effect (think wagon wheel effect in old movies) was showing the 400 rpm differential. Halfway down my descent, where I came out of reverse pitch, the strobe effect stopped, and then started accelerating in the opposite direction showing that the RPM was decreasing. I think any logical person would interpret that as a loss of power.

  The NTSB gave me credit for a pilot error accident, stating that I failed to maintain sufficient airspeed. Over the years I’ve seen a lot of accidents attributed to pilot error, but I’ve never seen the NTSB use the “I Don’t Know!” stamp. I’ve always felt that sending an engine to its manufacturer after an accident was like having the fox guard the hen house—but who else are you going to send it to?

  The Turbo Raven was not the first turboprop-powered civilian aerobatic airplane, though it may have been the first designed specifically for a turboprop engine. A turboprop engine had been fitted to a 1930s-era Great Lakes biplane some years before the Turbo Raven but the ship was lost in a fatal accident. The late Sam Burgess once hung a turboprop engine on his World War Two-era German-built Bücker Jungmeister biplane. He set a climb record, later topped by the Turbo Raven. David Kervinen’s Toucan is a modern biplane powered by a Walter turboprop. Like the Turbo Raven, it has a better than one-to-one thrust-to-weight ratio—and the look of attitude that accompanies such potential. Although the Toucan has yet to make its airshow debut, the world awaits.

  There are no plans to bring back the Turbo Raven or anything like it in the immediate future. The original, which cost $750,000 to build in the late 1990s, was destroyed beyond repair in the Salinas crash. The cost of a second Turbo Raven would certainly exceed one million dollars, too much money to earn back flying airshows. And, as if the building cost were not enough of a deterrent, Handley doubts whether any insurance company would write a policy.

  Oracle’s Larry Ellison did not lose faith in the concept or in Handley. Quite the opposite. Ellison offered to back the construction of a “bigger and better” Turbo Raven. But, as previously stated, Handley had already promised his family he would retire. The offer was made exclusively to him. The imagination soars wondering what might have been.

  The Oracle Turbo Raven after it crashed during a performance. Pilot Wayne Handley was injured but survived. The Raven was never rebuilt. Courtesy of Wayne Handley.

  The world, meanwhile, will have to settle for the memory of an aircraft possessed of uncanny powers. The Turbo Raven was more than just a perfectly-proportioned aircraft that could literally do anything with Wayne Handley at the stick. Like a Watusi lion-hunter’s spear, the Turbo Raven was one of a limited number of man-made tools in which form and function coalesce so seamlessly as to be indistinguishable. The bright red airplane really did look like it was flying when sitting on the ramp—and knew it! Extended gear legs necessary to accommodate the large propeller gave the Turbo Raven a stately, even haughty nose-high aristocratic bearing that made it appear to look down on lesser aircraft unable to top or even imitate what it did.

  Great things are often short lived. The Oracle Turbo Raven was gone almost before it arrived. Like the last surviving specimen of a rare butterfly, the Turbo Raven emerged from its cocoon and unfolded its wings, enchanting and humbling all those lucky enough to see it fly.

  In retirement, Handley keeps his hand in flying by offering aerobatic instruction. Long-time airshow announcer Danny Clisham praised Handley as a “fantastic mentor who brought along a lot of young talent,” and referred to Handley as “Maestro.”

  53

  INTIMACY

  “CLOSE,” might mean a couple feet to a navy Blue Angel or an air force Thunderbird, but to the husband-and-wife team of Daniel and Montaine Héligoin it meant inches. They were the French Connection. Nothing quite like them existed before they joined the airshow circuit in the 1970s.

  The couple flew identical Mudry CAP-10B aircraft in close formation, one upright and the other inverted, canopy-to-canopy through much of their routine. If they broke apart, it was only to execute individual maneuvers mirrored by the other. These included octagonal loops, a more difficult form of aerial math than the four-sided square loop.

  Husband-and-wife team Daniel and Montaine Héligoin were the French Connection. They’re shown canopy to canopy during a performance in their CAP-10B aircraft. Photo courtesy of Fred Robbins.

  The “Frenchies,” as they were sometimes called, came to the United States in 1973 to demonstrate and sell the CAP-10B, which at the time was a new low-wing aerobatic aircraft manufactured by the French company Avions Mudry. After they were in the United States for a time, Daniel and Montaine decided to fly airshows and try something new, something that had never been seen at an airshow. Given airshow performers’ willingness to try anything over the one-hundred-year history of the sport, inventing something new was a tall order.

  The couple had two CAP-10B demonstration aircraft and worked up an act, both for income and to publicize the aircraft they were selling. At the 1977 Cleveland National Airshow on Labor Day in Cleveland, Ohio, someone dubbed them the “French Connection” on the program, an impromptu nickname that stuck.

  The couple, married in France in 1990, flew together for almost twenty-five years before they lost their lives in a training accident May 27, 2000. They were seventeen minutes into a morning training routine over their home base of Flagler County Airport in Bunnell, Florida, practicing their two-abreast hammerhead stall for the third time that day. The recovery called for each to fly away from the hammerhead and meet up again belly-to-belly. The fatal collision occurred at the meet-up stage of the maneuver.

  John Cudahy, of the industry trade group International Council of Air Shows, said that the hammerhead stall and recovery was about the least risky of the couple’s routine, according to a story in the May 31, 2000, issue of the Orlando Sentinel.

  Both CAP-10s crashed on
the airport. French Connection Airshows, Inc., an act that had entertained millions over a quarter century, was gone in an instant. The aerobatic world not only lost two of its most popular performers that day but it also lost two of its most sought-after instructors. When not doing shows, the Héligoins shared with others their techniques and the finer points of aerobatics.

  The entire practice session, including the collision, was taped. It was made available to the National Transportation Safety Board, which found fault in the “design” of the maneuver, particularly the last segment which required the wingman (Daniel) to “discontinue continuous observation of the lead (Montaine’s) aircraft.” In other words, he had to join up blind. The report also states that Montaine may have had trouble seeing Daniel in the belly-to-belly rejoin because of the CAP 10B’s low-wing configuration.

  In 1951, Daniel joined the French Air Force, where he acquired a love for close-formation flying. He established a light aircraft aerobatic team for the FAF and became the National Aerobatic Champion of France in both 1971 and 1972. After he retired from the military, he and Montaine signed on with the manufacturer of the CAP-10B to sell its aircraft in America, a challenge since the ship had not yet been certified and there were none to sell. It was a lean time.

  The CAP-10B was among the first of a new breed of aerobatic aircraft and among the last of an old breed of aerobatic aircraft. The cantilever low-wing configuration and bubble canopy said new but its fabric-covered all-wood construction harkened back to an earlier, simpler time in aviation.

  A bit on the chunky side and with only a 180-horsepower Lycoming engine, the CAP-10B was anything but overpowered. However, it flew at just the right spectator speed, its flight path as easy to follow as champion ballroom dancers. The CAP-10B required a sense of rhythm and momentum, again like dancers. The team’s routine, in fact, was choreographed to a Strauss waltz.