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The Nesterov Cup

The Nesterov Cup awaits the team whose pilots tumble with the highest degree of precision across a small piece of sky.

Text and Photographs by Larry Lowe.

As his monoplane falls out of the sky like some monstrous blue maple seed, Peter Anderson sees a row of trees swirl past his windshield. He lays the stick forward and the resulting jolt slams him against a rigid web of seat belts and harnesses. Precisely one and a half revolutions completed, the snap roll stops. Anderson continues an inverted 45 degree dive, the airplane upside down, raging toward the ground. Directly off the left wing, a tiny row of judges hang from a grassy ceiling. Anderson steals a glance at the small card in the middle of the instrument panel, taking an instant to confirm his next move.

As the airspeed indicator winds past 200 mph, Anderson pushes hard on the stick and is brutally flung around the outside of a diving arc. Straps cut into his thighs and blood rushes to his head as the airplane claws through part of an outside loop until it points straight up into the cloudless sky. Airspeed decreases rapidly. Split-second timing is needed to pick the right speed for a clean vertical snap.

Now! With brutal finesse, Anderson snaps the stick back and pops the airplane into a violent spin going straight up. Relying on a sense of timing gleaned from hours of practice, he looks at the spinning horizon of the wingtip, waits a beat, reverses his controls and then returns them to neutral. The blue monoplane he is flying concludes the snap roll dead on the 360 degree mark and continues upward, coasting on what's left of the energy gathered in the dive.

The view from Clint McHenry's Extra 300 during a vertical roll.

Six hundred feet directly behind Anderson lies a neat grass airfield displaying a row of 19 flags. Each represents one of the nations participating in the 1990 World Aerobatic Championships, held at an 800-year-old Swiss village named Yverdon-les-Bains. Seventy-nine pilots have come to Yverdon to compete for the Nesterov Cup, the crowning honor of aerobatic flying. In the row nearest the runway, the French team's elegant, sinewy CAP 231s hold the pole position. Behind them wait the Soviets' mighty Sukhoi Su-26s, a glowering quartet on aeronautical steroids. In the back row sits a menagerie belonging to the U.S. team: three Pitts S1-S Specials, two single-place Extra 230s, a two-place Extra 300, a CAP 231, and a Laser, as well as the unique biplane Snargasher and the very unique monoplane Ratsrepus.

Anderson, a 38-year-old from Fowler, California, is participating in his first world championship. He's alternate member of the U.S. team, filling in for a pilot who could not make the meet, but he's flying with the combined skills of Chuck Yeager, Boris Kasparov, and Olga Korbut. The urge to cheer grows as each new pattern evolves, but except for a few other pilots gathered at this lovely little airfield, there is nobody to applaud. All day long, Anderson and a host of others have been performing feats at the pinnacle of piloting, and no one is watching .

Who are these guys?

Team Hungary arrives at the opening ceremony to compete in the 1990 World Aerobatic Championships.

It's a mistake to equate the intense, disciplined competition aerobatic pilots with thrill generating airshow performers or a few lazy summer afternoon loops and rolls performed in an antique biplane. The pilots who fly competition aerobatics form a dogged group that steadily expands the limits of man's ability to design, build, and fly fixed-wing aircraft. The arcane culture that has developed around the sport consists mainly of its own pilots. At the exact center are a few good enough to compete effectively at the world championship, maybe two dozen or so of the pilots who have come to Yverdon.

What makes the sport substantially more difficult than merely flying precision figures is the invisible cube of sky that is known simply as the Box, within which the competition pilot must confine all of his activities or lose points. Flying at high speeds momentarily approaching 300 mph, it takes a pilot approximately 10 seconds to cross the 1,000-meter square box in any direction. On the ground white lines mark the edges of the Box, and a white cross its exact center. The bottom of the Box is 100 meters--330 feet--from the ground.

Aerobatic pilots form an international group, and for years this competition, held every two years, has served to facilitate cultural exchange. European pilots especially have developed a wide interest and expertise in this most intricate game. Meanwhile, a design war is being waged by France's Avions Mudry, the Soviet Sukhoi Design Bureau, and Germany's Walter Extra to who can create the airplane best suited to the sport. (Why no one has sent Burt Rutan a set of rules, a check, and a mandate to return the United States to aerobatic design supremacy remains a mystery.)

The 1990 World Aerobatic Championships theme sculpture dominates the flight line at Yverdon.

The competition is quite reminiscent of the Olympics, complete with the traditional rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. As usual it's a David and Goliath confrontation. The Soviet government maintains a program in aerobatics, but the U.S. team depends on Sporty's Pilot Shop in Batavia, Ohio, and a handful of other sponsors to help pay the bills. To get to Yverdon, the U.S. pilots have had to reach into their own pockets.

Regardless of nationality, competition aerobatic pilots have a common language in the Aresti System, an international visual notation that provides the framework for competition. Named after its creator, Spain's Jose de Luis Aresti, this system imposes an invisible lattice of lines and angles against the fluid nature of the air. The Aresti symbol for a one-and-a-half-turn inverted spin with an upright entry is as recognizable to a Hungarian pilot as it is to his Dutch counterpart.

Each pilot assembles a flight sequence from the set of figure elements in the Aresti manual. Three Flights--Known, Freestyle, and Unknown--make up the contest for the Nesterov Cup. The trophy awaits the team whose pilots tumble with the highest degree of precision across a small piece of the sky.

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