On the charge

After a stellar rookie season where Matt placed third overall, the highest placing for a rookie, Matt is looking forward to 2010 with a new aircraft, an aircraft that he had a hand in creating.

Keeping with Matt’s discipline from his RAAF days, he is focused on safety in the event as so is the Red Bull Air Race organisation. This was no more evident than during the training day with the accident into the Swan River involving the Brazilian race pilot and 2010 rookie, Adilson Kindlemann.

Adilson’s accident came after completing a number of laps of the course in the first training session on Thursday morning when as he exited the left turn after the chicane at gate 2, he appeared to stall in the turn whilst reversing to a right turn to proceed to the wings level gate 3.

His MXS-R impacted the water in a near wings level attitude and as a result of the landing gear hitting the water, the aircraft flipped inverted. The SCUBA equipped rescuers on the Red Bull Jet skis were quickly on the scene and helped Adlinson from the aircraft and onto a rescue boat that sped him to the waiting ambulance on the Perth Esplanade and on to RPH.

Whilst in the cockpit, Adilson’s training kicked in and he was able to use his emergency air bottle before the rescuers were able to get to him to help free him from the cockpit of the upturned aircraft.

In all the first rescuers were on site within 30 seconds and Adilson was onboard the rescue boat within 2-3 minutes.

Prior to this accident, the first ever crash for the Red Bull Air Race, all the race pilots had undergone ‘dunker’ training at Jandakot where they were submerged in a pool inverted in an aircraft trainer, having to escape from their harnesses whilst breathing from a small pony air bottle that supplies approximately 10 minutes of air. This air bottle is carried in the cockpit of every race aircraft.

Matt’s involvement in the Red Bull Air Race has certainly increased awareness of the event within the Australian aviation scene. This was no more evident than during the public flight line walk during the weekend when Matt Hall Racing’s hangar at the Langley Park Temporary Airfield was swamped by the public.

When it came time for the flight line to be cleared at the end of the day so that preparations could commence for the next days racing, security had to move down the area to help clear the crowds. The Red Bull announcer eventually asked Matt to make an announcement to the crowd as a whole as there was insufficient time for him to speak to everybody personally at his hangar.

When I spoke with Matt and his team later in the weekend, he remarked that this had certainly helped him in his quest for the weekend’s racing.

When I first spoke with Matt prior to his guest appearance in 2008 (Australian Aviation, April 2009), he was looking to joining the race circuit and now one year on, he is totally focused on better performances now that he has seen most of the courses and learnt a lot more about the race routines and techniques whilst all the time keeping safety as a priority.

Matt’s preparation for each race starts with general fitness training to better cope with the rigours of the race environment. When Matt gets to each race site, he generally flies to buildup a ‘g’ tolerance, buffet feel of the aircraft whilst performing performance handling testing of the aircraft after being assembled following shipping by either 747 freighter or by sea container.

Following this individual aircraft and pilot testing or workup, Matt then concentrates on particular manoeuvres that are maybe going to be involved in that race track to gain the best performance in the actual race whether that be improving handling through the chicane or getting the shortest turn from a vertical reversal turn like after Perth’s gate 4 and 8. This would involve 4-5 work up flights.

Matt is helped through his race season by a team of 2 others. Matt is of course pilot but also fulfills the role of CEO and financier. Ably assisting Matt is Team Coordinator David Lyall who is responsible for, to use Matt’s words, ‘he does everything! His primary responsibility is to make sure the team is organised, and look after our professional image. This then expands out to media, web, facebook, Twitter, brochures, stickers…you get the idea. When nothing else is going on, he helps the technician pull the plane apart and put it back together again.’

In the more technical area, Perth based technician Jack Moshovis, has joined the Matt Hall Racing Team with the Perth race having replaced Leonard Rulason. Jack’s duties being responsible for safety, maintenance and development of the aircraft. As a team they will be working with any development ideas to get the aircraft fast and plan when these changes can be carried out. Matt calls the aircraft ‘his’ (that is Jack’s) and he (Matt) just ‘flies it’. Matt Hall Racing is now an all Aussie team.

This year’s aircraft is a development of his race aircraft from 2009. It is a totally new aircraft with a lot of design ideas that Matt has personally had first hand in implementing.

These include shortening the aileron span to reduce drag when rolling and thereby increasing the overall lift of the wing, a shorter and more streamlined rudder for reducing drag in combination with the tailwheel, tighter engine cowl to reduce cooling drag and much lighter to allow experimentation with the Centre of Gravity. In future, Matt is looking at ways to improve the wing and cowl plus some horsepower ideas.

In the future, like in a number of motor sports, Red Bull may introduce a standard engine fit to more level the playing field between the teams and pilots and their engine development companies and budgets, but at the moment there is no such standardizing. This may see the use of a single standard core engine with individually developed induction and extraction systems. Pilots like France’s Nicholas Ivanoff this year has experimented with a unique exhaust system that exits out either side of the engine cowl. The whole setup also gives a unique sound in the race course making his Edge 540 sound more like a radial engine.

As an example of the continual development of the aerodynamics of the race aircraft, Nigel Lamb unveiled in Abu Dhabi and then in Perth, Spain’s Alejandro Maclean, the use of winglets on their MXS-R aircraft. Nigel described the winglets as having the advantage of reducing the drag during manoeuvring on a turning track whilst improving the aileron effectiveness and therefore increasing roll rate with the shorter spanned ailerons also decreasing drag whilst rolling. This was very obvious in the first round with Nigel placing second overall behind Paul Bonhomme and again with high placings during the Perth round.

In the humid atmospheric conditions during training early in the week, where most of the Edge 540’s and other MXS’s trailed large tip vortice streamers, Nigel and Alejandro’s aircraft did not. Alejandro with his first outing with the winglets appeared though to be challenged by the slightly higher roll rate and picked up a number of penalties for ‘incorrect knife edge flying’ on each time just slightly over rolling to the knife edge attitude.

Apart from Matt Hall, there is another quite prominent Aussie involvement in the Red Bull Air Race. That is the form of senior Race Director and Red Bull’s Aviation Expert, Drew Searle, himself a Perth resident.

Drew first became involved with the Red Bull Air Race when prior to the first race being held in 2006 in Perth, Drew and his aviation business partner Darius Pavri were asked to advise Tourism Western Australia and Red Bull Australia on the feasibility of holding an event over the Swan River in Perth. In 2007, Drew was offered the job of International Race Director and still performs that job today. Drew’s voice would be very familiar to Australian race fans with his Aussie accent call of ‘……. cleared into the track, Smoke ON’ coming over the venue’s PA system and television coverage.

Drew’s aviation background comes not only from his involvement with warbirds and aerobatic operations at Jandakot but from his previous flying in the RAAF and a major Asian airline. Drew’s family was also involved with the RAAF, his father having flown the Mirage and F-111.

The duties that Drew performs for Red Bull Air Race are pretty much fulltime involved with location checks for both confirmed and potential locations around the world. This involves working with aviation and city authorities and agencies right down to planning the actual tracks to be flown at race venues.

His duties also extend to future planning including training and qualification of rookie race pilots, planning flying displays and all the relevant application processes. Each race requires extensive preparation sometimes starting up to 12 months in advance depending on whether it is a new or existing venue. Depending on the locations, some venues have required up to 2 years of planning and preparation.

Once the activities start at a race venue in the week leading up to a race, Drew’s duties involve briefing the race pilots, helicopter and media pilots; those doing the specialist passenger rides for guests and media; and display pilots and down to co-ordination with local Air Traffic Control and Regulator Scheduling, flight safety aspects, control and supervision of flight operations including test flying of race aircraft, training and racing plus associated flying like the helicopter camera operations.

On Qualifying and Race Day, the Race Director controls the flying while the ‘Showcaller’ manages the schedule and works with the director to keep the show on time. To help with local co-ordination, Red Bull has their own ‘ATC guy’ and Flight Zone Manager who look after race airport operations for the Race Director.

The Race Director is ‘King of the Castle’, the castle being the Red Bull Air Race tower. The tower, which is air transportable around the world to all the race venues, is packed from the ground floor frame work to the roof top antenna with the latest state of the art communications, HD video telecast equipment and computer systems for monitoring the race and the aircraft telemetry, waterborne operations, security, commentary and the race stewards, those guys that scrutinize the flying and hand out the penalties.

Drew’s position, as one of the three Race Directors who rotate through the role for each race venue, control from the top of the race tower behind a console of communications, computer screens displaying race information and data with an all encompassing view of the race course and it’s surrounds. Of course the console is equipped with the obligatory Red Bull can holders!

As in previous years, the Perth course consisted of a 3 pylon chicane, three wings level (blue banded) gates and the new 270º turn gate instead of the old quadrille 4 four-way gate. The new 270º gate, first seen at this year’s Au Dhabi round, involves the racer entering the gate, knife edge pass right wing low, reverse the roll to the left, 270º left turn back to the other side of the gate, roll hard to the right to be knife edge right again and then exit via a left turn. Lots of rapid rolls, negative g, high g turning followed by rapid roll rate, negative g and high rate roll again to exit.

With a little wind on the practice day, this saw a few pylons being hit, the most spectacular being from the Japanese pilot, Yoshihide Muroya who managed to snag a section of gate material over the top of the rudder of his Edge 540 and after a close inspection from the chasing Red Bull Bőlkow BO-117 camera helicopter, he landed safely at the Race Airport in Langley Park.

If an air gate or race pylon as some may call them needs to be replaced as a result of damage from a race aircraft like this, it can be done in 2 and half to 3 minutes. Drew tells me that the best he’s seen is two minutes, the average being around the 3 minute mark depending on whether the race gate is on land or water and the wave state of the water affecting the mounting barge.

The gates are on about their fifth evolution of development and are made of varying thicknesses of lightweight nylon material held together in sections that are individually replaceable. The gates can withstand gusts up to 40 knots but before this racing would have been called off above 34 knots. Venues like Detroit in 2009 were extremely windy events with some flying being called off because of the wind.

This was not the problem for Perth in 2010, as by the time racing commenced on each day, the wind had died to be close to dead calm. Unfortunately this caused some problems with the smoke just hanging around the course reducing visibility for both onlookers and pilots alike.

The racing this year came after 2 days of training and practice. The first training day was curtailed early following the unfortunate accident involving Adilson Kindlemann and the rain, low cloud base and general drizzly conditions over the Swan River.

The Race Airport also was unusable until later in the week following the rain in the Perth area. Although the Race Director declared the Langley Park grass runway was too wet, Great Britain’s Paul Bonhomme was heard to remark, “I don’t know, we fly off muddier fields than this back home!” Eventually the race aircraft recovered to Langley Park prior to the weekend after Friday’s practice having flown to and from Jandakot for all the other sessions.

The race format for this year was essentially similar to last year’s racing but subtly different to that seen in Perth in the last race November 2008. Pilots raced through the course for two laps each time involving a total of 18 gates.

After the two days of training and practice, the race weekend starts with the Qualifying Round consisting of two races by each pilot with the fastest time of either round being used as the final qualifying time. After Saturday’s Qualifying, Paul Bonhomme, the 2009 Champion emerged as the fastest qualifier followed by Austria’s Hannes Arch, the 2008 Champion. In third place was Nigel Lamb followed in fourth by Kirby Chambliss.

Matt Hall was ‘Mr. Consistent’ with a seventh fastest qualifying time 4.88 sec behind Paul Bonhomme. Matt’s times hadn’t varied by much more than a second through all his runs all with zero penalties each time. However, Paul’s fastest qualifying came even after a 1 second penalty for no smoke. I was told later by a member of his team, that this was as a result of a slight error on Paul’s part, not a switch problem, but he had actually dislodged the inlet line to the smoke pump whilst ‘getting comfortable’ in the cockpit and was unaware that the line was disconnected.

As a result of qualifying fastest, Paul earned an extra 1 point towards his 2010 tally.

When speaking with Matt Hall about the speeds and ‘g’ through the track, he mentioned that a lot of the time they don’t actually look at the speed except through the start gate where there is a limit of 200 knots.

Matt plans to enter at approximately 192 kts so as to keep the next gates, the chicane, in control. Speeds through the remainder of the track range from 185 knots in the near level parts down to a low of 115 knots over the top of the gate 4 vertical manoeuvre after touching 10-11g in the pull-up. Matt’s MXS-R then accelerates very well once pointed back down towards gate 5.

These speeds are only actually known after interrupting the data collected by their onboard recording system, a new complex system installed by Larry Perkins. With this system Matt can now look at his engine parameters, flight parameters including ‘g’ and acceleration rates in the track post flight to see where improvements can be made.

When measuring the course in Perth, Matt estimated that with an average speed of 296kph over the 6.33km distance, the average time would be 1:16. Paul Bonhomme’s fastest qualifying was 1:25.05. Not far off.

Race Day dawned fine and clear after the rain and threatening overcast during the week. With forecast light winds and a maximum temperature of 29º, a great day of racing was envisaged.

The day commenced with a fly-off between the 5 slowest qualifiers in the ‘Wildcard’ round. There would normally have been five as in Abu Dhabi except with the race field being cut short by one following the accident earlier in the week.

Out of this fly off, the fastest two would then be the final two making up the round of ‘Top 12’.

After a further race, this would be progressively shortened to 8, The ‘Super 8’ and then after a final fly off, the fastest would makeup the ‘Final 4’, and out of this fly off, the final place-getters would emerge.

On each occasion on Race Day when Matt Hall placed initially 7th in the Top 12 and then placed 4th for the Top 4, there was a huge cheer and applause from the estimated 120,000 plus crowd.

The Top 4 then flew off in reverse order, slowest to fastest. During the final 4 races, the crowd held their collective breath as each pilot after Matt flew. Next up was Nigel Lamb who fell just short of Matt’s time by less than a second meaning that Matt had a definite podium finish of at least third place. The pilots don’t know each other’s times in this final fly off until after the last pilot has completed his round.

Then followed Hannes Arch, who put in a blistering run and a faster time than Matt by approximately 0.8 second. There was only the defending Champion, Paul Bonhomme to come. When he fell agonizingly short by less than half a second of Matt’s time, the crowd erupted therefore meaning the Aussie, Matt Hall placed second in his first home race.

It was obvious by Matt’s elation at the trophy presentation and comments later that this was a fantastic result following some of the handling problems that he had endured earlier in the week including one DSQ during Practice for over-‘g’-ing in the chicane as a result of the C of G being a little too far aft.

Hannes said he felt justified after his DSQ for ‘dangerous low level in the Final 4 in Abu Dhabi. Paul Bonhmme was obviously a little disappointed but said that at least he was going home with 10 championship points for the weekend. His final time was one of his slowest for the weekend.

The Red Bull Air Race now moves to the next round in Rio de Janeiro and Australian race fans await Matt’s next appearance on Perth Red Bull Air Race podium. Matt has now accumulated 14 points and lies equal third on the ladder for 2010.