BALDWIN – Members of the Habersham County community gathered Friday at the Habersham County Airport Terminal in Baldwin to enjoy a cookout and aerobatic display.
Pilot Shaun Brautigan invited the community to the airport, where he grilled food for them before entertaining them by practicing his competition aerobatic routine overhead.
“Our sport is competition aerobatics, and we’re in a box 3,500 feet by 3,500 feet and we have to stay in that box,” Brautigan said. “The G force comes from pulling those maneuvers at such a high rate of speed in such a small amount of space.”
His competition aircraft is an EXTRA 330LX.
“It’s 300-plus horsepower,” Brautigan said. "It’s a Lycoming 580 monster engine, bulletproof and can do just about anything. The roll rate is just crazy sick when you see us roll. It flies the same upside down as right side up.”
The plane is more of a trainer and still a competition aircraft, Brautigan said. Rather than the SC, which is a single-seat version, the LX includes a front seat.
“You can’t see it,” Brautigan said. “I have a single-seat canopy to get a little extra bit of performance out of the plane.”
Friday’s high winds created good practice conditions for the aerobatic box over the Habersham County Airport.
“We got a real challenging day,” Brautigan said. “This would be a challenge for us in a competition that we’d run into. You have a huge crosswind component. You’ve got to stay in the box. It’s a penalty every time you get knocked out of the box. It’ll be a great practice.”
The routine being practiced is on a small, laminated card and contains all the maneuvers in that routine.
“This is our known sequence for 2020,” Brautigan said. “This is what I’m practicing for. This is what I’m going for to try to win. The next sequence will be my free sequence, which a group of us have teamed together to fly the same sequence. Then the last sequence is awesome. It’s called the unknown and you have 12 hours to study the card, memorize the card and fly it. You have to know and do these figures, because if you make up your own figure it’s a hard zero and you’re done.”
While Brautigan practices a lot over the Baldwin area, competitions are held across the country and even overseas.
“We have a good time,” Brautigan said. “We have four different levels: Primary, Sportsman, Intermediate, Advanced and Unlimited. I call Unlimited the sky gods because they’re at the top. It’s all really safe. We have really low incidences because of the safety that we go after. We do about 15 figures, which is in a known sequence, sometimes only 10 depending on the K factor on how hard they are. We compete across the nation, and then we have WAC, which is the World Aerobatic Championship, where we compete against the Germans, the French – everybody. We’ve been struggling to try to get gold. We’re going to try to get it this year hopefully.”
Brautigan’s first competition of the year is the Snowbird Classic at Marion County Airport in Dunnellon, Fla., on March 27.
Then it’s up to Jackson, Tenn., for the Tennessee Music Highway Aerobatic Jam at McKellar-Sipes Regional Airport on April 25.
That’s followed by the Southeast Regional Championship at Sebring Regional Airport in Sebring, Fla., on May 1.
Aerobatic pilots are a specialized group.
“It’s a pretty cool sport,” Brautigan said. “It challenges pilots. It’s a small group of us.”
Practice at the Habersham County Airport continues today, Feb. 29, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., weather permitting.
