"I can't even remember not wanting to fly," Holland said.
08.09.2010 | Professional air show pilot Rob Holland, stands in front of his plane, the Window World MX2, at Barnes Municipal Airport. Holland will be performing at the Westfield International Airshow August 21-22.WESTFIELD - Flying straight at the ground at over 200 mph is surprisingly peaceful. It’s almost meditative.
The Earth sits still, and your eyes soak up the newly unfamiliar landscape. The nearly invisible propeller adds a touch of soft-focus blur to the trees and roads below.
A stencil in the cockpit of Rob Holland’s aerobatic airplane, the Window World MX2, reads “Fly it like you STOLE it,” but the statement belies the care and precision with which Holland, a professional air show pilot and aerobatics champion, guided me through a series of maneuvers high above the Pioneer Valley this week.
“Everyone comes out expecting a roller coaster ride – and as you just saw, it’s nothing like a roller-coaster,” said Holland after the flight. He will be among the aerial performers on Aug. 21 and 22 at the 2010 Westfield International Air Show.
His obsession with aviation began in childhood, and Holland says he can’t even remember not wanting to fly. Two photos hang on his refrigerator at home: one, from the 1980s, shows Capt. Dale “Snort” Snodgrass, a now retired U.S. Navy pilot, flying an F-14 Tomcat in a canopy-to-canopy pass with aerobatics legend Jim Parker.
Holland watched the Snodgrass-Parker routine at the first air show he went to as a kid. “I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” he said. Soon, all of his model airplanes were hanging upside-down from the ceiling.
Photo courtesy of Rob Holland | Pilot Rob Holland, top, and Capt. Dale "Snort" Snodgrass, U.S.Navy (Ret.), perform during a recent show.The second photo shows Holland – now 36, and a world-renowned aerobatic pilot in his own right – flying with his hero, Snodgrass, in a canopy-to-canopy formation at an air show in Florida earlier this year.
“It’s like it’s come full circle,” Holland said of his career in aviation, which began when he earned his pilot’s license at age 18. He attended aviation school at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, N.H., and his early gigs included a stint as a flight instructor at Hampton Airport in North Hampton, N.H., and jobs towing banners and flying corporate aircraft.
But aerial maneuvers like Cuban 8’s, hammerheads and his favorite – tumbling – were never far from this mind.
“The whole time I was doing aerobatics whenever I could,” Holland said. He often flew with other aerobatic pilots, and, once he was confident enough, he began learning on his own.
“All the tumbling stuff, nobody can really teach you that. You have to figure it out yourself,” Holland said. “Just go up really high, make sure you hit the altitude, and think about it ahead of time; make sure you know all the ins and outs, and try it.”
Holland eventually started his own aerobatic flight school and found his way into the competitive aerobatics circuit.
Now, running his company – Rob Holland Ultimate Airshows – is a full-time job; he flies at an average of 24 shows each year.
While he cites a performance with the U.S. Navy’s flight exhibition team, the Blue Angels, at the Wings Over South Texas Airshow in May as one of his most memorable flights, Holland’s resume includes a number of highlights. He has been on U.S. Advanced Aerobatics team three times, and in 2008 he took the top spot at the Advanced World Aerobatic Championship in Pendleton, Oregon.
Robert Bismuth, president of the organization that hosted the world aerobatic championship event, says Holland is “at the top of his sport.” He describes him as “very level-headed and pragmatic.”
“As a pilot, he is a delight to watch,” Bismuth said when asked what sets Holland apart from other competitors. “Very precise, never confused and extremely well coordinated in terms of not just flying each figure in a sequence but also in maintaining the flow of figure after figure.”
08.09.2010 | WESTFIELD - Rob Holland, right, instructs Greg Saulmon on the use of an air sickness bag. The championship consists of a series of flights, including a qualifying flight and a “free” flight, which is a routine of the pilot’s own design. There are also two flights called “unknowns,” requiring pilots to fly a sequence they’ve never practiced, and that they’ve only seen on paper the day before they take to the skies, Bismuth said. Those are challenging for even the most proficient pilots, he noted.
Holland’s combined scores for the four flights topped a field of 34 pilots from over a dozen countries.
“Rob is an outstanding person and one of the best – if not the best – pilots in the world,” Bismuth said.
Being among the best, though, can mean different things, as the competitive judging standards that Holland compares to figure skating are a far cry from the judging standards of an air show audience looking for a “wow” factor.
Top air show pilots operate with a “zero altitude” waiver that allows them to perform “right down to the ground,” Bismuth explained.
“This adds the other attraction of motor sports for the crowd: the thrill of the ‘near death’ flight – i.e., the apparent risk the pilot is taking,” Bismuth said. “That never happens in competition flying, where pilots are always flying with sufficient ground clearance to give them some safety margin in case of problems.”
In either context, though, Holland doesn’t see himself as a “stunt” pilot. “A stunt is doing something where you’re not quite sure what the results will be,” he said.
His audiences might see him as a daredevil, but in some sense that’s part of the act.
“With aerobatics I almost like the discipline of it more than the actual thrill-seeking of it,” Holland said. “Trying to make everything as precise as possible, as safe as possible. Just the art of trying to make it exciting for the crowd to watch.”
As Holland swung the MX2 out to Runway 15 at Barnes Municipal Airport in preparation to take off for our flight, a red-tailed hawk rode a thermal overhead. Watching the bird – its own marvel of engineering – it was easy to imagine the questions that must have captivated the pioneers of aviation.
After solving those initial riddles of flight, trading bones and feathers for propellers and ailerons and gauges, pilots began exploring just what these new machines could do.
A man stares at a bird and makes a plane. A boy stares at a plane, flying upside down, and makes a career.
“You ready?” Holland asked.
I couldn’t be sure, but I said, “Let’s do it.”
Soon the MX2 was hugging the ground just 7 feet above the runway. A few hundred yards later, when Holland pitched the plane into a sudden, steep climb, my stomach reached for my feet.
In an instant the hawk disappeared, and the planes at the airport seemed smaller than sparrows.
With Mount Tom a shadow in distant haze, Holland brought the nose of his aircraft about 20 degrees above the horizon and sent us through a gentle roll, followed by one that approached the aircraft’s maximum rotation of about 400 degrees per second. Then, turning the plane belly-up, Holland held a steady line while we hung from the cockpit harnesses.
We were flying somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 feet off the ground, looking up to look down. At an air show, Holland performs some of his maneuvers as low as 5 feet.
“There’s a hard surface there you’ve gotta watch out for,” he said after the flight. “You’ve gotta make sure everything works 100 percent of the time.”