49 ship flyover
Greeting to all RVers,
I was lucky enough to be in this awesome formation. Before I go any further you all have to know about 3 guys: Phil Lamb (Ripper), Richard White (Maverick) and our fearless flight lead Bill Gill (BeeGee). If it wasn't for these guys this would have never happened.
I first heard about these guys and the KC Flight group last year when they did the Kansas City Chiefs Breast Cancer Awareness flight. Since my wife is a breast cancer survivor I knew I had to get involved. If any of you have been around cancer it is not a pleasant experience for the affected person but it is pretty emotionally hard on family as well. It is a gut wrenching experience and makes you very thankful of every minute we have with loved ones. To be a part of something this cool is hard to describe. My wife was there at the stadium and when she saw us fly over she said " When I saw you all overhead it was very emotional for me I couldn't help it, I teared up". I wore a pink hat on the flight and presented it to her at the game (hey, I even got a HUGE bear hug- thought she was gonna break a rib).
The whole focus of this massive amount of logistics, expense, and personal commitment was to raise awareness of be breast cancer and I think we accomplished that. The last figure I heard was $30,000 raised for the local cancer hospital. During the actual flyover brief one of the guys punched the numbers on a calculator and came up with (pardon me if I don't get it exact) 9,310 horsepower with a fuel burn of 354 gph.
On a side note, I had 3 HD wide angle cameras in the cockpit with audio and it will take some time to edit everything but will post something as soon as I can.
Thanks also to our chase plane/coach Tom McNerny for getting everyone in position. There's lots of videos on the net but I think his is really cool and I took the time to shake his hand after we got back (his link is here on the forum).
http://youtu.be/G_p-R2i13HU
Finally, thanks to Van for designing such an incredible airplane, thanks to Doug Reeves for such an awesome website and community gathering place and most of all to the KC Flight guys. To hit a Zero second deviation Time Over Target (TOT) by BeeGee (our flight lead) just at the last note of the National Anthem was truly an incredible feat.
My personal thanks to all the KC guys, I will be back next year.
Oly