RV-4's in Extended Trail

[Bill Wightman]

OK, I just signed up on YouTube to share some fun stuff with my old RV4.
We had an informal dogfight club with 4 local ships and things got pretty interesting at times.

A few loops with my bird in trail on this video shot using the camera and viewfinder turned around backwards. The rejoin to three gets things going and after a break into extended trail lead flew me through a number of oblique loops and that's what you see here.

Note the end of the video when I bury my nose directly in leads wake - my prop ate a bunch of bad air and it was like shutting the engine off. Big loss of thrust and I got spit out so bad you can see me putting the nose down to keep airspeed up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RzzQqaktDM

[ao.frog]

Hi.

That was really some nice flying you did there!
You really stayed in position like you where glued in!

Also, interesting to see the last part, where your nose got into the prop wash.

Thanks for sharing!

[Steve Ashby]

What an incredible video! I thought the picture quality was great. Do you know what the setup was in the lead ship? Did you prevent prop indexing in the shot with a lower shutter speed? What kind of camera did the lead ship use? Thanks.

[Bill Wightman]

Steve - Camera was a Sony 8mm MiniDV DCR-PC100 set on "auto". Nothing fancy, no special settings or filters here.

The video was taken from the back seat of lead's ship, with the camera aimed essentially over the backseater's shoulder. To see where he was aiming the camera, he had the viewfinder turned around backwards, but this made pointing the camera sort of backwards for him (aim to your right, but the picture goes left sort of thing). So it took us a moment to sort that out.

ao.frog - We think the RV's make fantastic formation platforms. Very capable airplanes: quick to respond to power changes, plenty of control authority, not too heavy in pitch, and good visibility. Also, both lead and I taught formation at Vance AFB in the T37 for a few years so we had lots of practice