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The Reno Air Races date back only to 1964. "Only" is relative, I know. But air racing as a sport has been going on here in the US since 1908. I swear I am not making this up, but the only four airships in the United States at the time flew a race in St. Louis. Two got blown off course by the strong winds, the remaining two finished and divided the $5,000 purse between them. That was a lot of money back in those days. Heavier than air racing started up the very next year, in May of 1909, just outside of Paris with four pilots entered, two starting, and no one actually finishing. This was followed a few months later in August by a much larger race in Reims won by Glenn Curtiss himself against the cream of the powerhouse French aviation industry. Air racing, like every other form of racing known to man, has always been a very international sport. The Reno races are also called the National Championship Air Races, a harkening back to the enormously popular national air races held in Cleveland, Ohio during the interwar years, resuming after the end of the Second World War. The Bendix Trophy, the Thompson Trophy, the Schnieder Cup. Those were names to conjure with! Back in those days, air racing was seen as a way to drive the technological development of the airplane, much the same as automobile racing is said to drive the development of automotive technology. My pickup truck has Toyota Racing Development on the side of the bed, so perhaps there's a grain of truth in there somewhere. Pilots, airplanes, and races Some may recall Jimmy Doolittle. He was the US Army pilot who almost single-handedly developed IFR instrument flying, and led the fabled first bombing raid against Imperial Japan in 1942. Before the war, Jimmy won the Schneider Cup, the Bendix Trophy, and the Thompson Trophy races, the triple crown of air racing at the time; he also found time to set a world speed record. Jimmy also won the Medal of Honor. It seems that air racing has often attracted the very best among us.
The pilot Jimmy Leeward was himself no stranger to airplanes, being raised in a cockpit, or even to air racing. Soloing in a T-6 illegally at age 14, he started racing Formula 1 airplanes while in college in the late 1950s, early '60s, served as crew during the very first of the new Reno National Championship Air Races in '64, and in 1976 flew his own clipped-wing P-51D racer "Cloud Dancer" in the Unlimited class. He flew a lot of races after that one, over 150 since returning to racing in '76. He flew as a stunt pilot in various movies like "Amelia" and "The Tuskeegee Airmen." Leeward also sat on the board of directors of the EAA for many years. He was a real pillar of our community. The race Red Bull is sponsoring a new kind of air racing for those who like a bit more visual excitement, but for pure speed and power, Reno is the top. And tops among the various classes at Reno is the Unlimited. You can race in the Jet class, if you want a bit more speed, but the Unlimited class is king. It is fundamentally WWII warbirds--the last of the heavy piston-powered, propeller-driven fighter planes. This is where you go if your heart skips a beat when you hear a Merlin crank up, if your throat tightens as one more P-51 picks herself up off the ground, tucks her gear away, and climbs out with a roar that a lion might envy. I've been to Reno. I went to watch the Unlimiteds. It's what we do. The airplane The Galloping Ghost was the name of the P-51D that Leeward was flying in his last race. GG, as she was known to some, also had quite a history of air racing. Her serial number was 44-15651; she was built as a D model the year before the war ended, 1944. She was sold by the government in 1946 to a couple of former USAAF pilots named Steve Beville and Bruce Raymond. They bought her to compete in the National Championship Air Races held in Cleveland Air Races that same year. GG was the last P-51 to be sold to the public. Raymon piloted her to a fourth place finish, winning $3,000 against the $3,500 he paid for her. Not a bad start for a race plane. Beville and Raymon are the ones who originally named her The Galloping Ghost after Red Grange, the legendary halfback who played college and professional football in the '20s and '30s.Red earned that name by the way he could run through the defensive line as though he were invisible. GG flew her first race at Reno in 1969, a veteran of both the war and the National Championship Air Races, flying stock, and she won her first race there in '72, took second in '73 and 3d in '77. She returned to the winner's circle in '80 and '81 (even with a rookie race pilot up). The Galloping Ghost was a winner's airplane. Like many warbirds, The Galloping Ghost went through a long series of owners before she found Jimmy Leeward, or he found her. He bought her in '83, and flew her most years at Reno from 1984 to 1989 when she was put into storage. In 2005, Jimmy announced that The Galloping Ghost would return to air racing! But there was a great deal of work to do, first. Racing mods GG had been extensively modified in 1970, with clipped wings and a turtle-deck B-model-type canopy in lieu of her stock D-model bubble. The new mod work would give her a better canopy designed by Jim Larson, an aerodynamicist from Seattle. She had had her wings clipped again in '82 and her wingspan was a full ten feet shorter than stock. Clipping the wing is a usual modification among warbird racers. Fighter planes like the P-51 are designed for awesome climb performance, which requires a lot of wing. Whirling around a closed course doesn't. All that extra wing is mostly weight and drag, with the added benefits of flutter susceptibility and increased wing root bending moments during high g turns. GG had the shortest wingspan of any modified P-51 racer, and she could put that to good use. There were a number of big modifications necessary before returning GG to the races, all related to the engine. Fans of the P-51 usually know that the stock Packard Merlin V-12 with its two-stage, two-speed supercharger was good for 1,450 horsepower; a pilot could get up to 1,720 horsepower at war emergency power. This is an enormous amount of power. The Galloping Ghost's heavily modified engine produced about 3,800 horsepower, more that twice the power that a stock P-51D would ever hope to have on its best day. De-scooping The first really major modification was "de-scooping." The belly scoop that is such a part of the visual signature of a P-51 was removed, leaving the aircraft with a profile that looked a lot more like a Supermarine Spitfire than a North American P-51D. Done well, the de-scooping mod removes a lot of weight and drag, much like clipping the wings. The only complication is what to do with the radiator that was the entire reason for the scoop to begin with. That is the second really major mod. New cooling system A thermodynamicist named Pete Law had designed an entirely new way of cooling the big engine using a water-methanol boil-over system that dumped heat overboard without the need to insert a heat exchanger into the airstream for a different and even more heavily modified P-51 racer named Stiletto. The Stiletto crew didn't fly the system long, and Rick Shanholtzer ended up with some of the parts, though the entire system had to be redesigned for GG's configuration. And it worked really well. Back to racing Putting the airplane together was a labor of love for Leeward, Shanholtzer, and the whole crew, which included Hoot Gibson, a former Shuttle astronaut and fellow Cal Poly alumnus. No one gets rich racing old warbirds. Quite the opposite. Air racing is an example of that classic aviation question, how do you make a small fortune with airplanes? Start with a large one. Jimmy and the crew had been intending to race every year since '06, but something always came up. In 2009, they missed racing by a single day. A heart-breaker for everyone involved without a doubt. They made it to Reno last year, easily working their way up the ladder to the Gold heat that would decide the Unlimited champion, but the heat was canceled due to high winds. So, this year was going to be the year that decided everything; this year would be the year that put The Galloping Ghost back in the winner's circle where she belonged. Sadly, this year was the year that things fell apart during the final heat. Crash information
With so little information available right now, it doesn't seem right to speculate in public on the possible failure modes, what may have gone wrong. I don't know what we will learn from this, though I know we will learn something. Progress in aviation has always been punctuated by tombstones. As morbid as that sounds, it is the truth. And in this past century of powered flight, we have learned an immense amount. Moving forward I think we need a little time to encompass the tragedy; I know I do. I don't really have a heartwarming pro-aviation message at this point. I'm just sad. But, this too shall pass. I know people will mourn what happened, and rightly so. Afterward, we will move forward as best we can, adapting to this new reality, bidding good bye to some friends and looking towards the future as we know they would want us to do. The one thing I absolutely know for certain is that none of those who died in this tragedy would want us to stop racing. Terry Drinkard is currently consulting on an aviation start-up. His interests and desire are being involved in cool developments around airplanes and in the aviation industry. Usually working as a contract heavy structures engineer, he has held positions with Boeing and Gulfstream Aerospace and has years of experience in the MRO world. Terry’s areas of specialty are aircraft design, development, manufacturing, maintenance, and modification; lean manufacturing; Six-sigma; worker-directed teams; project management; organization development and start-ups. Terry welcomes your comments, questions or feedback. You may contact him via terry.drinkard@blueskynews.aero Other recent articles by Terry Drinkard:
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