The Red Bull Air Race

Last weekend Jenny and I had the pleasure of experiencing the finale of the Red Bull Air Race right here in Perth. The Air Race has a series of gates which are inflated cones about 50 feet high and it’s flown over the Swan River. The race is timed and the pilots fly individually and obviously the one that flies the course in the shortest amount of time wins. Well with that being said, some of the planes are flying over 300 kph, just when they turn! In one part of the course the pilot has to fly through a gate and then immediately pulling up towards the sky and performing a loop (which now puts him upside down) and then flipping over to fly through the gate experiencing around 12 G’s. 12 G’s would make the pilot feel like they weigh 12 times more than their weight. You can imagine the exhilarating feeling you get when watching these planes perform these maneuvers a mere 100 feet in front of you.
The first day that we went to see the race we stayed on the side closest to Perth. The temporary runway for the pilots to land and take off was put there, so the spectators could enjoy watching the race, as well as see the planes land and take off. It was pretty cool watching the pilots land their planes 50 feet above your head narrowly missing the palm trees and telephone wires. We got some great pics of some of these planes as they side slipped into the runway. We noticed that there were also thousands of people on the other side of the river which is where the actual race took place. The grand stands were located on the other side of the river so naturally the race would be too. We looked into getting tickets for the next and final day but were thoroughly disappointed when we saw that they were charging $100 a ticket. On Sunday we decided to venture over to the other side of the river, so after a 5 minute shuttle ride on a TransPerth bus we were among the thousands of free loading spectators just like us. This was definitely a better spot to watch the race, you could see and hear everything much more. We had a great day and were treated with an awesome show from the Royal Australian Air Force Roulettes which is a team of 5 Pilatus PC9’s that performed about 5 minutes worth of acrobatic maneuvers while in formation. Than to top it off an FA-18 fighter jet made a few passes over the Swan testing the tolerance of our ear drums and concluding what was an awesome weekend together.