My adventures as an Air Force photographer in New Zealand
Aerobatics photography
The Red Checkers, in the early 1980's: Colin Pearce, Steve Bone, Bruce Ferguson, Malcolm Knox and Roger Read.
Initially I thought it was just a shot of the team (as above) on the ground but the excitement grew as it became clear that there was more to this task!
Aerobatics (from the aerobatic aircraft), for those of you that have never experienced the process, is a bit like a really, really smooth roller coaster ride, with gravitational forces so intense that your blood vacates the brain and you may pass out during positive G manoeuvres. Negative G is a rather unsettling feeling often resulting in burst blood vessels in the eyeballs. There was none of that on the flights I have done but I have seen pilots return to base with bloodshot eyes.
The first time I flew with the Red Checkers was in a Harvard (a WW2 pilot training aircraft which was one of the original Red Checkers aircraft).
As we started to taxi towards the runway, the pilot was going through his checklist and making sure I was all sorted.
We left the ground after a prolonged roar from the Harvard’s huge 13 cylinder radial engine with the five CT- 4 Air Trainers climbing into the air ahead of us. Wheels up. Now we just needed to fall-in behind the Air Force aerobatic team.
We did this repositioning and I slid the canopy back and locked it fully open, as planned.
Now we were ready for the fun to start!
The well-practiced routine began but as the G-force increased I struggled to keep my head up because of the weight of the helmet, the camera became "dead weight" on my lap and I puffed and panted due to physical stress, until I eventually passed out!
This occurred a number of times - but only at the bottom of a loop. The G force loosened a wee bolt in the winding mechanism of my Pentax 6x7 camera (10 shots per roll of film) which failed half way through the routine, so I said to the pilot that we might as well return to base. We finished the flight with the aerobatic team, landed and I went back to the Photo Section with my broken camera.
My pilot on the next occasion explained that the best way to combat blood loss to the brain was to prevent the blood from traveling directly to your lower body.
One way to do this is to imagine you are suffering from constipation and try to “force it out” by pushing from your solar plexus region - really hard! This eases the gravitational effect of blood flow away from your brain and traps some of that much needed blood in your upper body.
He said “You can grunt away as much as you like, no one is going to hear you up there!” So I put on the parachute (like a huge seat cushion), climbed into the backseat of the Harvard, strapped in and started to ease into my helmet and headset. One of the ground crew handed me my camera, a twin lens reflex Mamiya C330 this time (fewer moving parts that can fail).
Everything was going well as we climbed to the desired altitude with the aerobatic aircraft directly in front of us.
Then the Air Trainers all disappeared for my view (they had started their dive together) shortly after that all I could see was the patchwork quilt of the ground and the Harvard went really quiet (powered off) - we were diving towards the ground!
Suddenly five thick smoke trails stretched out, rocketing vertically across our boughs. A second later, under crushing G-forces (well, it seems that way when you are holding something with a bit of weight), the patchwork quilt was exchanged for sky, with a brief look at the horizon. Back to deafening full throttle for the “up hill” slog.
Aerobatics (from the aerobatic aircraft), for those of you that have never experienced the process, is a bit like a really, really smooth roller coaster ride, with gravitational forces so intense that your blood vacates the brain and you may pass out during positive G manoeuvres. Negative G is a rather unsettling feeling often resulting in burst blood vessels in the eyeballs. There was none of that on the flights I have done but I have seen pilots return to base with bloodshot eyes.
The first time I flew with the Red Checkers was in a Harvard (a WW2 pilot training aircraft which was one of the original Red Checkers aircraft).
As we started to taxi towards the runway, the pilot was going through his checklist and making sure I was all sorted.
We left the ground after a prolonged roar from the Harvard’s huge 13 cylinder radial engine with the five CT- 4 Air Trainers climbing into the air ahead of us. Wheels up. Now we just needed to fall-in behind the Air Force aerobatic team.
We did this repositioning and I slid the canopy back and locked it fully open, as planned.
Now we were ready for the fun to start!
The well-practiced routine began but as the G-force increased I struggled to keep my head up because of the weight of the helmet, the camera became "dead weight" on my lap and I puffed and panted due to physical stress, until I eventually passed out!
This occurred a number of times - but only at the bottom of a loop. The G force loosened a wee bolt in the winding mechanism of my Pentax 6x7 camera (10 shots per roll of film) which failed half way through the routine, so I said to the pilot that we might as well return to base. We finished the flight with the aerobatic team, landed and I went back to the Photo Section with my broken camera.
My pilot on the next occasion explained that the best way to combat blood loss to the brain was to prevent the blood from traveling directly to your lower body.
One way to do this is to imagine you are suffering from constipation and try to “force it out” by pushing from your solar plexus region - really hard! This eases the gravitational effect of blood flow away from your brain and traps some of that much needed blood in your upper body.
He said “You can grunt away as much as you like, no one is going to hear you up there!” So I put on the parachute (like a huge seat cushion), climbed into the backseat of the Harvard, strapped in and started to ease into my helmet and headset. One of the ground crew handed me my camera, a twin lens reflex Mamiya C330 this time (fewer moving parts that can fail).
Everything was going well as we climbed to the desired altitude with the aerobatic aircraft directly in front of us.
Then the Air Trainers all disappeared for my view (they had started their dive together) shortly after that all I could see was the patchwork quilt of the ground and the Harvard went really quiet (powered off) - we were diving towards the ground!
Suddenly five thick smoke trails stretched out, rocketing vertically across our boughs. A second later, under crushing G-forces (well, it seems that way when you are holding something with a bit of weight), the patchwork quilt was exchanged for sky, with a brief look at the horizon. Back to deafening full throttle for the “up hill” slog.
A "proof" of one of the 6x6cm sample images.
While going through the bottom of the loop "pulling up", I did what the pilot advised and grunted my way through the gravitational force that pushed me deep into my seat.
My helmet felt so heavy that I struggled to keep my head up. My arms were like lead, but I took a breath and kept grunting, until the forces eased and we began to climb again - vertically.
We were now pointing straight up with only sky to be seen.
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom “Let’s switch off your intercom next time, Colin” - I turned a very red colour (even though no one could see me).
The pilot had been a party to all of my grunting because I had missed turning the intercom switch OFF!
I could hear a horn blasting periodically, later discovering that this was the audible warning to the pilot that the wheels were up and power was minimal - so that you didn’t land with your wheels up (remember this is a WW2 aircraft).
I asked the pilot to move the aircraft off to one side of the aerobatic team, so that I could get a better shot of the display team “Roger that”, as he realigned us, “how’s this?”. “Great” I said as we approached the top of the loop.
Click - wind, click - wind “Excellent!”
Now comes the scary bit (for me anyway). The best position for doing shots of the team was going to be from their front three quarters area, so that we were slightly in front of them - off to one side.
This required some major twisting in the seat, so with this in mind, I had loosened my shoulder harnesses so that I could shoot back towards the five aircraft - big mistake. As we turned upside down and the positive G's receded I "fell" into the shoulder straps of the parachute, I dug my heels into the space below the seat pan as the slack in my harness was taken up. Basically I felt that I was falling out of the aircraft for a second, until I could feel the shoulder straps cut into my shoulders again - remember my canopy was open, nothing between me and the ground as we hung upside down!
Settling for shots from the side rear view was a safer approach, so I squeezed off a shot or two of the subjects, after all that is why I was there. My job was to photograph the aerobatic team going through their paces over the historic Wigram airfield for an Air Force publicity poster.
We went through this entire routine a couple of times so there was a lot less anxiety after that.
There were 12 shots on a roll of 120 when using a square format camera like the Mamiya C330. I did not need to reload while we were airborne, which was a great relief to me because when you I take my eyes off the horizon to do something like putting in a new roll of film the G forces can make me feel really, really airsick.
Once back on the ground and I could get my "jelly like" legs to operate normally again - it was time to get the colour film processed for producing the poster - Job done!
Here is a video from another time: https://youtu.be/mcBKA3zadro
The finished product was in colour, but I was unable to get a copy of the full version - here it is in B+W anyway.
Old Defence images
Air to air shoot: P3 Orion to A4 Skyhawks
I was asked to jump aboard an RNZAF, P3 Orion ( a four engine turboprop maritime surveillance aircraft) to take photos of some A4 Skyhawks that had gathered for a maritime exercise off the coast of New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty.
Seemed simple enough, until I discovered that the Skyhawks would be restricted to flying within a big triangle of air space. This meant lots of direction changes and as a result lots of lighting changes.
For me to get ready to shoot I needed to attach a harness around my waist, go to the rear left door of the Orion, secure my harness to a “D” bracket on the floor, notify the pilot so they could throttle back to a safe speed, then open the door, pin it back so that I could stand in the doorway with nothing between me and the formation of wee jets that were coming up behind us.
It was freezing (as usual) and the roar of wind and engine noise made it virtually impossible to hear anyone speaking to me on the headset, so I resorted to hand signals for transferring the directions to the Orion pilot via the crewman who was just behind me.
The Orion pilot dropped the left wing a bit so that it was a clean shot without the wingtip or jet efflux from the hot gas exhausts.
There was a speed disparity also, so after a chat with the pilots of the P3 Orion, we came up with a plan.
It would take a while to get four Skyhawks and one Orion in the right bit of sky at the right time, so all of the pilots (Skyhawks and Orion) worked fast to get things happening.
The wee jets arrived on the scene, just as we had to break off again for another turn. Remember we were part of a maritime military exercise involving a number of countries, so we need to fit in with these limitations as part of being permitted to do these shots.
So the countdown began as we completed each bank to change direction. Often we would just about get into position then we would need to break-off to make another turn (very frustrating and stressful).
We had a few attempts at this and eventually we managed to the formation of Skyhawks as well as the Orion in the same bit of sky at the same time to get some shots within the very short timeframe, allocated.
At one point, once we were all set to shoot, the Skyhawks were going as slowly as they could without their wings opening up and we were going as fast as we could in the Orion with the door open but the wee jets were still advancing past the ideal position off our port wing. So the pilot said “Hang on” and he pushed us into a shallow dive to speed us up a bit. It worked - a wee bit frightening - but it worked - we got our shots - thanked all those involved - closed the door and went home!
Processed back at the base - Job done!
Old Defence images
Small jet shoot
An RNZAF P3 Orion had just won the Fincastle Trophy for Anti Submarine Warfare skills and was returning to NZ air space. The competition had been hosted by the Royal Air Force, in the UK.
Planned for about the same time was a training sortie for three Strikemaster jets (the BAC 167 Strikemaster is a British jet-powered training and light attack, two seater- side by side aircraft) in the northern skies of New Zealand.
The operations team had decided to combine the training sortie of three Strikemasters with an air to air photoshoot of the return to NZ of the victorious P3 Orion.
So late that afternoon I was asked to grab a camera (Mamiya RB67) and meet with the pilot of a Strikemaster jet for kitting out with a G-suit. This was sort of like a tightly fitting girdle for the lower part of your body which is plugged into the aircraft and was designed to inflate and deflate to counteract the result of G forces starving the brain of blood. A "May West" lifejacket, helmet with comms. etc, then straight out to the aircraft.
It was all a bit of a rush, but as we taxied I was given a safety briefing by the pilot that included how to eject, if required. The pilot would decide if there was an emergency and when to exit the aircraft.
The Strikemaster has a Martin Baker ejection seat that has two initiation points, the Face Blind (above your head) incase you are in a negative G situation and cannot get your hands down to reach the other trigger, the Seat Pan Handle between your legs (if you need to leave in a hurry). For safety reasons, if ejection is required I was to dump the camera as it could hinder successful operation of the ejection process.
With all of that out of the way, we left the ground and headed north. Apparently this was an “escape and evasion” type of exercise. As we reached the northern east coast we descended to about 250 feet from the water and we were moving rather quickly by this stage (Maximum speed of the Strikemaster was about 800 km/hour, although I do not think we were near that speed). When the other three "Blunties" were spotted it was "all-on" dogfighting. At one stage we were hiding behind a hill!
As you can imagine, in a speedy wee jet this was hard work and the G suit got a real workout and I was not feeling too bright.
As we sped around the sky doing the modern day's "Biggles" thing, time was passing rather rapidly and the light was disappearing. I got a few formation shots of the "Blunties" but that was about all before we returned to base.
I eventually photographed the RNZAF P3 Orion winning team - but on on the ground!
Job done!
