[BITList] The gushing report is even more impressive than their shows

[John Feltham]

The Red Arrows: aerial acrobats

Wing Commander Jas Hawker is the man who choreographs the world-famous  
Red Arrows, the aerial display team who travel the globe performing  
breath-taking stunts.

By Ismene Brown
Daily Telegraph (on-line) LOndin: 01 Sep 2009


Ready for take-off: Wing Commander and leader of the Red Arrows Jas  
Hawker
The noise is deafening, but it’s music – of a kind – and the  
ballet is about to begin. No need for a curtain to rise to show the  
performers, their entrance can’t be missed, preceded by an  
earsplitting roar, nine red shapes slashing across the sky. The Red  
Arrows ballet has begun.

Is it a dance in the sky, this breathlessly exciting sight, that  
causes 100,000 onlookers to exhale in fright or gawp in disbelief?  
Surely it isn’t simply a ruthless utilitarian exercise to show  
cutting-edge technology, the way Formula 1 is a shop window for  
Ferrari or Brawn car technology.

Whatever it is, it is beautiful. Nine red jets roll and loop in  
ribbons of patriotic blue, red and white trails. Several minutes of  
tight formation flying, when they change shape from diamond to  
triangle to bird to V, is followed by aerobatic fireworks that look  
stunningly dangerous, planes seeming to smash into each other then  
shoot out of the tangle like sparks from rockets.

At some point the pilot who’s the head of the diamond, the beak of  
the phoenix and – most daring of all – the brush that paints an  
infinity symbol in red smoke in the sky, while eight other jets roar  
through the loops, comes down to earth. He’s known as “The Boss”.  
I prepare to meet the Nureyev of the skies.

“I’ve never been described as a Nureyev of the skies before,”  
says Wing Commander Jas Hawker. “Though I sometimes describe the sky  
as my palette, on which I’m painting. What we do has got to be safe,  
first and foremost, but it can’t be boring, it’s got to be exciting  
to watch.” With 45 years of history, the Red Arrows displays aren’t  
short of manoeuvres, any more than a ballet company is short of steps.  
Some of the stunts even have curiously balletic names – the “Swan  
to Fred Loop”, for instance, which is as artfully picturesque as a  
flock of swan girls.

Hawker, 38, a former Tornado pilot in Iraq and elsewhere, has the rare  
accolade of having choreographed a new gem, the “Infinity Break”.  
This entails him weaving an infinity sign between his colleagues as  
they roar towards the crowd, then whizzing back to the head of the  
group as all the planes spray outwards in a spectacular burst.

The display is split into two halves: an aerial ballet for the nine in  
constantly varied formation and then 12 minutes of dynamic manoeuvres  
for two groups, five jets in the Enid (as in Blyton’s Famous Five),  
four in the Gypo (rhyming with hippo, and no one knows what that name  
comes from). The Boss heads the Enid, leading the newer pilots, while  
the Gypo includes the most experienced aerobatic virtuosos working in  
synchronised pairs.

Hawker explains that this is one ballet that is above all safety first.

“When I design a manoeuvre in my bath with my toy planes – no, not  
really – I do have to cover all the what-ifs. What if you hit a bird,  
what if the engine stops at this point, what if you lose the radio.  
For every manoeuvre we have a mandatory safety get-out. Or we can’t  
do it. We would never go and try flying something and then come back  
and say, oh, that’s not safe.” The serious point about the Arrows  
is that they push some of the best pilots flying operations over Iraq  
or Afghanistan to a new level of mastery and confidence, and that  
nothing draws recruits to the RAF like this jaw-dropping display. But,  
as Hawker says, not even when he had been accepted in 2000 did he  
realise what was involved.

“You’re not expecting to get in, because the competition to get in  
is so fierce. Once the disbelief has drifted away, probably the next  
emotion is: 'Ohmigod what have I let myself in for?’ There are days  
when you may be the only one of the nine pilots who can’t crack the  
finesse of a particular manoeuvre and you can easily get into a  
downward spiral where you are letting everybody else down.”

I see that combination of grit and honesty displayed after the show,  
when the nine pilots watch the video of their performance, each man  
tersely correcting his own flaws: “Short. Long. Wide.” Wherever  
they go they’re mobbed for autographs and photos by onlookers. From  
April to September they fly 97 displays – the day I saw them in  
Bournemouth they were popping over to Denmark to do a morning show and  
back to Bournemouth in the afternoon.

Hawker acknowledges that the PR is necessary and it is a factor in  
determining which of the 40 top RAF pilot applicants each year fill  
the three vacancies. But “there’s zero place in the Red Arrows for  
an egoist even though we do get associated with pop-star lifestyle. I  
think if there were big egos around they’d be stamped out by the  
team.” And when you see the aerial ballet you can’t miss the fact  
no one would leave the ground to do such a thing if they had the  
slightest niggle that one of the group had his own agenda. The margins  
for error are minute.

Screaming by at 400mph, the £5 million planes are only feet apart,  
pilots’ eyes glued to reference points – angles between nose and  
wing, or wing and tail, lining up sights in simple trigonometry.

In 1971 and 1978, there were two appalling Red Arrows crashes in the  
Hawk aircraft’s precursor, the Folland Gnat, killing both crews, but  
for 30 years since, the biggest risk to a Red Arrow has been not  
another Red Arrow but a bird getting sucked into the engine and  
stopping it mid-loop.

“If we had a critical emergency at an air show we can probably glide  
seven or eight miles away to find a safe place to put down,” Hawker  
says. “We talk about all these things because we have to. It’s  
unlikely to happen, but by talking about it, if the worst-case  
scenario happens you’ve already got the mental database of what to do  
inside your head.” That the Red Arrows rarely have a malfunction is  
due to the equally fierce competition for the back seat in each plane,  
for the pilot’s personal engineer. Currently, two women and seven men  
occupy “the Circus”, as these elite engineering jobs are called;  
this winter the Red Arrows finally acquires its first female pilot,  
Flt Lt Kirsty Moore.

Last year, the Red Arrows displayed over New York, which they reached  
by hopping 1,000 miles at a time on their two-hour fuel tanks from  
Scotland to Iceland, Greenland, Baffin Bay and Canada, the old wartime  
route for plane delivery. The aesthetic, tight-formation appeal of the  
Red Arrows isn’t matched by any other nations – the United States  
and Russian military display teams purely demonstrate combat aircraft,  
Hawker says, though the French and Italians come closer with smaller  
teams.

Arguments occasionally surface about the purpose of the Red Arrows and  
whether their artistic finesse is an elite luxury, but Hawker, who  
leaves this autumn after three years in charge, takes a pragmatic  
view. “We don’t like the word elite, it makes us sound different  
from the people on the front line. We’ll be going back there and  
thanks to the Red Arrows our pure flying of the aeroplane will be  
better.” I ask Hawker if he doesn’t consider himself and his  
colleagues as being performers. “Very probably. I think we do know up  
there if we’ve done well.”

Clearly for the RAF the Red Arrows are an extreme working tool for  
perfecting their pilots, and yet that doesn’t explain why when one  
watches their display one’s reaction leaps beyond mere admiration,  
why one’s emotions have been seized. Those planes seem emblems of  
such panache, flourishing courage as beautifully as possible in the  
face of death, trying to control the impossible in three dimensions at  
screaming speed. If you stand back a little further, it’s nuts. Other  
nations think it’s enough to run display teams simply to demonstrate  
combat aircraft. Only the Brits have this batty desire to turn  
something essentially pragmatic and functional into an art form.

The Red Arrows will display at the Duxford Air show, Cambridgeshire on  
Sept 5; further display dates www.raf.mod.uk/reds/displayinfo

ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20090902/bc5b7efc/attachment-0001.shtml 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Red-Arrows_1469639c.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 41605 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20090902/bc5b7efc/attachment-0001.jpg