High five…

Lead makes the call: “Smoke on… Go!” Followed by, “Pulling… Up… Now!” At 300ft and 175kt, five Van’s Aircraft RV-8s curve smoothly upwards, pulling 4G, wingtips a few feet apart. Through the inverted at 75kt, and down the other side with the G coming back on as they level out and roll into a knife edge right turn. Concentration is all, the leader plotting height, track, speed and the wingmen focused tightly on the leader and their references to his aircraft.

Twelve minutes later and from a quarter clover. “Break, break…Go !” “Smoke off…Go!”

Time to relax, check Ts and Ps and fuel, and roll the neck. 

“Raven, display complete, exiting South.”

The event is the Midlands Air Festival 2021 and the first time we, Team Raven, has done this ‘in anger’ since Dinan in France in October 2019. We land a few minutes later at the very hospitable gliding site at Bidford. Refill the smoke oil tanks, fuel up for tomorrow, check the aircraft over and put the covers on. Half an hour until the taxi to the hotel, which means we can indulge in the now traditional ‘five pints of cider please’. We sit in the sun and debrief the display.

“Safety points?,” asks the leader. Two? No. Three? No. Four? No. Five? No. “And nothing from me,” the leader adds . Domestics? Five heads shake. “Flippin’ awful landing though,” says someone, to howls of laughter. A few points to sharpen up, but generally the verdict is that it was ‘rather a good display’.

Team Raven, five guys with five RV-8s, and a huge collective sense of humour, having a ball. There’s a degree of hard work as well of course. Although these days more on the paperwork side of things than on the aircraft side.

Raven 5, Mark Southern, ex-RAF fast jet and recently retired with a ‘gazillion hours’ on Boeings and Airbuses, looks after all the permits, licences, medicals and other bits of paper necessary to fly and display in the UK and Europe. Mark has an online package of all of our paperwork which he updates continually, and which can be sent to Flying Display Directors and organisers in one go.

On the publicity and ‘sales’ side we have Raven 4, Gerald Williams. Everybody knows Gerald, ex-professional rugby player and larger than life character. Probably the highest hour civvy jet display pilot around.

So why the RV-8? Like many decisions in life, we just ended up there without making a positive conscious decision. In retrospect, however, it does look like the right one for us. Consider the alternatives. Extras? Yes please. More power, faster roll rate, the list goes on. But, ‘extras’ are a lot of money to buy and would cost a lot more to maintain as the aircraft are certificated. Can you do more with them in close formation stuff? Well, yes. Could WE do more with them in close formation stuff? Perhaps not. They are full-on aerobatic ships, and we don’t do flicks and tumbles.

Edges, Gamebirds? All as above – with knobs on. Where could we get five of those?

Yak 50s? Now you’re talking. Most of us have owned / flown Yak 52s and we all loved them. We know that the 52 isn’t as capable as the RV-8 for what we do, but the 50 most certainly is – and more. The noise and its sheer presence is awesome. But we also remember the maintenance bills, the fuel burn, the frustration of running out of compressed air for the starting system, plus there’s only one seat.

So, back to the question. Why the RV-8? They look cool. Van’s say the RV-8 is the ‘aircraft of choice’ of retired fighter pilots the world over. But then, Van’s would say that, wouldn’t it? Well, 40% of Team Raven support that view.

All of ours have the injected IO-360 engine and constant-speed props. Apart from that they are standard aircraft, as ‘standard’ as any homebuilt can be. They are all the same and yet they are all a bit different. The performance is adequate for what we want to do with them in display work. By all other standards the performance is brilliant. Short(ish) field stuff is OK, and we’ve been into some very short fields in them. Transit flights are a very big part of display flying, sometimes they can also be the most difficult as well. We cruise at 150kt using about 35 litres an hour and we can go a long way. Almost four hours from Holland to Culdrose a few years ago, and comfortable one day flights to and from Portugal, Croatia and Denmark. The RV-8 also has room for bags and passengers – our wives and girlfriends have been to Ireland and Europe with us.

The LAA Permit system allows us to perform most of the routine maintenance ourselves and this we are able to do. The annual permit renewal is done at home bases with the aid of helpful and knowledgeable local LAA Inspectors. We’ve found the LAA most helpful, recently it assisted us with modifications to fit LED lights very quickly and efficiently.

This modification was designed and built by Raven 2, Steve Lloyd. Steve’s our engineering guru and well into his third RV-8 build. He reckons that if he keeps building them he’ll get one right eventually. To be fair, the two he’s built already go very well indeed and one of these is flown by our leader – Raven 1, Simon (Sid) Shirley. Sid is ex-fast jet and currently CO of the UAS at St Athan flying the Grob Tutor. Smooth and accurate leading is the essence of formation flying and Sid has this in spades.

Raven 3 is me, Barry Gwynnett, who looks after the finances, recently retired and also flies the Pawnee glider tow plane at Talgarth.

So what does a typical two-display weekend entail? We can generally make a venue anywhere in the UK, Ireland and the near continent in a comfortable day and so it’ll be a Saturday morning departure from Swansea, where four of our aircraft are based, with an en route rendezvous with Number  5 from Sleap.

Landing at the operating airfield we’ll unload baggage and spare smoke oil, check aircraft and get the all-important display brief from the FDD. We all go to on-site briefings but sometimes Sid will get an individual phone brief, so he’ll sit us down and make sure we all understand the salient points. After the outbrief there’ll be a walk through and carefully timed take-off for the display.

In the UK most of our shows these days are ‘seaside’, on the Continent they’re more likely to be on airfields. Generally the latter are more straightforward, seaside shows often have curving crowd lines, tidal issues, piers and boats. The wind is always a factor for the leader, but also for Gerald and Mark who break off from the main formation for individual and two-ship manoeuvres.

We don’t have a ‘flat’ show as such, but we do have contingencies built in for awkward wind situations and such like. Our current Display Authorisations are for 300ft aerobatic and 100ft fly-by, which are often ‘trumped’ by local height minima. At many sites the lower you go the less the crowd sees, so it’s better to stay higher anyway. Our maximum display height is 1,200-1,400ft, so low cloud is rarely a factor for us. We haven’t had to modify a display for weather for a few years now.

We have a mix of ‘5, 4, 3, 2 and 1’ aircraft manoeuvres and the aim is to keep at least one aircraft in front of the crowd all the time. The display has been ‘evolution’ rather than ‘revolution’ over time with some well-received manoeuvres always included, we rarely change the display during a season.

Without doubt the most difficult parts of the display are the re-joins from splitting up manoeuvres. There’s time to check Ts and Ps etc, but always an anxiety to get back into position for the next bit.

There’s quite a bit of ‘instructional’ radio in formation flying and most organisers are happy for us to use the official display frequency, often relaying it over the PA to the crowd.

Off display it’s back to the operating field which can be up to 40 miles away or, if it’s an on-airfield show, we can all be back on the ground in a couple of minutes. Shutdown, aircraft check, refill smoke oil, gather round for debrief and analysis – then relax. Overnights are good opportunities to catch up with others in the display, organisers and Flying Control committee members. We have quite a comprehensive list of curry houses all over the UK and Europe. Best named by us has to be Ayr India at Prestwick!

Next day (Sunday usually) it’s ‘repeat as above’ and then load up and transit back. It does mean committing to most weekends in the summer, some of them long weekends and there are weekday displays as well, mostly in Europe. We’re all lucky in as much as we’re our own bosses or effectively retired.

We operate as a ‘not for profit’ set-up and we all own our aircraft. If we’re lucky we earn enough in the season to pay our insurances, fuel and smoke oil, and maintain the aircraft.

So far we’ve been lucky with an average of 30 shows a year for seven years. It’s hard work and a lot of commitment but it’s so rewarding. Of course, a huge sense of humour helps.

We have a few displays lined up for the rest of 2021, more in Europe than in the UK, but we’re really looking forward to 2022 when, hopefully, we get back to normal.