by Rod Douglas 

As I drove into the car park on Tuesday morning I felt it arise. That amazing sense of ‘YES’…a week of airplanes. I felt like punching the air but I decided just to let out a holler instead. All of this could only come from someone who is mad about the air and all things airplanes. The best part, of course, is that you get to do it, in public, with tens of thousands of others. This was, of course, the Australian International Airshow 2009.

For many Australian aviators in this big country of ours, getting up the head of steam needed to be in Victoria at the right time for Avalon with time to play is a challenge. And to be fair, we have plenty of excellent airshows spread throughout the country, so it’s a big investment to make the trek.

This was my second Avalon. It took a birthday promise to my eldest boy, Jai, to get me there the first time in 2007. Ever since he was a little tacker I’d promised him that, when he turned 10, I’d take him to Avalon for his birthday. As it happened his birthday turned out to be during the airshow. Well did we have some fun! He had his first unaccompanied flight down and we had an absolute ball. I’d been working in Melbourne for the week, so I sneaked in an additional trade day which gave me a good sense of the lay of the land. If there is one thing you need to do to make the best of Avalon, it’s planning.

This year I got to spend all the days with the exception of Thursday enjoying the sights, sounds and those, oh so delightful, smells that define aviation. When I got back from my first experience in 2007 I told my wife that next time I’d be there the whole week. She looked at me with those eyes that only a woman who could easily spend a week shopping, and wonder why you’d be bored stupid, can muster. ‘A week, what would you do for a whole week?’

Well after a week in Avalon, it still wasn’t enough. I’d certainly had enough of the noise. The noise of Avalon is beyond description. It destroys your hearing, completely ends conversations and punctuates every important happening. It makes all the noisiest of noises pale into insignificance.

Still it wasn’t until Friday afternoon when Jai and I headed north to discover the heavy parking tarmac and explore the fast jet display area that we realised just how big Avalon is. I’ve always wanted to go to Oshkosh. It must be enormous. Avalon had 400 planes on the ground and I reckon you could spend a month and not get through all the conversations that are waiting to be had.

I took a great mate of mine, Ralph Plarre, out on Wednesday. Ralph is a car nut. If it’s on four wheels, he’s probably experienced it somewhere in the world. His take on Avalon was fantastic. “Beats the F1 Grand Prix hands down.”

I’d have to say that Ralph gave me a great gift on that decidedly trade only day. I spent the whole day explaining the magic of aviation to a complete novice. It reminded me how lucky I’ve been to have spent more than half my life playing in and with planes. Even better, Ralph reminded me how little I know of the deep mystery that is aviation. His best question of the day was a simple one. “Why does that one have windscreen wipers?”

He had both the Hawker Pacific chief pilot and I scratching our heads. King Airs do. PC 12’s don’t. I thought I had it sorted out around flat plates versus curved windscreens when I landed at Coolangatta on the way home and then realised that Piper Cheyenne’s have both curved screens and windscreen wipers. I spent the whole day answering great, simple questions that helped to remind me why I love aviation so much. No matter how deep you dive, the pool of knowledge is deeper. It’s a world in which you can literally learn until the day you die – and much as I love flying, I have no desire to die doing it.

Which brings me to an incredibly sad aspect of Avalon. The 9th Australian International Airshow cost us the lives of two of Australia’s most fantastic aerobatic performers. Both Pip Borrman and Tom Moon were killed in separate accidents a short five weeks apart while practicing their routines for Avalon. Both were consummate professionals. Both were unique individuals and they both died doing what they loved.

Australia is short two more extraordinary pilots and Avalon was a little less because of it.

Vale Tom Moon and Pip Borrman.

Avalon is an organised place. Australians know how to put on an event with a larrikin friendliness that is renown around the world and the Airshow is no different. Hundreds of volunteers sign up, year after year, to give up a week of their lives to ensure that the show goes on, and that it goes on superbly well. Generally there is much good patience and the very cool bonhomie that is the way of the pilot. Occasionally you see a little testiness.

Friday night was a bit like that. Weather is something that even the gods like Ian Hornery, CEO of the Airshow, has no control over. It’s two for two for this brown duck when it comes to Avalon’s weather. In 2007 it was the winds. Howling winds across desperately dry and dusty paddocks that made the venue less than ideal. This year it was the rain. Now everybody knows how desperately Victoria needs rain. The tragic bushfires of February were still burning as the show started. By Saturday they were well and truly out. A green Victoria is a beautiful Victoria, but…

Friday afternoon the low cloud started coming in. It didn’t upset the fighters but it did put a stop to some of the other displays. As time went on it was pretty clear that the big evening of flying was going to be severely limited by the weather. For me it wasn’t a big issue. I’d spent all week watching superb flying but you could feel the disappointment in the crowd. I was having a lovely time working the chalets, where the food really was superb and the drinks flowed freely.

You could sense the desperation of the organisers when they dragged ‘Connie’, the superb HARS Lockheed Super Constellation in Qantas livery, on to taxiway ‘Charlie’ knowing that there was no way that ‘Connie’ could fly in the tragic weather. For those who have been lucky enough to tour ‘Connie’ she pulls us back to the grand old days when air travel really was a luxury and space was a given. ‘Connie’ is a great night time flying show with amazing streams of fire shooting out the exhaust ports of the four big potted Curtiss- Wright 18 cylinder turbo compounded supercharged radial engines on takeoff. It gets a bit desperate when you need to run ‘Connie’ up and down the runway four times at high speed taxi to add a little drama.

Saturday was worse with a torrential downpour that had everyone acting like ducks. It was so wet it became ludicrous when the expo pavilions had to be closed due to overcrowding and the flying programme was delayed three hours.

Across the board I expect that those who attended the public days would be pretty disappointed. It doesn’t take away from the truly amazing displays that were put on for the rest of the week. Ricardo Traven, the Boeing F18 Super Hornet lead test pilot, once again demonstrated just how remarkable the big Boeing multi-role strike fighter is. With a jet powered glider doing the most remarkable and silent aerobatic displays and the world’s most remarkable aerobatic aircraft, the Sukoi SU26 twisting and tumbling through the sky, with other funny little old planes turned into clown shows, there truly was something for everyone. Unfortunately, not everyone got what they wanted.

One of the big complaints that I did hear was around the finale for one of Australia’s most loved performers, the F111C ‘Pig’. Avalon 2009 was to be the ‘Pig’s’ last hurrah before their retirement and many people attended on the public days just to see the ‘Pig’ dance and perform its spectacular dump and burn routine. Friday night’s spectacular was the shortest I’ve ever seen with the dump and burn lasting but moments as the afterburner sent the big jet leaping forward down the runway before it blasted skyward into the murk of the thousand foot ceiling. If you doubt how dense cloud is, that doubt would have faded as it took seconds for that amazing beacon of light and power to be snuffed out in the vertical climb.

No one can do anything about the weather. Bad weather always delivers disappointed people at an event like Avalon.

One of the constant theme’s of the trade days was the ‘GEC’. You know the ‘GEC’ by now. Beloved by media and politicians, it’s so much less scary to take an incredibly complicated problem, give it a name (in this case ‘global economic crisis’) and then abbreviate it. Pilots like to do that too, by the way, so you can imagine that the number of ‘GEC’ filled discussion was incredibly high.

But how much difference did it really make? It was hard to tell. Exhibitors were off by about 40 from the previous show at 600, although they took about the same amount of space. 57 organisations felt the need to spend the $60,000 that it costs to take a chalet for the week and wine and dine their important guests. That was a decrease of about three. I remain amazed at the corporate largess of a couple of the very major organisations that simply abandoned their chalets over the public days of the show.

And the organisers kept the numbers through the gate incredibly close to their chests. My experience tells me that the gate must therefore have been down significantly from the 187,000 visitors of 2007 as, in these times, a good number would have been crowed from the roof tops, and even a reasonable number would probably have been celebrated. One of the big indicators for me was the run into the show on Saturday. With media accreditation comes some privileges, and one of them is the use of a different route in to the show than the public.

The 2007 show Saturday came complete with a 90 minute crawl from the freeway to the car park. I set off down the public entry route this Saturday knowing that I could simply retreat if needed. There was no crawl. I don’t know how many people did or didn’t turn up but it’s clear that both the weather and a significantly degraded economic environment didn’t support the Airshow to continue growing as it always has before.

Avalon is by all accounts a different sort of show to the big American trade shows like the National Business Aviation Association in Orlando, Florida. At those shows everyone is very proud to show off the signing of big contracts for sales, and the success of the show is often measured by the number of sales from the floor. I sense that the Americans, always looking for a press release to keep their profile up, do lots of deals before the shows and then release them to mock surprise and much hoopla.

From all accounts Avalon has always been different to that. Avalon is about building relationships, and in a market as small as Australia’s relationships matter. I asked one very significant aircraft brand about being at Avalon and they made an astute comment. “It costs a lot to be here, but in these times the cost of not being here was just too high to consider.” In tough times in a market where confidence is so critical, showing up really matters.

There are some interesting statistics around aviation and recessions. The average recession will impact upon household goods sector for 10 quarters. That same recession will affect the broad aviation sector for five quarters. Starting later, and going deeper, aviation will see revenues fall on average by 10% as compared to the household goods sector when the fall in expenditure is about half at 5%. It seems the last in, first out mindset comes from a significant level of connectedness in our globalised world. Doing business globally means flying and watching aviation carefully could be a very positive indicator of the pending return to growth.

So did the deals get done, or at least the relationships started? By all accounts everyone had some good quality interest. Aviation is a handmade world where the entry price is always large and the sales process is iterative. You don’t have to sell a lot by number and one move up the range can be measured in millions of dollars. Let’s hope all the participants got value and will be back in 2011.

And when you talk about millions of dollars it’s not hard to wander into the Gulfstream area of the concourse. Gulfstream returned this year with the same three models as in 2007. The baby of the family is the G150, with a superbly engineered flight deck and list of improvements that makes you certain that it’s the latest of the Gulfstream’s to come off the drawing boards.

My good mate Ralph is a connoisseur when it comes to beautifully fitted cars. His Bentley Continental GT is superbly finished. It drips plus leather and finally polished timber. He’s done the whole trip to Crewe to see the car being built and it is his baby. After he’d slipped out of the first of the Gulfstreams he was visibly shaken. The level of finish that Gulfstream put into their machines is superb.

It only got worse for Ralph as we moved from the G150 through the G200 and on into the G550. Ralph was philosophical. After all, his Bentley only cost as much as a newish second hand Cirrus SR22. The G550 at about AUD$70 million at current exchange rates, really does set the standard for the big cabin business jets. Interestingly, the G150 had a far more modern big screen glass cockpit than either of her brothers. Which just goes to show that with low volumes and incredibly high certification costs, even the big boys can only integrate improvements in technology at the rate that their pocketbook and sales dictate.

At the other end of the scale were the LSAs who were out in force. The real growth in aircraft numbers has, for a long time been split between the LSA category and the experimental category, which just goes to prove that the sport of aviation is where the real life blood still pumps.

While Avalon demonstrates the breadth and depth of the broad church that is Australian aviation, it was interesting to note that there was no representation from these parts of aviation in the flying programme. While the performance of these ‘everyman’ flying machines is rarely earth shattering I’m constantly amazed by the pull that handling displays or formation flights by aircraft built and maintained by ‘ordinary blokes’ captures the attention of the frustrated punter who simply wishes it was him up there.

It’s good to see the stalwarts of the industry thriving. Cessna has been a committed participant in Australian aviation since day dot. With excellent representation across the county split between Aeromil Pacific and Airflite they have a couple of the most professional teams on the ground.

While the plain vanilla Cessna singles were well represented on both camps their significant presence also indicate the very divergent way in which they are moving into the future.

Aeromil had prime flight line exposure with a Citation X, a Citation Mustang and the first Oasis interior Caravan in the country. Sitting behind the display office was a pair of pistons in the 172 and 182. With a strong focus on the jets, Robert Hollander was down from Singapore and the local team, led by Nick Jones, Peter Lang and Phil Laffer, meant that experience and answers were only a question away.

Airflite sees the world differently. With a strong focus on the piston end of town they had a Cessna Corvalis 400 as well as a more traditional 182. The surprise of the show was to discover that Kevin Mahon had linked in with Airitalia, the Vulcanair distributor in Australia, to distribute the Vulcanair P68C, as well as the Vr which is a retractable version and the A-viator which should make a great replacement for the Chieftain fleet with its 11 passenger capacity and turbo prop reliability.

Another mover is Hawker Pacific with their recent acquisition of the Diamond agency. Hawkers, who for many years have represented Beechcraft and Bell Helicopters, now have a full line of aircraft to suit just about every type of flyer. Their signing at the show (remember what I said about American’s announcing

deals to keep the media engaged? Well, Aussies do it too) with Massey University of New Zealand for 14 Diamonds, 12 DA40’s and 2 DA42’s, continues to prove Diamond’s dominance in the training field.

Of course, once you need more than four seats it might well be time to step into a Baron or Bonanza, which will then lead to the well trodden path to a King Air and then into the Premier and Hawker lines of jets. This defined path based on the life cycle of your typical pilot has worked a treat for Cessna, and will undoubtedly work well inside Hawker Pacific’s high service culture.

Cirrus arrived at Avalon with a pair of SR22’s. One was a ‘Perspective’ equipped turbo and the other an Avidyne normally aspirated model. Talking models, in the tent was a third scale model of the Cirrus Vision SF50. A fantastic looking aircraft, this is one of the contenders to create a whole new category of jets – the personal jet. While the VLF dream pretty much died with the failure of Eclipse, the personal jet with its single engine carries the hopes of high speed low cost flying forward.

Steve Maltby was there with Mark, his erstwhile collaborator in getting aircraft assembled and Adam, the new sales manager for the group. Cirrus has, without question, redefined the way pilots think about high performance person travel. It will be interesting to see how the Cessna teams approach reeling in the Cirrus juggernaut, especially with the first deliveries of the Vision jet due for late 2010.

Jai decide a number of years ago that his path lay in flying fast jets. One of the great aspects of Avalon is the opportunity for absolutely everyone with an interest in aviation to find someone to talk to. So it was for us as we wandered over to the US fast jet marshalling area. The USAF had flown down two F16’s, one F15 and a tanker to keep them air-to-air refuelled.

Jai’s conversation with the F16 jockey was instructive both about the mindset of today’s pilot, and the rigour of getting to be a fast jet pilot in an incredibly competitive world. The officer we were chatting with outlined his program. The first challenge was to get into the air force. Six months initial training on T6 Texans was followed by another six months on jet conversion. There is a rating process for every single step, including every flight, every engagement. It’s incredibly rigourous. The top 25% make it into the fast jet program. For the very cool dude we were speaking to, his only desire had been to fly the F16. Why? It’s the only single seat, multi tasked fighter bomber and he wanted to do it alone. To get into the F16 meant he had to be in the top 25% of his class. The best of the best.

It was something of a rude awakening for Jai, who at 11 (well 12 next week), would be washed out right now because he can’t make a bed to his mother’s standard, let alone the military’s.

It was suggested to me that the last of our human fighter pilots are being born right now. That’s an extraordinary thought, until you walked the Expo halls and saw the 30 odd versions of UAV’s that were pretty much everywhere you looked. From micros (less than 100g) all the way through to 35 metre wingspan Global Hawks with a single turbine propelling it, it’s clear that the future is in unmanned aerial vehicles.

There are still many questions to be answered especially regarding appropriate safety in mixed environments but with the incredible amount of R&D being thrown at these capable aircraft the date must surely be pulling closer when it’s normal, and then expected, for an aircraft to be put into the air without a pilot.

Back to fast jets, or maybe I should say really noisy, big jets. The B1B Lancer bomber came visiting Avalon this year. There is no other way to put it: this is one big mother of jet. It’s like an F111 on massive doses of steroids. With four huge jet engines hanging off the tail it literally screams through the air with a nerve shattering pitch that will do almost as much damage as the bombs that it delivers.

While you could never call it beautiful, it’s bloody impressive. If you get the chance to see one fly by, do so. It’s unforgettable.

On the other hand Qantas A380 handling display was nothing short of boring. The great big lumbering beast is quiet but nothing that the crew did in the handling space added any interest at all.

At least Virgin Blue chose to celebrate their giant steps forward and made their first 777 the absolute centre of attention. With a beautiful bevy of crew, they were most welcoming to the people coming on board. Qantas just sat their big beautiful jet on the ramp.

And so it goes. Another Avalon, some more weather, many planes and lots of relationships built. I’ve touched on only a few of the highlights of a great week spent hanging out with people who love aviation as much as I do. There were hundreds of other insights and snippets picked up in a world full of people who love planes, just like we do.

Will I be back in 2011? You bet I will. Will I see you there? I hope so. The Australian International Airshow is the centre of the Aussie flying world and you really should experience it, if only just once.