Racing Yaks
HOW CAN IT BE that a couple of old Russian training planes look more like classic American racing planes than even the most magnificently modified Mustang or Bearcat could possibly look? After all, isn't shortcourse, all-out pylon racing as typically American as baseball? Sure, a few of the pilots in the oh-so-macho Unlimited class have failed to heed the lessons of the American Revolution of 1776 and have switched to Hawker Sea Furys. Since the big British fighter does have a 2,350-cu.-in. engine and a funny five-bladed prop that turns the other way, one can understand the American pilots' defection.
Paris Air Show: 1991
Almost two dozen acres of indoor and outdoor space brimming with the latest and best in full-scale aircraft and accessories, plus lots of miniaturized replicas, added up to the biggest aerospace trade show ever held.
Dart Kitten
DREAMS often fall apart, and often for causes beyond the dreamer's control. That many aircraft designs have seen limited production has less to do with the designs themselves or the men behind them than with the circumstances under which they originated. In the case of the Dart Kitten, four prototypes were built in 24 years: Mk.I, Mk.II, Mk.III, and a home-built. Obviously, this Kitten was no Ford. Some airplanes come along at the wrong time. Convair's 880 and 990 airliners, for example, tried to penetrate the market for four-engine planes after the pioneering Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 had locked it up. Other designs come up short in a critical performance element; the underpowered Republic Seabee amphibian is a case in point.
3-Km Racers
WHAT'S THE BIG deal about 500 mph, anyway? Look up on any clear day and you stand a fair chance of seeing an airplane flying faster than that. So why has it taken forever for a propeller-driven airplane to break the 500-mph barrier in a simple three-kilometer dash? For that matter, why is the barrier still there, glaring smugly at us all? It took just six and a half years to boost the Absolute World Air Speed Record from 200 mph to 300 mph, and barely half that long to get from 300 to 400 mph. The last of those events happened way back in 1931, and 57 years laters we're still trying to get over the 500-mph hurdle.
It's All Done With Smoke
THERE ARE THREE basic forms of public aerobatics (to say nothing of a lot of ways of doing it in private): Contest flying of the gut-wrenching, eyeball-popping kind, flown in high-powered little biplanes and monoplanes in one-at-a-time, all-alone-in-the-sky formal competition. It is meant to be appreciated by a panel of skilled, eagle-eyed (and, in the view of all but the winners, downright nasty) judges who know exactly what each pilot is supposed to do. The average spectator finds it sleep-inducing after the first dozen all-alike performances, even though the flying is frequently superb.
