Australian Air Race 2024 - 47 Years in the Making
 

AUSTRALIAN AIR RACE TO RETURN IN 2024!

AOPA Australia has teamed up with Skyfuel Australia and VIVA Energy to bring the Australian Air Race back in 2024, seeking to break the 1976 race record for participating pilots and aircraft. Racing from Perth to Sydney over 5 epic days of flying, the event will be open to aircraft of all types including sport, recreational and general aviation!

It has been some 47 years since the race was last run in 1976 and we are excited to be bringing it back in 2024 giving an entirely new generation of pilots the opportunity to share in the excitement and adventure.

We have assembled a great organising committee and will soon launch the Australian Air Race website where pilots can learn more about this historic event.

If you are an aviation industry association or business and would like to add your brand and support to this remarkable event, please reach out and make contact with us at AOPA Australia.

We are also eager to connect with past participants of this great race to learn more about the 1976 event, and are inviting those who both flew and volunteered to reach out to AOPA Australia.

More updates to follow!

BENJAMIN MORGAN
Chief Executive - AOPA Australia
Mobile: 0415 577 724

Great initiative, I hope it goes ahead and plan to participate if it does.

I'd be keen on entering the RV, but am curious about how's it going to work? GPS time trial like the Outback Air Race? Over 5 days, can't see it being a balls-to-the-wall speed run?

Hi Ben,
really happy to see this on the cards, and like Fred, if possible I'll enter.
I had a few ideas a while back here to try and raise awareness of the sector: Air Race Ideas

I am hoping the cost to enter won't be astronomical..

Reach out to me via email or my mobile 0415 577 724 and lets chat. We have put together an event team and are working our way through the various challenges and logistics to make all this happen. Would love to speak to you about your race concepts and ideas.

So...

Where are arrangements up to? I can't find the website for the race, but my search skills may be deficient.

First you need a sponsor
 

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....5ea28d6cfc.jpg


I don't know if that sponsor is around any more but both motorcycle gangs and drugs are legal here in Drugsville ACT so check with the Government for sponsorship deals.

B & H Air Race 1976 Entrants List
 

File of entrants names and aircraft is attached.
Lot of "names" in that blast from the past.

There were a raft of serious aviators on the Organising Committee including Chief Marshall, Jim Hazelton; Chief Steward, Keith Robey.

In today's woke world I suppose you would have to include Blackout Bowen Fuel Supplier and Greta Thunderberg, Media Relations???

Now if you are seriously going to replicate the 1976 event, you will also need to organise a total eclipse of the sun on the day the race stages through Melbourne, as happened on October 23rd 1976.
Would you believe the Victorian Government set up a co-ordinating committee to manage this. Yep, only in Victoria.

The original route was as follows where "O" means overfly, "X" means overfly and fuel available, "N" means an overnight stop with fuel.

Jandakot October 20th 1976
O Hyden
X Norseman
O Caiguna
O Loongana
N Forrest
O Nullabor Homestead
X Ceduna
O Port Augusta
N Adelaide Parafield
O Cambrai
O Tintinara
O Naracoorte
X Warnambool (watch for the black snake, right George # 40??))
O Apollo Bay
N Melbourne Moorabbin 2 nights (Not allowed fly day VFR during eclipse)
O Frederick Hill
O Tocumwal
X Narrandera
O Parkes
O Bathurst
N Sydney Bankstown 24th October 1976

Followed by a very nice dinner and prizegiving at a city hotel (Hilton??)

And a bunch of great memories 48 years later.
Like the engine failure at 1500 ft at Head of Bight on the way across and the amazing replace two cylinders and fly on in two days.
Like Horrie Miller of MacRobertson Miller Airlines in the stocks at a steakhouse the night before the race.
Like the black snake at Warrnambool who had never seen so many aircrew and was not a happy fellow!
Like doing it all with a map, a compass and a watch. No navaids on board! GPS, what is that?
Yeah, it was a blast.

And Clinton, take my machine and go for it!

That’s a very kind offer, Advance! That means I'll have a choice of four machines, then.

Interestingly, I remember very well that eclipse in ’76. I was then a first year apprentice at the RAAF School of Radio at Club Med Laverton. I remember going out and looking at the black circle of the moon at the ‘totality’ point – despite all the advice. I also remember how quickly it got cold and that all the birds went crazy.

My first real air race experience was the Bicentennial Round Australia Air Race. Lots of stories out of that one. I’ll stand by for details of the one the subject of this thread.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....0f6d0adc44.jpg

One Mr Dick Smith entered in his Pa-30 VH-DIC.

Everything From Tiger Moths to a Learjet!

Yep. I flew with Ian Smith and Nancy-Bird Walton.

Highlights were the night at Forest and meeting Sir Douglas Bader!

Nearly 180 entrants for the '76 race (though I'm not sure what the dashes under the 'Aircraft' and 'Registration' against a number entrants denote). Bloody good effort. As I recall, there were 'only' about 125 aircraft in the Bicentennial Round Australia Air Race.

I hope it is better-run than the London-to-Sydney race in 2001.
In early 2000 we told the organisers that we wanted to enter a helicopter in the race - they only had planes to that stage, and The Boss of the air race was very keen to have us along. We paid the $15,000 deposit, went out to buy the maps - ONC 1: 1 million, very hard to find full coverage of the route - which hadn't been decided. Lay the maps out on the floor of the hangar, they went from one corner diagonally to the other. Initially we were going to use a LongRanger with extra tank, but some performance graphs of passing through the Middle East heat in April ruled that out. We bought an Agusta A109 and had a special tank made for it.
The Boss was still dithering about where the route would go, so I made up some lengths of string and pins and drew range circles and looked to see where we would need to refuel. Then the Boss said that entrants would need 700nm range - best we could do was 450nm. "No worries" he says, "We will organise intermediate stops for you."
Time passes by. No word about the route or stops. With plenty of time to spare, we tell him we want to fly the aircraft to London to pre-position, and use the reverse route to get a look at how things go. "No can do, we haven't decided on the route, and anyway the landing / overflight permissions are a once-off."

OK, we will pack it up and sea-freight it in a month or so. But still no details on the route, so we can't confirm that we can find fuel. All sailing dates go by, still no word, so the next thing is air freight, at a massive jump in cost.
Still no route details. Last air freight times approach, I ask The Boss about the extra fuel stops he was going to organise - oh dear, too late to do that. And one of the stops had to be in Iran and another in Pakistan, neither of which were being overflown by the planes. So, we had to pull out. Never mind, here's a cap and a jacket for your $15,000 and remember to pull out that special fuel tank.

Mumble mumble...

Whole Program 1976 Air Race
 

The original air race program was 66 pages including the covers.
I just scanned it in two halves intending to post it all here for the historical record.
BUT Mr Prune has a file limit of 2 mb and each half runs close to 10 Mb so that was a waste of effort unless somebody with some technical smarts can tell a techo simpleton like me how to get around the limit??

And Yes, Ascend Charlie, it was a really well organised air race effort.

But then we were an intelligent race back in 1976.
In November, that learned journal National Geographic published a 45 page article on GLOBAL COOLING.
However, back in 1976 and in this particular National Geographic article, most of the emphasis for concern was the apparent global cooling occurring in most parts of the world. A quote in the article from Dr. J. Murray Mitchell, Jr. of NOAA and member of the U.S National Science Board in 1974 gives the reason:
“During the past 20 or 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but sharply over the last decade.”
Then there is a string of quotes from a variety of other “experts” around the globe listing a range of “strange” climate trends being measured or experienced. Some of these showed warming, but most of the troublesome reports had to do with either cooling or more ice or advancing glaciers such as the Meares Glacier in Alaska that “nudges toward Prince William Sound at 100 feet a year.”


Off topiic? Nah, just had to add something controversial - would not be one of my posts otherwise would it? (Hey google it, its all true.)

Actually it is relevant. When we left Drugsville, your national capital en-route to Perth for the race, the rain was just starting.
It flooded so badly that the road to the airport became impassable and bodies from the Queanbeyan cemetary were washed down into Lake Burley Griffin.
Don't let anyone tell you the rains of the last few days were catastrophic, unprecedented, record breaking etc - just same old, same old land of flooding rains.

DCA then was just as "know all" stupid then as its name changed brethren are now.
When the Operational Control mob found out we were flying VFR in Western NSW we were instructed (not suggested, ordered) to go and land at Lake Menindie.
When asked was that a licensed aerodrome with NOTAMS the answer was NO and the instruction became proceed at once to Lake Menindie and if it appears, suitable, land there.
The airstrip was flooded so that, like most Department of Name Change instructions, got ignored and we landed beside the pub a bit closer to Broken Hill.
Next day we were getting close to Port Augusta when we were told that it was flooded and we were not to land there.
Whilst we were figuring out our next trick, we heard an aircraft report, Landed Port Augusta, cancel SAR.
Turns out it was the local commuter airliner (Navajo?) but we figured if it was good enough for him it was good enough for us in a Cherokee too.
Yes, we got our feet wet at the fuel pump but we got fuel and back on our way.
And at 1500 ft at Head of Bight the O-320- swallowed a valve head, sucked it up into the next cylinder and tried running on two pots.
Never have I been so shook up in all my life; the vibration was so great it was hard to see anything.
Mayday call relayed to Ceduna Flight Service by another fellow on his way west for the race and within minutes we were on the ground at Yalata Mission.
And the FS Officer had managed to get the party line trunk telephone system to work, contacted the Mission and ensured we were safe - he did a darn fine job for us.
Two days later we had two new cylinders on the aircraft test flew it, refuelled at the Nullabor Roadhouse and made Caiguna by last light.

I hope AOPA can organise a truly great air race, attract both sponsors and competitors and make something worthwhile happen.

1976 AIR RACE PROGRAM in five parts
 

Reduced resolution and rescanned ....