The plan was to attend the 2010 West Coast RV Formation Flying Clinic in Madera, CA, approx. 627 NM south in the lower Central CA Valley just north of Fresno. The trip started out on Friday AM about 10:00 AM with 2000’ OVC and some light scattered rain through southern WA. Weathermeister.com was showing OK weather with 2500 OVC through central OR, then broken and finally clearing into the CA Central Valley, but the winds were going to be fairly stiff out of the north with 15G25 or so on landing. I departed and headed down the valley over I-5 and was able to slowly creep up to about 3000 by Hillsborough, then up to about 4000 towards Eugene where the clouds finally went BKN. I was about 10 miles behind a group of 4 from the Portland area and we all pushed up to VFR on-top, climbing to 9500 for a nice ride down to Oroville CA. Around Roseburg, one of the guys lost an alternator and headed back. Lava had a new alternator replaced and eventually made it back down by evening. The Portland guys landed at OVE and I was about 10 minutes behind. We all got a car, then headed into town for some lunch and enjoyed the sun! We departed as a 3-ship, then picked up one more around the Auburn area to make it a flight of 4 heading into Madera (2 RV-8s, a -6 and my -7). Through the CA valley, winds were about 40kts on the tail giving us ground speeds of almost 200kts, but the flip side was the penalty heading north on Sunday! Overall, we had about 4.5 total hours down to Madera, arriving in time to get cleaned up for the evening ground school.
Ground school was run from 6:00 – 10:00 PM with some pizza thrown in for dinner and covered the key knowledge areas of the T-34 Formation Manual, with emphasis on the differences for the RVs. If you read the manual and understood it, this was a good review for the weekend. I suspect that by 10:00 PM, everyone was pretty beat and most folks headed off for the evening, show time was 8:00 briefing on Sat AM.
Most folks showed early to start prepping planes, uncover, pre-flight, clean bugs, etc, to be ready for an 8:00 briefing. All up, there were about 27 participants as of Friday evening so it promised to be a good weekend. The first flight of the day was to be a ride-along for those of us new to RV formation, with the newbie riding along with an experienced pilot to see what the correct sight pictures were for RVs so I rode along with Eddy (SoCal) in the back of his RV-8 and he proceeded to show me the way an aggressive rejoin is really done. If done right, you get a face full of airplane just before moving to the outside if you’re #3 (#2 forms to the inside of the turn – always). Although #4 had a communication problem, we had a good flight with some wing time, and re-joins before heading back.
We had some lunch then got ready for the afternoon flights. The first flight of the afternoon was a 3 ship and I was solo, deemed not scary hazardous to health from the first flights, so we briefed up and went out and flew. Lead was Rodac, who had a Mazda-powered RV-6 in Navy colors. Nice airplane but it sure sounds like a big model airplane ;-). We departed as a 3-ship section take-off, formed up, then went out and generally flew the same profile, but added some extended trail exercises. This is basically follow-the-leader with a 1000’ separation in trail, which is way too much fun!
After debrief, there were a group sitting around, and Rodac asks, “anyone want to go fly a 7 ship?” Well, with that we were all briefing up 7 ship formation composed of a 4-ship and a 3 ship. Whoo-hoo. I was #2 for Alpha flight, so all I needed to do was just stay on lead, good thing since I was starting to get beat. Even with form flights under an hour, a newbie comes back sweating and tired from gripping the stick and throttle. One really has to learn to relax and take time to shake out feet and arms as this is fairly intense flying for sure. So we went out and flew what we briefed, going from a fingertip and a 3-ship vee formation, to a big delta and back before coming back in. This was somewhat of a short flight, but a lot of fun. If you’re in the front of the formation, you don’t generally see the mass behind you, but if you’re bringing up the rear, you do get to see that.
That’s where we were for the dinner flight Saturday evening. The plan was to fly to Sierra Skypark from Madera for a Tri-tip BBQ dinner at one of the guy’s airpark homes. I rode along with Charlie Flight lead and just took some pictures and it was good to see the group of RVs out in front of us for the 15 mile flight. It’s always interesting to hear “RV-flight of 17, entering extended downwind for the initial..” Some complain about the 3 or 4 in a pattern at the local non-controlled airports, but try getting 17 on the ground! We taxied in and pretty much filled the streets with airplanes and enjoyed a great BBQ dinner. And for those of us not flying, a couple beers were really good after a long day. The folks involved in this come from really interesting backgrounds, with the majority non-military. There’s the 1st grade teacher (Schoolmom), a retired volcanologist (Lava), a couple who work for Van’s Aircraft, a professional photographer for The Governator (Forrest), some folks from the SF Bay Area high-tech industry, a couple airline pilots, a retired Navy Flight Doc, and others, all with an interest in formation flying and very diverse backgrounds.
Overall, a really great weekend with lots of flying. Including, the trip down and back, I managed to put another 12.2 trouble-free hours on the RV, increase my formation skills, and socialize with a bunch of like-minded pilots.
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