Champions Fly at Reno on a Wing and a Prayer

A lot of people think all the fun and romance went out of airplanes when the propellers were taken off the front and replaced with jet engines on the back.

They’re probably the same people who, the third week of every September since 1963, have shown up here for the National Championship Air Races.

What draws them--in addition to the whirling props--is the subtle perfume of hydraulic fluid, the aroma of seat leather baking in the sun and the heady odor of hot oil belching from the exhaust of elderly but still sturdy World War II combat planes.

The names of the aircraft have the same growling roll as their engines: Thunderbolt, Sea Fury, Wildcat, Hurricane, Spitfire, Lightning, Corsair, Mustang.

They’re the hot, high-flying iron that elevated the likes of Joe Foss, Chuck Yeager and Pappy Boyington to the status of ace in the skies over Europe and the Pacific.

Although both the men and the metal belong to another era, how the planes still fly!

The National Championship Air Races, with a hundred or so entries, feature the world’s fastest motor sport.

$450,000 in Awards

Speeds have cracked the 450-m.p.h. mark and the awards are commensurate: This year the kitty will exceed that same figure, multiplied by a thousand.

But for all that wealth and apparent recklessness, the four-day affair has a wonderful down-home flavor.

Just about everyone from the judges to the hot dog vendors are volunteers, with the list of participants sounding like a roll call of small-town America: Boy Scouts, Sertomas, Kiwanis, Soroptomists, Jaycees.

Four classes of races bring back the bacon. The Formula Ones are little dinky hot rods between 15 and 18 feet long, carrying a restrictive 100-horsepower engine. Restrictive, yes, but they nevertheless approach speeds of 250 m.p.h.

The Biplane category features double-wingers that look for all the world like model planes on a heavy steroid diet. They’re homemade from kits, and the most frequently entered is the sleek, swift, open-cockpit Pitts Special.

Then there is the AT-6 class, the hearty World War II trainer. Its design speed was a mere 170 m.p.h., but the racers exceed that by a third and more, in beating the original blueprint specifications.

The Unlimiteds are the biggest draws of the eight daily races. With them, anything goes, and that means they can be beefed-up, sleeked-down, narrowed, whatever the ingenuity of the pilot and mechanic can create.

Unlimited Range

They are to the other classes what a Harley-Davidson is to a Schwinn. Unlimiteds range from the B-25 bomber (it made the first, famed run over Tokyo) to the lethally sleek, double-boomed, twin-engine P-38 Lightning.

Last year’s winner was an old British Sea Fury, “Dreadnought,” with an incredible 28 pistons pounding under the cowling.

Just how near do the planes come to the people? The rules say that racers must fly no higher than 1,500 feet nor lower than the top of the course-marking-pylons, 50 feet high. And laterally, the distance from the flight path to the grandstands is about a quarter-mile.

But put three dueling airplanes bunched up like seeds in a grape out there and, well, they look an awful lot closer and sound as if they’re flying right in one ear and out the other.

Stead Field, 10 miles out of Reno, offers strange, unnerving visual effects. There’s a big dip at one end of the runway, and as the planes take off they appear not so much as to be leaving the ground, as to be flying right out of it instead.

At the other end of the strip is a deep gully, and that serves noted flyer Bob Hoover extremely well.

The Right Stuff

He is one of the many and certainly the most perennial, possiblythe most famous of the acrobats who show off at Reno. Hoover will disappear, then sneak up on the field via the gulch and then, as if out of nowhere, come roaring up as a speeding phantom.

There’s a lot of the right stuff in the air over Reno each September and some of it right on the ground, too. The old Marine Corps ace, Pappy Boyington, personifies it as he sits in a stall autographing the book from which the TV show about him got its name, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.”

Made of equally good aerial material is Mike Kawato. A Japanese fighter pilot now living in Texas, he knocked Boyington out of the air and he, too, is selling a book. The title of his: “Bye, Bye, Black Sheep.”

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The 1987 National Championship Air Races are scheduled Sept. 17 to 20. General admission is $6 the first day, $10 the second, $13 the third and $17 for the final day. Reserved seating is $10, $15, and $25 for each of the final two days. Season tickets are $35 for general admission, $65 for reserved seating.

For children, general admission is free the first two days, $5 on the third day and $6 for the final day.

General admission tickets can be bought through BASS Ticket Centers; Ticketron offers both reserved and general admission tickets.

Daily bus service from downtown Reno is $4.50 each way or $29 for the four days.

Passes, which can only be purchased by those 16 and older, to the pit, where mechanics and pilots work on the planes, go for an extra $10 on the first day, $15 the second and $20 for the last two days. They are available only at the race site.

Hotel/motel/show information for the Reno area can be obtained by calling (800) FOR-RENO.

For additional information, write to National Championship Air Races, P.O. Box 1429, Reno, Nev. 89505.