Name: Flying A Plane With Fireworks On The Wings
Uploaded: 2020-04-01T01:11:00.000Z
Duration: 6 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I got an email from an aerobatics team that said,

"Hi, we attach pyrotechnics to our planes

"so we can produce a fireworks show in mid-flight.

- My inspiration for Aerosparx came from seeing New Years Eve on television,

in Edinburgh, where underneath the castle they had a waterfall of light.

I always imagined that being somehow trailing off behind the wing of an aeroplane.

- Aerosparx, as a display team, we are lucky enough and privileged enough

We've been to China, Saudi Arabia, Portugal,

lots of locations in Europe, and obviously locations in the UK.

And we can display from up to 300,000 people, to a million people.

It is nearly dark enough and our planes are nearly in position.

Just to be clear, this is a practice run.

When it's a display, there is a lot more going on in the cockpit,

and they are very much not allowed to take passengers.

But, um, yeah. Let's see what this is like.

- One of the big wows is flying in extremely close formation.

We're helped by the wings being extremely long,

so your peripheral vision is just full of aeroplane.

but I know that he's probably only three metres from my aircraft,

- You'll see us firing lots of different kinds of fireworks, pyro, from the aeroplanes.

They all need preparation and that can take some hours.

So all of the igniters, eMatches, need inserting into the fireworks.

We need to work out what we're going to put on the aeroplane where,

and then the process of actually fitting the aeroplane, again,

We genuinely can't shimmy down the wing and light the blue to uch paper.

All commercial firework displays are ignited the same way.

They're all ignited with a control box lighting an eMatch or an igniter.

And that goes into the blue touch paper, effectively.

We started out by having a bank of switches.

But when you're under high workload in formation flying,

We can fire 24 separate fireworks in our display.

So we've actually had a bespoke computer system designed,

and not only does it fire our fireworks for us, but it also

controls the LED light system on the aeroplanes  as well.

And that means I now have only one button.

So once I've pressed it once, it then auto-sequences onto the next part of the programmes.

My imagination, I've found over the years,

has always been a leapfrog ahead of the authorities' regulation.

Not trying to stop what we're doing, but trying to understand what we're doing,

and finding out where it fits into regulations that were written, quite genuinely,

So at the moment we're dealing with aviation regulation and firework regulation.

- So the question is, how can they do this?

My job is to lead the formation, lead the display.

- Rob is working very hard in the climb out,

working out exactly where to start the display,

to keep it in the right place with the wind conditions.

to fly safely and as close as I can without hitting him.

and that planning starts on the ground before we even get airborne.

We do a bumblebee dance, as we call it, so we go around in circles,

in our mind and physically mimicking the manoeuvres that we're then going to do in the sky.

And that then sets a cadence and a rhythm, and the physical memory of what you're doing,

so that when we start a display, we're on the same page and working as a team.

On the radio, we're confirming all the time what we're going to do before we do it.

- Our choice of using a Grob 109 motorglider was for lots of reasons.

One of my original imaginations of this firework display

was to separate the fireworks as far as we could, and we needed a big wingspan for that.

Because it's a glider, it also has the efficiency of a glider.

Which means that we can perform aerobatics with a very small engine, and it gives us grace.

The disadvantage with a motorglider is a very small engine.

That means we take a long time to climb to altitude,

we try and conserve all the energy we have.

We describe our as play as painting with light.

We like to think that the focus is more on the image we're painting with the aeroplanes,

rather than the distinct manoeuvres we're doing separately.

when you're flying next to fireworks, it's even better.

And I still pinch myself every time I even think about going flying with fireworks,