'10' NZAC 25 years on
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- Published on Monday, 05 September 2011 09:30
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The following article written by Martyn Gosling in 2010 delivers a brief history of the New Zealand Aerobatic Club.
This is the 25th time that the New Zealand Aerobatic Club has gathered at the close of a New Zealand aerobatic championships. It’s appropriate to have a very quick look at where we were, and where we are, and a few things that happened along the way.
The club was formed at a winter training camp at Omaka in 1985. It was savagely cold - the frost never melted from the shadows and they were long shadows. Our chief judge was Allen Hogan, who owned a vineyard nearby and whose backdoor was guarded by a magpie. Let me tell you about the magpie. The magpie had crosshairs on its beak. It aimed them most of the time at Ray Philpot. Maybe it was this that convinced Ray to be a judge of flying things. “Missed. That’s a zero!”
It’s sad that so few of those first members are still around. Our first president Merv Meredith died in a crash that left both our club and the Central Hawkes Bay Aero Club deeply bereft. That feeling has been repeated all too often over the past 25 years, the most recent of which was Colin Greatrex. Of the old originals, only myself, Keith Trillo, Richard Hood and Pam Collings are still members.
We’ve had members who felt that the only way to success was to bend the G-meter needles around their stops. I still twitch in horror recalling our old friend Bill Arnold hauling WIZ vertically with such extraordinary vigour you could hear the shriek of pain from the wingbolts. He’d stagger out of the plane with his eyes red, his skin green, drenched in sweat and unable to speak. But he was having fun - at least till the scores came out. Then he was more than able to speak.
We’ve had others for whom excessive G - anything over 2 or 3 - was an affront to a good aeroplane and who brought grace to aerobatics. Rae Turnbull could coax a Cessna 152 through Intermediate or Sports, sometimes with a safety pilot aboard, and hardly have the engine turning throughout. It was beautiful to watch, as were his flawless pinpoint landings. This included the one he flew straight at the judges. They were climbing over the back of their chairs and he was his normal gentlemanly, quiet, self, wondering what all the fuss was about. He had an old truck that was our first club transport. You could see through the floor and it used to have a warrant sometime around 1810. But you’d find an anthology of English verse on the front seat. He’s that kind of chap.
We’ve had our god times, and not so good. The fact that we’re still here suggests that the good far outnumber the other kind, and the not so good, such as they were, are best forgotten. Most of the time we’ve had a lot of laughs and real enjoyment from our fellows who find it quite normal to do what others consider insane.
Perhaps one of the biggest laughs was when Morris Craig got his RV stuck on the end of his finger.
Or when Colin had the entire club lined up across the field searching for a spring off MAD. Nobody else could have got us to do it, but he was a Royal Navy war veteran officer and it never occurred to him that he would not be obeyed, and it never occurred to us to not obey. We never found the spring, but the search made quite a sight.
And I can still remember big Al Yeoman demonstrating how to fly a Cessna 152, complete with sound effects, in the bar of the Tavistock. Cows one day, Cessnas the next, same technique.
He won Unlimited on both sides of the Tasman - thankfully not in a Cessna 152, but if that was all that was available it would have been enough. If anything, he demonstrated that to fly aerobatics competitively you don’t need a hotrod, though I have to admit, I miss mine desperately.
I have often been struck by the generosity this club both creates and engenders. Doug provided a chariot for a flock of aerobatic pilots for several years. Paul has had no hesitation allowing me to drive WIZ, which cruises around the box with grace of a Q-class racing yacht. MAD was always available if someone needed some dual. Ray made his time and home available to anyone who wanted coaching, and drove for hours to sit in rain and sun as a judge, while suffering cancer, while missing his birthday at home, year after year, just for pleasure of stressing out - which he was very good at. And for some reason the kind folk at Ruahine Motors have for years loaned us a truck for the week for the cost of a slab of beer. And without the wonderful people whose properties we terrorise - sorry, fly over - we wouldn’t have much of a season. And while the aero club interest in our operations has waxed and waned over the years, they have never hesitated to provide all the help we’ve ever asked for. And then there’s Neil - the Neil who turns up every year to climb over paddocks and put out box markers, and mow runways, and provide us with a radio caravan, and generally help hither and yon. And he’s a glider pilot! We must be doing something right as a club to have so many good friends.
It’s the good times, and the good people, who bring us back year after year. This is the essence of any good club, and it has always been the foundation of ours. It’s why we’ll be here in another 25 years.
Actually, none of this is what I meant to talk about.
What I was going to talk about was the most striking thing about our 25 years as a club and our 26 years of competition.
It goes like this....if we accept that there are an average of 15 pilots at each championship and that each flies three scoring rounds and a scored official practice (I’ve massaged the average pilot numbers to account for Sports only having two scoring flights) and that each sequence is about 15 manoeuvres and that we’ve been doing this for 26 years, it means that we’ve seen flown at Waipukurau 23,400 manoeuvres. Now, if we multiply that by about four judges, it means that we’ve seen 93,600 scores written down.
And guess what - not one of them was a 10.
Not one of us ever fluked it. Not once.
93,600 strokes of a pen.
And no 10.
Sheesh.
Now don’t get me wrong. We would not have a club or competition without judges. And it is the skill and fairness of our judges in applying distinct criteria that have truly made this club a success. Most of our judges I have seriously liked most of the time. But not one 10!? Not ever!!
And none at the Brian Langley either!
It’s probably why Doug got an aircraft with an X in the name because it’s the only 10 the plane will ever get.
Seriously, I wish I was with you to deliver this diatribe in person. I hope you have a great 25th.
Martyn Gosling