Sixteen acts.
What to look for
in each one.

Watch for

• Find the aircraft first. A slow, high, straight-and-level pass into wind. You will see specks before you see canopies.
• The stack. Once open they descend in a stepped column, each jumper holding vertical separation. That is formation flying under fabric.
• The flag jumper lands last, into wind, on the centre point, with a deliberate flare a metre off the deck.

Look under the nose

Canadian Hornets carry a fake cockpit canopy painted on the underside of the forward fuselage. In a close-in turning fight an opponent gets half a second of confusion about which way up the aircraft is — and in a dogfight half a second is a great deal. It is an RCAF signature and one of the last genuinely clever low-tech ideas still flying on a modern fighter. Look for it on any topside or knife-edge pass.

Watch for

Listen through a wingover: as the pilot pulls, the prop unloads and the rasp softens, then bites back on the way down. Two aircraft means formation work — watch how tight they hold, on aeroplanes with no formation aids whatsoever.

Watch the nacelles, not the aircraft

The transition is the single most distinctive manoeuvre you will see today. As the nacelles rotate from vertical to horizontal the machine changes what it fundamentally is, mid-air, and the sound goes with it — from a heavy chopping beat to a smooth turboprop drone. On a straight pass, look for a partial tilt in the turn.

Watch for

• The composite airframe. No rivets, no panel lines, continuous compound curves. Next to the Harvard it looks like a different species, because it is — carbon fibre instead of aluminium over a frame.
• The DA62’s engines. Two diesels burning Jet-A, not avgas. Roughly forty percent less fuel per hour than a comparable piston twin, and it runs on the fuel that is available everywhere in the world.
• The wings. Very long, very slender, very high aspect ratio — Diamond’s design DNA comes from motor gliders, and it shows in how the aircraft float.

Watch for what is missing

On the KC-135, the boom operator lies face-down in the tail, looking through a window, flying a rigid telescoping tube into a receptacle using small control surfaces near its tip. It is the last job in the US Air Force performed prone.

On the KC-46, there is no window. The operator sits up front behind the cockpit and flies the boom on screens fed by stereoscopic cameras. That Remote Vision System has been the programme’s defining defect: in certain sun angles the depth perception degrades enough that operators have scraped receiving aircraft. It has been a category-one deficiency for years.

The Bo 105 is the one to watch

Most helicopters cannot do aerobatics. The Bo 105 can, because it was the first light twin with a hingeless, rigid main rotor — the blades flex rather than pivoting on hinges, so the rotor keeps producing usable control even at low or negative g. It can loop and roll. If you see a helicopter go inverted today, that is why, and it is genuinely rare.

Watch for the sting in the tail

That long thin boom projecting aft from the tail is a magnetic anomaly detector. It is mounted that far out to get the sensor away from the aircraft’s own metal and electrical noise. When an Aurora is genuinely hunting a submarine it flies low and slow with that boom trailing behind it.

Telling them apart

Spitfire: elliptical wing, curves everywhere, all-metal stressed skin. Hurricane: thicker, squarer wing, a taller and more upright stance, and a rear fuselage that is fabric over a steel tube frame — which is exactly why groundcrew could patch one overnight and put it back in the air. Both run a Merlin, so they sound like brothers. The airframes are how you call it.

Watch for

• The roll rate. Over 400 degrees a second means more than a full rotation per second. Fighter jets do not come close.
• Tumbling manoeuvres. Look for the Lomcevák and the knife-edge spin — the aircraft departs controlled flight deliberately, tumbles end over end, and is recovered. On any other aircraft here that would be an emergency.
• Hanging on the prop. With near 1:1 power-to-weight it can hover on thrust alone, nose vertical, going nowhere.

Today is a vapour day — here is the physics

The white clouds that form over the wings in a hard turn are not smoke and not the sound barrier. Air accelerating over the leading-edge extensions — the strakes running from the wing root up alongside the cockpit — spins into two tight vortices. Pressure inside a vortex core drops, temperature drops with it, and the water already in the air condenses. In post-rain humidity, expect the Rhino to drag visible vortex ropes off both sides on every pull. This is one of the best weather days of the year for it.

Watch for the Fenestron

Instead of an exposed tail rotor, the Dolphin has a shrouded multi-blade fan buried inside the vertical fin. It is quieter, more efficient in the hover, and — the reason the Coast Guard cares — dramatically safer for deck crews working around a running helicopter on a pitching cutter at night. It also gives the aircraft a distinct voice: a higher, smoother whine rather than the classic tail-rotor slap.

The person on the wire

The demo’s real subject is not the helicopter, it is the rescue swimmer. Note that the hoist operator, not the pilot, effectively conns the aircraft during a pickup — the pilot cannot see the person below and flies to the operator’s voice. That relationship is the whole demonstration.

Watch for

• Counter-rotating propellers. The engines turn opposite ways, cancelling torque and the asymmetric pull that makes single-engine fighters swing. It is why the P-38 was unusually easy to aim.
• All guns in the nose. Wing guns must be harmonised to converge at one chosen distance; nose guns fire in a parallel stream at any range. Pilots described it as using a hose rather than throwing a bucket.
• The booms. Not styling — they carry the turbochargers and radiators, which is what leaves the nose free to be filled with guns.

The manoeuvres, and what they prove

• The high-alpha pass. Nose absurdly high, mushing along slowly, clearly not stalling. Any other fighter here would depart controlled flight. The nozzles are holding the nose up.
• The tail slide. Pitch vertical, let airspeed bleed to zero, slide backwards, recover. Aerodynamic controls do nothing at zero airspeed; vectored thrust does not need airflow.
• The J-turn. Watch the flight path against where the nose points. They stop agreeing. That decoupling is the entire idea.

Why this is harder than it looks

The two aircraft have almost no overlapping speed range. The P-38 cruises around 320 km/h; the F-22 does not want to fly there at all. The Raptor holds the formation dirty and slow — high angle of attack, sometimes gear or flaps out, burning fuel at an absurd rate — while the warbird sits at the top of its cruise. It is a formation held together by the fast jet doing all the compromising.