ACROJETS

The Acrojets at the U. S. Air Force Base at Williams Field get ready to perform acrobatics in the air at 540 miles p.h.

Acrojels

The roar of 100,000 people drowned out the rolling thunder of the airplanes themselves as four sleek, silvery F-80 Shooting Stars, wing tip-to-wing tip, slid out of dense cloud completing a perfect loop.

Actually the sensational flying at speeds above 540 miles an hour was not as difficult as it appeared for the four U. S. Air Force jet pilots from Arizona. When the Acrojets from Williams Air Force Base disappeared into the clouds they were so close to each other that three of them could have read the instrument panel in the cockpit of the flight leader's plane. To the Acrojets the cloud was just a faint mist between them.Incidents like this and the fastest formation aerobatics ever attempted have made the Acrojet team famous by any pilot's standards. The jet jockeys of the air force pilot training school near Chandler, Ariz., have become nationally famous and brought added renown to the baby state where aviation champions are made.

In the year or so since they organized their precision SHOOTING THE JETS. "I must admit that these new 'swish' jobs," says Photographer Herb McLaughlin, "certainly have the men with the 'know-how' flying them." He should know. McLaughlin went along on several of the Acrojet jaunts to take pictures of their acrobatics in color and black and white. To take pictures of the jets doing tricks at 540 miles an hour, he was taken along in another jet going at the same speed.

The photographer says: "From the time we took off until the time we landed was exactly 30 minutes, and in this period of time I made 24 black and white pictures and 6 color shots. This time is counting the time it took us to climb to 10,000 feet and the time it took us to come back down, so roughly speaking I made the 30 shots in a space of about 15 minutes, or one every 30 seconds. On the black and whites I was using packs and I would wind up my back shutter to a speed of 1,000 and, of course I had the settings for F stop and distance preaerobatic team, the Acrojets have performed before at least a million people in air shows from Yakima, Elmira, Miami to San Antonio and California points, capping their travels with an all-out demonstration at the National Air Races in Cleveland, the top air show of the land.

A significant point about the Acrojets is that they donate their time and talents. The five men that make up the team, Majors Howard W. Jensen, Jones E. Bolt and Walter K. Selenger, Captain Robert C. Tomlinson, and Lieutenant Michael E. Smolen are instructors at Williams, the only jet pilot training school in the United States.

They carry a full load of regular training duties and perform the exhibition on their own time. They cannot receive extra pay for their show, nor can they compete for awards and specific honors for themselves.

Their show basically is for the public, a demonstration of the Air Force's newest type of airplane. To anyone who knows the Acrojets personally, it is also obvious that they themselves enjoy high speed aerobatics, hazardous as it is.

focused so with the G filter, the lens set at F8 and focused on 100 feet, I would pull the slide, shoot the first picture at 1/1000 of a second; pull the tab on the pack and then shoot the second time at 1/250; pull the tab, put the slide back in, and wind up the shutter for the next two shots.

"After shooting the black and white I took the filter off the camera, opened it up all the way and made my color shots. We would fly in one direction for a few minutes, and then make a 180 degree turn and fly back in the other direction. These turns presented some very nice shots looking at the formation in bank, the only trouble with it was that when you make a 180 degree turn you do it right now, just like making a U-turn on a street, and in doing this the camera, which ordinarily weighs about 8 pounds weighs about 40 to 50 pounds. In one or two of the turns I could not lift the camera. On other pictures the pull of gravity pulled the film out of its plane of registry.

Timed to split seconds, their entire repertoire requires exactly 13 minutes from the form up in a close diamond formation on take off until they loop over the end of the runway and land. In the time between spectators see some of the most skillful and fastest flying possible with Jensen leading, Bolt on the right wing, Smolen on the left, and Selenger behind in the slot. Tomlinson is the alternate pilot and flies any position.

In formation, Bolt and Smolen's wing tips are but four feet apart under the fuselage of Jensen's ship while Selenger rides under the tail pipe of Jensen and inside the tails of Bolt and Smolen.

To set the stage they first roar across 50 feet above the heads of spectators. The jets fly ahead of their sound, and the sudden blast brings startled groundlings to their feet to catch the fleet planes. Their low run captures complete, awed attention.

At the end of the speed run the Acrojets pull sharply up to 15,000 feet in seconds and begin a series of Immelmans, Cuban Eights, Clover Leaf and Split-S maneuvers -never higher than 5,000 feet and at one point all four silver planes make a beautiful slow roll a bare 200 feet off the ground in front of the crowd.

The high speed Cuban Eight is one of the most spectacular maneuvers of all and combines several others. The planes complete half a loop, make a roll on top, come down, and zoom upwards into the same turns from another direction. It looks like a figure 8 lying sideways.

As a finale the Acrojets have a creation all their own called the Bombshell. A highly complicated maneuver, it starts with the four planes in a vertical climb. At the exact instant, there is a lightning flash of wings as the planes flip over into the four cardinal directions and loop down. So fast are they going that at the end of the looping the opposite planes are 15 miles apart-yet they form up again over the field in two minutes. It looks exactly like a Fourth of July star shell.

The surprising discovery in talking to the alert fliers is that they seldom communicate with each other via the interplane radio when performing acrobatics. The joke among them is that Jensen is the brains and if they go wrong it is his fault. So far, they have never had a serious The jets are lined up at the Williams Air Base. This team of fliers has been featured at various air shows.