The RV grin

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The freedom formation, a team of 12 Van's aircraft plus the leader in a Yak, appeared in my Facebook feed some months ago.

They did a practice at Cowra so I got to see their routine a few times, very impressive. They are performing at the Pacific Airshow on the gold coast this weekend. Recently they have profiled the pilots, all just normal guys who were introduced to the RV aircraft. One such story.   

WITH JUST 3 DAYS TO GO IN... - Freedom Formation Display Team

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WITH JUST 3 DAYS TO GO IN THE COUNTDOWN TO THE PACIFIC AIRSHOW GOLD COAST, Freedom Formation Wingman Profile #3 is OLLIE GERAGHTY. Irish to the core and...

 

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Freedom Formation Display Team

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Pacific Airshow 2023 - Wrap-up
Well, after nearly a year of preparation and training, “It’s a wrap!” The Pacific Airshow 2023 is done and dusted, and with it a successful debut for the Freedom to Fly Formation Display Team, aka “Freedom Formation.”

It was a weekend in September 2022 – Almost a year ago! – that Jeremy Miller approached the Sydney RV formation flying crew with a proposal to work up a routine for an international-scale airshow.

Putting aside some initial skepticism, momentum grew for a dynamic, action-packed air display that’d showcase the abilities of Australian general aviation pilots and homebuilt aircraft performing in the largest aerobatic display team in the Southern Hemisphere.

A central theme: Anyone in our audience could realistically believe that they could go home after the show, buy or build their own airplane, train in it, and fly it with some of the world’s best pilots. It must be possible, because that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Under Jeremy’s guidance, we’ve all trained and stretched our knowledge, precision, and aircraft handling skills. If you asked any of us three years ago if we thought we’d be doing this, we’d have thought you were insane, but here we are, doing it.

We choreographed an air display that starts off quietly and builds in momentum. Filling the display box with movement, smoke and aluminium, the aerobatic elements push the tempo towards a crescendo of movement and dynamism which culminates in a 250 foot opposing pass crossover with a 320 knot closing speed just 200m from an audience of more than 100,000. It’s a spectacle that’s never been seen before in Australia.

But the display wasn’t all of it.

We began the event by smoking-up the opening press conference at Gold Coast International Airport. Lesser pilots, upon asking for permission to buzz the tower, hear, “Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full,” but when we asked they just gave us a clearance. 500 feet across the airport in 13-ship “Balbo” formation with smoke streaming out the back, we arrived on target right as the Mayor was finishing his opening speech, and appeared on the front page of the following morning’s Gold Coast Bulletin.

It was only during the next day’s official practice session that we started to realize how photogenic a formation of 13 aircraft was. No matter the lens, we fill the frame! Instagram and TikTok started to fill up with Freedom Formation happy-snaps, and the Pacific Airshow organizers began featuring us in their promotional materials.
The reception from the public was amazing.

For our good friends and sponsors in the SAAA: We managed to get homebuilt aircraft on the TV news for five days running, and displayed them to a live audience of approximately 300,000 people.

And we were stunned at how well that audience received it.

We appeared at the autograph tent on all three airshow days, and were greeted with queues that stretched down the forecourt and out of sight around the corner. People were lining up for more than an hour to get their posters, t-shirts, hats and (in one case) Sherrin football signed by the team. We spoke to legions of people, including hundreds of children, about how fun and fulfilling we found personal general aviation.

Our favorite moments came from using an exaggerated whisper to tell parents that they’d better hope their kids didn’t find out that they could start training at 14 for a pilot’s license at 15 and be licensed pilots before they could legally drive a car, while their 13 year old kid was standing right next to them, eyes lighting up with realization. We might have hooked a few in; Only time will tell.

We couldn’t have asked for better engagement with the airshow performer community. People like Red Bull Air Race world champion Matt Hall, and Smithsonian “Living Legend of Flight” Sean D Tucker gave us incredible and unexpected feedback and welcome advice. We’re immensely humbled to have appeared on the same stage alongside these legends.

We couldn’t have done it without the support of a team of incredible volunteers who worked with us, stood by us, and occasionally put up with our nonsense.

In no particular order – because prioritizing these superb ladies and gentlemen would be desperately unfair – we need to thank:

Trent Stewart, RV-14 builder and international airshow veteran from Melbourne, was our ground coach, helping us nail the sight-lines and timings. When we got it bang-on, we could rely on him to say, “Gotta tell you, guys, I felt some movement right there.”

Matilda Mendham, our volunteer crew chief from near Orange, NSW, ran around like a woman possessed to service our airplanes with fuel and smoke oil during our briefing sessions at training camps and during the show itself. We couldn’t have done it without her, but we’re going to have to learn because we want her flying with the team next time.

Lorenzo Hariman and Dominic Hubert, our team photographers, were invaluable with video footage during debriefs. We’d go out and fly our 13 minute routine then spend an hour and a half going through 8K video from cameras that cost more than our airplanes to analyze our defects and look for improvements.

Angela Stevenson, our commentator and musical coordinator, did a fantastic job. She filled the crowd with information about who we were and what we were doing, and told them where to look when the color and movement overwhelmed them. She was bouncing off the walls after the Saturday show because she’d lined up some music that went “doof doof doof bass-drop,” and synchronized it perfectly so the bass drop happened at the exact moment of the crossover break during our opposing pass. She said it was a career highlight that she'd never be able to do so perfectly ever again, then she went and did it again on Sunday.

Tony Self from Australian Flying Magazine did a 6-page spread on the team in the 60th-anniversary edition in Sep-Oct 2023 (in newsagents now, rush out and buy it!) which made us look fantastic.

We have to thank our wives and partners who have put up with absences and distractions for months. Show’s over, we’re back, and now have time to change broken light bulbs and mow the lawn.

And we have to single-out Jeremy Miller, our instructor, mentor, coach, choreographer, and formation lead. Pulling off something like this has been one of his career ambitions, and we’re all pleased and proud to help him fulfill it. He’s shown the world what General Aviation pilots can do when they’re dedicated, well-trained, instilled with a disciplined professional safety culture, and equipped with tremendous quantities of smoke oil.

We also need to thank our sponsors. It costs a lot to run a team of 13 airplanes for three training camps. We had sponsors to cover training fuel, smoke oil, meals and accommodation. Segway Ninebot Australia, Skyfuels, AvPlan EFB, UPRT Australia, Mach-5, Cloud 9 Roofing and Guttering, Full Throttle Photography, and Punkinhead Canopy Covers.

A special callout to the Sports Aircraft Association of Australia (SAAA), who have been absolutely fantastic to us and very supportive right from the start. We hope we made the entire homebuilt aircraft community proud, we’ve wanted nothing more than to be exemplars of what SAAA represents. We have been so incredibly pleased to make full use of this unique opportunity to display SAAA talent in front of hundreds of thousands of people on a world stage.

Build or acquire an experimental amateur-built aircraft, fly it, train in it, and you too can aspire to fly with some of the very best pilots in the world. That’s what we’ve done, you can do it too.

Over three days, we showed a few hundred thousand Australians what RVs flown with safe professionalism by General Aviation pilots can do, and they loved it. There’s going to be more. In the words of celebrity Air Boss Wayne Boggs, “I guar-RAN-tee it.”

Jeremy Miller (Yak-55)
Gavin Nour (RV-7A)
Ollie Geraghty (RV-7A)
Brayden Rowley (RV-7)
Eddie Seve (RV-7)
Kevin White (RV-6A)
Don Harvie (RV-6)
Mal Kains (RV-6A)
Glenn Bridgland (RV-7)
Pete Grogan (RV-7A)
Martin Russel (RV-7)
Mark Newton (RV-6)
James Weightman (RV-8)

Please support our sponsors; Segway Ninebot APAC  UPRT Australia  Sport Aircraft Association of Australia  Skyfuel Australia  AvPlan EFB  Punkin Head Air Sports  G-Force Carpentry  Oz Labour Solutions  Cloud9 Roofing and Guttering  Road And Rail Excavations Pty Ltd  Follow our page to monitor our progress and say hello if you see us at your local airport. Pacific Airshow Gold Coast 2023

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