Longtime airshow fans remember the legendary Eagles Aerobatic Team led by aviation icons Charlie Hillard, Tom Poberezny, and Gene Soucy, who flew together for more than two decades before making their final Cleveland appearance in 1995. Thirty-one years later, the NextGen Eagles have stepped into those iconic cockpits, flying the unmistakable, feather-feathered rainbow liveries of the Christen Eagle II. Originally engineered by Frank Christensen in the late 1970s as a high-pe

With its razor-thin forward canard wing and rear-mounted pusher propeller, Fowler’s bright yellow 1986 Rutan Long-EZ resembles a futuristic spacecraft far more than a typical show plane. Even sitting motionless on the tarmac, the machine tells a story. Before he straps into the cockpit, Fowler has to physically lift the craft from its nose, manhandling the front end into position just to manually extend the forward landing gear. The reason is pure center-of-gravity physics: w

Stepping into a hangar along the flight line at Burke Lakefront Airport is always like walking into an active laboratory of aviation history, but every once in a while, timing delivers something truly poetic. Just a moment before our crew walked through the hangar doors to catch up with seasoned airshow pilot Susan Dacy, an original, stock World War II primary trainer taxied in and parked directly across from her iconic aircraft, "Big Red". In an instant, the open bay became

If you think the loudest, fastest machines at the Cleveland National Air Show only belong in the sky, you haven’t stood near the tarmac when Hayden Proffitt fires up his jet-powered beast. Long before the aircraft overhead begin their passes, a wall of heat, raw kerosene smoke, and earth-shaking thunder rolls across Burke Lakefront Airport from ground level. Strapped inside the cockpit of his flame-throwing jet truck, Proffitt commands an absurd amount of thrust designed to p

Watching the Blue Angels execute a crisp break over Lake Erie is breathtaking, but from a medical standpoint, what is happening inside the cockpit is an absolute physiological battle against physics. When these pilots bank into high-performance maneuvers, they pull up to 7.5 positive Gs (+Gz). In practical terms, that means a 180-pound aviator instantaneously feels an effective downward load of 1,350 pounds crushing them into their seat. At that magnitude, the body’s normal c

If you’ve spent any time near downtown Cleveland this weekend, you haven’t just heard the U.S. Navy Blue Angels, you’ve felt them rattling your chest. That deep, thundering roar vibrating off the lakefront and echoing between the downtown skyscrapers is the unmistakable soundtrack to Labor Day weekend on the North Coast. Over the next three days, hundreds of thousands of spectators will line the shores of Lake Erie and pack Burke Lakefront Airport with their eyes locked firml