Seat of Our Pants

Once upon a time my Dad raced airplanes. Yes, you read the right. There is such things as racing airplanes. For those of you who haven’t been to a race, it’s sort of like NASCAR – a fast race ran around a track. But that’s where the similarities end. The machines racing are airplanes, so the race obviously takes place in the air. A second and more important difference is speed. Air racing is the fastest competitive racing out there, with speeds topping 500 mph.

Before his ‘moss’ (his affectionate name for his children) came along, my Dad was into racing aircraft. Really into racing them. But not just any aircraft – only highly modified WWII planes would do. By chopping off a good chunk of wing, adding a bunch of horsepower and fabricating a canopy just about the size of his head, he created a number of devilishly fast, winning aircraft. In fact, the planes he modified were so cool one of them sits proudly in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

Martin and I dropped by the Smithsonian when we were in DC a few months ago to check it out. We brought along my friend Danette and her cute-as-a-button son Blake. Following a potentially awkward misunderstanding about just who was showing up that day (it was just plain ol’ me and not my Dad, as the curator was lead to believe), we toured the exhibits with a real sense of awe. There are some seriously cool planes there. Does the Spirit of St. Louis, Enola Gay, the Concord and the Wright Flyer ring a bell? Yeah, they’re all there. All packed into a huge, beautiful building and all sharing a place on the floor with my Dad’s race plane. How seriously cool.

Check out the little video we shot that day below.