Friday SD1June 19, 2015 Cox Media GroupAIR SHOW EXTRA

A C L O S E R L O O K A T T H I S W E E K E N D ’ S E V E N T S

TODAY’S SUBSCRIBER BONUS

The Vectren Dayton Air Show will be held from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on June 20 and 21 at the Dayton International Airport. For ticket information go to DaytonAirShow.com.

“It’s a visceral experience but also a way of celebrating the free-dom and ingenuity that we have to do what nature never intended for people to do. We were not made to fly. We can’t grow wings, but we have brains, and our brains make it possible to fly.”

For Terry Grevious, executive di-rector of the Vectren Dayton Air Show, the love for aviation often begins with simply watching an air-plane take off.

“We’ve talked to a lot of pilots that their first intro to flying was coming to an air show; that’s how they got the bug,” Grevious said. “You talk to some of these guys and they say, ‘The very first time I got into aviation was at an air show, and I thought, I want to do that.’ When I was very, very young I’d bike out to the airport and just watch the airplanes — at a very ear-ly age I picked up that bug.”

Gaffney calls the love of flying and airplanes “a natural thing, part of the fabric of the community of Dayton.”

This year’s 41st Dayton Air Show on Saturday and Sunday at the Dayton International Airport will seek to help instill the love of flight for the next generation.

“We have two jet teams, which is rare,” said Mike Emoss, chair-man of the Board of Trustees of the United States Air and Trade Show Inc. “We have the Breitling Jet Team and the Thunderbirds, which are loud and fast. We have Sean Tucker, who is renowned for aerobatic flying. It’s daredevil kind of stuff and this guy is the best in the industry. We also have a pro-peller plane and that’s the first one to our show, and that’s daredevil and fast.”

This year the show features two jet teams: the French Breitling Jet Team, which is embarking on its

first U.S. tour and is performing in Dayton for the first time ever; and the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds.

New this year is the pit row for the performing aircraft, which will exhibit the parked aircraft for at-tendees to see up close.

There is also a static display of ultralights. Gaffney describes them as “in a lot of ways like kites.”

“They only weigh a few hun-dred pounds, and you feel every little gust or change in wind,” Gaff-ney said. “You’re not closed up in a cockpit, you’re sitting out in the wind, with an unobstructed view of the world. I think it’s much clos-er to what the Wright brothers ex-perienced in their early flights. It takes you back to what flight was all about in the first years of avia-tion.”

Then there are the oddballs of the air. The Jet Waco is a clas-sic biplane, but with a jet engine strapped to its underbelly. This al-lows the plane to perform stunts and maneuvers that a traditional biplane would never be able to do.

“It’s just unlike any other air-plane,” Gaffney said. “When you watch it fly, you’re just going to be asking yourself, how does this air-plane do that?”

In celebration of the Wright brothers, a replica of one of the very first airplanes, the Wright “B” Flyer, will be performing at the air show, but Grevious believes the Breitling Jets, Thunderbirds, and U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet Strike Fighter — which Gaffney called a “really amazing airplane” — will be the top attractions.

“People get to talk to the military, and people are very patriotic, and that’s very attractive to them,” Grevious said. “Most of the military people here have been in combat and it’s neat for people to see that.”

A popular past attraction was a B-17 painted like the World War II Memphis Belle bomber. STAFF FILE

Smoke from pyrotechnics from the Tora! Tora! Tora! show rises over the NASA Super Guppy on Saturday, July 23, 2011. STAFF FILE

Spectators look over the B-24 Diamond Lil, a rare WWII-era plane, on June 29, 2014. GREG LYNCH / STAFF

MAIN PHOTO: Sean D. Tucker trails a loop of smoke while rolling thought the sky at the 2014 Dayton Air Show. TY GREENLEES / STAFF