[Urbane Guerrilla]

A good aerobatics display brings tears to my eyes. I'm one of those spectators that gets the "airshow grin." You've seen it -- this huge, sloppy, slightly misty-eyed grin that is nearly constant.

And of course, when the old warbirds come by, my eyes go up because first I'm hearing that round-motor sound -- the fast, bluggablugga roar of the radial engine. Then for variety, the smooth, crackling drone of a V-12 aero engine like the P-51's Packard Merlin or something Allison-engined. Various props sound different too -- a T-6 has a snarl all its own (along with the roundmotor note) from its twobladed, geared propeller, and a T-28 has this portentious, I'm-a-big-deal thunder from its larger radial engine, and no snarl.

When they start these things up, you discover those high-compression piston aero engines really do go through all those histrionics: the cough-sput-wheeze chug ROAR crackle vrrrRRRMMMMcrackleRRRRM goings-on of the inline engine, or the Harleyish bass-toned sput-wheeze-chug bluggetta bluggetta blugga cough ROARclatter of a radial firing up. Radials always, always, shoot puffs of smoke on their first couple of turns because their bottom cylinders always accumulate a little oil. This is why they pull the prop through a couple of revolutions before ever hitting Start -- if they don't the oil in the cylinder will hydraulically bind up the piston and bend the connecting rod or even the crankshaft, I'd imagine. Even at their tightest, radials use oil and they carry around rather a lot of it, and they clear out the remnant oil in the bottom cylinders by burning it. Jets -- their oil capacity is like a sedan's.

Then there's the smell of the thing if you're downwind, or down-wash: burnt 100/130 octane doesn't smell like an automobile's exhaust. It's a race car odor, like gunpowder and kerosene together.

The only thing louder than an F-4 Phantom jet going overhead is an F-104 going by in afterburner, really giving the taxpayers a show for their money. Which is not like an F-18 from the Blue Angels is exactly quiet in a high speed pass either!