One Six Right

[checkpointcharlie]

Does anyone know where I can purchase a European format DVD of the film ?

[robin]

Try this

http://www.flyer.co.uk/shop/product.php?product=55

[Cusco]

Nah:

Flyer's DVD is in US format: I know - I bought one and have sold it on to someone whose DVD was multi-region.

There is an Ad in the current issue of Loop advertising the video with European format: unfortunately I've chucked my copy out so can't help you further.

Mebbe a PPRuNer who still has this month's Loop can help you.

Safe flying

Cusco:)

Edited: found my copy of loop : PAL version available from LOOP £21.95

www.loop.aero presumably
0r tel 01223 497060

[robin]

True, but I believe the UK version has become available. If not, you should be able to find a hack for your player to turn it into a multi-region machine, as I did.

http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks

[checkpointcharlie]

Thank guys. Let you know how it goes.

[Shaggy Sheep Driver]

I wouldn't bother. I bought it, watched it once, it was OK (just) but it may be some time before I watch it again.

[High Wing Drifter]

Agree with SSD. Dull as dishwater :(

[TheKentishFledgling]

Got my copy last week. After reading some very good reviews of it, I had high expectations.

However, tending to agree with SSD and HWD - it's not awful, and there are some great moments and some very good air2air camera work, but it's not as good as I'd hoped :(

tKF

[MyData]

Would have to agree with the recent posters.

I bought a copy many moons ago and still haven't finished watching it. Some of the footage is excellent and worth watching but as a 'feature documentary' it is over long and I lost interest.

Note to self: must get that 16R finished sometime...

[MyData]

Poor form to comment on ones comments:

Note to self: must get that 16R finished sometime...

So I did just that on the train home from London last night.

The most startling thing in the whole documentary was what happened at Meigs Field in Chicago. Absolutely dumbfounding. I'm sure it must have been discussed on these forums at the time but I still so shocked at the action taken that I have to post here just to get it out of my system.

[stiknruda]

I watched it last night and quite enjoyed it. I can't imagine watching it again in the next 5 years but overall I thought it was well put together.

The fact that Keith Leedom opened the "show" with a Pitts S2B, of course had nothing to do with it!

Stik

[Annie Asinto]

He took my husband for a ride and my husband couldn't stop gushing. Consider that my husband had 40,000 hours flying Mustangs in WWII, civilian and commercial aircraft over 38 years....well, it wasn't easy to impress him.

Keith was even more fond of his Russian planes and has some great videos of exotic maneuvres in those planes. I saw One Six Right and it is great. There are clips of Edan Shalev (Keith's coach and fellow Van Nuys Airport pilot) in that movie, also. World Champion Serggei Boryak taught Keith how to fly the Sukhois and was at VNY with Keith alot in 2000...very nice guy, too.

The Miegs Field story needed to be told...it was a heartbreaker.

Both Edan and Keith have quit the sport from what I hear (but both are still alive-which is good and rare for what they did). Keith's skydiving reputation is even crazier. He sat in the front of an S-2B and had the pilot roll the plane to inverted. Keith held on to the top wing, fell out, and posed for pictures while holding onto the top wing while the plane was flying inverted... I wouldn't have believed it unless I saw pictures. My husband said the Pitts had to fly at about 100kts with keith hanging on it...Amazing (and crazy). GO RENT THE MOVIE!!!!!!!!

[Annie Asinto]

If anyone is interested, here is the link to the pic of Keith Leedom skydiving from the Pitts (inverted) hanging off of tope wing. You cansee the pilot's head in the foreground.........Freddie Cabanas (famed air show pilot was flying the plane).

[Annie Asinto]

http://www.iac78.org/images/pitthang.jpg

oops, here is the link of Keith Leedom and his skydive from Fred Cabanas' Pitts. Scary? Maybe... Awesome? YES

[checkpointcharlie]

Hey Annie

Thanks for the enthusiastic reply. Love the pic. Havn't laughed so much for ages. Nutter !

[stiknruda]

Annie,

I've seen the photo before and only last Fri was explaining it to a mate.

No way would I allow anyone to do that from my Pitts. The grab handle is a spruce laminate that is glued onto the trailing edge cut out cove. For extra strength the drawing shows two wee brass screws.

It was designed as a grab handle for support during ingres/egress - not to support 190lbs being dragged through the sky at 100kts!

However it does make a great photo!

Stik

[doug_milner]

I am a skydiver from the Boston area and had occasion to visit Southern Ca. I had a skydiver friend in So. Cal. who knew Keith Leedom and had told me about his skydiving stunts (skysurfing from 24,000 feet on pure oxygen, jumping out of a Boeing 727 -back door-) and I knew he was a silver medalist in the US Skydiving Championships. My friend told me he was a nice guy and arranged for me to ride in one of his Sukhois that he bought from the Russian government.

I met him at Van Nuys airport and we went over some basic emergency responses (I guess Keith had just caught on fire in another plane and landed it without bailing out and he wanted to make sure I was comfortable getting out of the plane in case we had to). I was scared and made to feel safe at the same time if that makes sense.

Let me tell you, he did amazing things in that plane. He literally tumbled the plane (tail went over the nose) and took me through +9 g's (which caused me to black out-tunnel vision- and come to). He would only give me negative 4 g's and that made me feel like my eyes were going to pop out of my head. In competition and when practicing, Keith flew +9 and -8 g's..at one time he said he broke a bunch of blood vessels in and around his eyes and backed off to -7 and -6. These are g loads that fighter pilots in g suits don't fly and Keith did it in shorts and a t-shirt.

He then spun the plane from 6,000 to 2,000 feet and I was done. This guy had balls of steel and couldn't have been nicer. That picture of him skydiving from the Pitts is in his hangar and he told me it caused a LOT of trouble for him from people who thought he was dangerous, wreckless, etc. But, you should know, the FAA was aware of Keith's jump from the Pitts and had no trouble with him doing it. It was legal and Keith said the only thing that was negative about that jump was that everyone thought he was going to die and gave him a rough time for being irresponsible when he really wasn't.

By the way, planes weren't the only thing Keith was crazy in. After our flight, he gave me a ride in his Ferrari on the Van Nuys guard ramp and he took to car from 0 to 120mph to 0 again between the hangars and the taxiway that parallels 16R. Apparently the Airport police "requested" that he not do that anymore....turns out he had given about half of the force a ride in his plane so they were pretty nice to him.

I have over 2,000 jumps and am getting my private pilot's certificate now and NOTHING has compared to the aerobatic ride with Keith. He was very generous and couldn't have been nicer to me.

[doug_milner]

I am a skydiver from the Boston area and had occasion to visit Southern Ca. I had a skydiver friend in So. Cal. who knew Keith Leedom and had told me about his skydiving stunts (skysurfing from 24,000 feet on pure oxygen, jumping out of a Boeing 727 -back door-) and I knew he was a silver medalist in the US Skydiving Championships. My friend told me he was a nice guy and arranged for me to ride in one of his Sukhois that he bought from the Russian government.

I met him at Van Nuys airport and we went over some basic emergency responses (I guess Keith had just caught on fire in another plane and landed it without bailing out and he wanted to make sure I was comfortable getting out of the plane in case we had to). I was scared and made to feel safe at the same time if that makes sense.

Let me tell you, he did amazing things in that plane. He literally tumbled the plane (tail went over the nose) and took me through +9 g's (which caused me to black out-tunnel vision- and come to). He would only give me negative 4 g's and that made me feel like my eyes were going to pop out of my head. In competition and when practicing, Keith flew +9 and -8 g's..at one time he said he broke a bunch of blood vessels in and around his eyes and backed off to -7 and -6. These are g loads that fighter pilots in g suits don't fly and Keith did it in shorts and a t-shirt.

He then spun the plane from 6,000 to 2,000 feet and I was done. This guy had balls of steel and couldn't have been nicer. That picture of him skydiving from the Pitts is in his hangar and he told me it caused a LOT of trouble for him from people who thought he was dangerous, wreckless, etc. But, you should know, the FAA was aware of Keith's jump from the Pitts and had no trouble with him doing it. It was legal and Keith said the only thing that was negative about that jump was that everyone thought he was going to die and gave him a rough time for being irresponsible when he really wasn't.

By the way, planes weren't the only thing Keith was crazy in. After our flight, he gave me a ride in his Ferrari on the Van Nuys guard ramp and he took to car from 0 to 120mph to 0 again between the hangars and the taxiway that parallels 16R. Apparently the Airport police "requested" that he not do that anymore....turns out he had given about half of the force a ride in his plane so they were pretty nice to him.

I have over 2,000 jumps and am getting my private pilot's certificate now and NOTHING has compared to the aerobatic ride with Keith. He was very generous and couldn't have been nicer to me.

[Thomas D. Treines]

I read the threads about Keith Leedom and his airplanes. I met Keith in 1999 at Van Nuys Airport when he was training with the world champion (from Kazakhstan-not Russia) Sergei Boriak. I had seen Keith around the airport and knew he had an Pitts at the time. Later he bought a Sukhoi 31 and then a Sukhoi 29 from the Russians. I saw him train very hard over the years. He used to fly 3 times a day, 3-4 days a week and yes, he did break a lot of blood vessels in his eyes and around his eye sockets from all of the negative g loads. He used to have red spots on the whites of his eyes!

The plane's g-meters pegged at +10/-10 and on several occasions we looked in the cockpit after his flights and he had pegged it both directions. Undoubtedly, he flew harder than any fighter pilot in the services. And, yes, he did it in shorts and t-shirts...no g-suits. He is in excellent physical shape if you look at him. Edan Shalev (Israeli pilot, veteran air show pilot and competition pilot at VNY) said that Keith put him through, undoubtedly, the most violent maneuver he has ever experienced in an airplane. Keith tumbled the Sukhoi on a 45 degree upline at 320 kilometers (200 mph) when most do it at 100 mph. Edan said he though his head was going to come off.

I rode with Keith one time. He gave me -4g's at my request and I had a headache for hours and slept for 4 hours that afternoon. To give you an idea of what -10 g's is like, Keith would have to fly the plane straight down toward earth at about 190 kts (217 mph) and push the plan to level so that the plane was inverted and level. He did this at about 1,500 feet off the ground (about 4 seconds from impact). All the blood rushes to the head and the transition from straight down to inverted level took about 3 seconds. Do the math on that and no human could take that without great conditioning to the g loads.

When I fist saw him fly, i thought I'd hear about him dying. He was amazing to watch and some things he does in those planes are amazing. His takeoffs and landings were also spectacular as he constantly made high-speed short approaches about 50 feet over the hangars and frequently made nearly vertical takeoffs with all of that power.

Over the years, i saw him train very hard. I learned he was a competition skydiver, race car driver, jiu-jitsu fighter and a self-made business owner. I came to know him after stopping in his hangar a few times to talk. He always had a fridge full of beer for his friends even though he didn't drink it. Go figure!

I changed my opinion of him from that of being dangerous to that of being a perfectionist and true professional who worked VERY HARD at being a great pilot. I know he won almost every contest he entered and has since flown in foreign countries in the Russian planes.

The skydiving stories are something else, too. I know he jumped out of a Boeing 727 at over 200kts and literally decelerated to terminal velocity. Keith said it felt like he was hit in the back with a baseball bat when he hit the air at 230 mph.

So, the stories you read (and there are more) are all true. More importantly, he is smart about what he does and is not a danger to himself as some would like you to believe. He just has a higher thresshold for risk and danger than about 99.9% of us mortals do. If you ever run into him, talk to him about it. He is very personable and easy to talk to.
-Thomas

[sternone]

Don't put money in that movie, try to find one of your friends to watch.

It's boring...

[Andrew Copeland]

Keith still flies out of VNY, but in a Baron and not an aerobatic plane.
Very nice guy once you talk to him. He is a big guy and has a big, kind heart. I think the movie was pretty good.

Very cool that he is still alive, too. He flew very, very hard in the Russian planes but was always very concerned about training properly. Few competition pilots trained as hard as Keith-that is why he won so much. He outworked the other pilots and had natural talent.

I saw him tumble the Sukhoi 31 out at Apple Valley airport when he was training with the Russian team members. He could also put the 31 and 29 into an inverted flat spin from an upline-he spun it upwards-which looked very impressive with the smoke on. That was his first thing he did in air shows. Cool guy and nice to other pilots who were beginners.

[ken littman]

That film is very good. The flying in there is nice, but if you have ever seen Keith Leedom fly, he flies much harder in training and air shows. I saw him do unbelievable things in the Sukhoi 37. He loved the Russian planes and could tumble them tail-over-nose at about 1,000 feet. Pretty ballsy and even scary to watch-but beautiful, too.

We talked to him at Van Nuys airport once. He had just flown 3 sequences at about +10 and -8 G's, yet he took almost 30 minutes to take pictures with my 13 year old son and to answer questions about that amazing plane and the maneuvers he was working on. He was very hot and tired, but spent the time with us.

As good a pilot as Keith is, and he is incredible, he is an even nicer and very generous person. My son still talks about seeing Keith fly, but he talks more about the time Keith spent with him answering all those questions when it was over 100 degrees! All this from a total stranger.

So many pilots who do what Keith does have died. We are lucky to have those who remain. They are all amazing. I saw that picture of him hanging off of the wing of the Pitts. That picture is simply amazing. It takes your breath away to see him hanging from an inverted plane and so close to the propeller. To be a skydiver and a competition pilot like that takes tremendous dedication adn courage and talent! Whenver I am in CA and at van nuys airport- I look for Keith- he is very well known there by everyone. He calls the van nuys airport "his church".

[vanHorck]

If you like flying you'll like this movie, so if you don't like that movie you're probably not a pilot....

You are however right that it can be had for free, it s available on download sites, at least on Mininova and Btjunkie (torrents)

[greg whitsett]

He is a great pilot and was very nice to beginners. I ran into Keith at VGT in 2009, he was flying a Citation now and he remembered me. What he did in competition was nothing-you needed to see him train in Las Vegas or California-it was awesome. If you ever saw him tumble or torque roll the Su-31 with the smoke on , it was amazing. The smoke covered the entire plane. He flew the Sukhoi at a Paris show and the video is amazing. I think he was the only American to fly in the Paris show and he did it in a communist Sukhoi plane. Very nice guy. He didn't fly under the bridge-that was Jurgis-but he is an amazing pilot and the skydiving picture is unbelievable. He is less than 6' from the propeller hanging off of the wing when the plane is upside-down. Mike Mangheld and Keith were competition pilots and competition skydivers-the only ones who did both. Mike has some world records. Keith had no attitude like some of the others and took time to welcome newbies. Very, very cool person and pilot.

[Tmbstory]

When I was an upcoming young instructor at the Royal, I was given the oppurtunity to go on a demonstration flight with J. Blaha and his aircraft. What a display he gave for those days. All types of Aerobatics, including inside and outside loops and outside steep turns. I thought that my eyeballs were in danger of coming out of their sockets!.
What a flight, I still remember it to this day.

Tmb

[Tom Murphy]

I met Keith Leedom in Las Vegas at our Nellis Air Show. He spent 3+hours with our kids and the young eagles program ansering quesitons about aviation and his Russian plane.

I traded rides with in a Hornet for a ride in his Suhkoi and I think I got the better deal!

That guy can fly and do things I have never experienced in an airplane! He tumbled the plane 2x and flew me backwards through the plane's smoke. I literally could not see out of the plane while it backed downward on its tail toward the ground through the smoke. He was cool as ice in the Sukhoi! After that he went to our gym and worked out. I was exhausted after all of the G's.

He is a bad-ass pilot and was very kind to donate his time. He is amazing and nice!