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Adam Lather, pilot Mike Mundell, Don Leipply, Rick Mundell, and Doug Keck remove the wings.
AKRON -- Mike Mundell’s tiny orange-and-white airplane can rip across the sky at 250 mph.
It’s traveling much slower as you read this, packed onto a cargo ship bound for Tunisia, where Mundell soon will compete in the first of two overseas air races.
Mundell has never been to Tunisia, and he won’t have time to gawk at the blue Mediterranean as he and his fellow pilots race, eight at a time, in a tight oval just 50 feet above the North African coast.
At that altitude, in an airplane that covers more than the length of a football field every second, an errant twitch, a mechanical failure or a lapse in concentration could mean disaster.
For 10 laps. Mundell will have to trust his fellow pilots in the buzzing constellation, keep a tight grip on the controls and stay focused on the flight.
If something scary happens, he’ll have time to think about it after he lands.
THE FAST LIFE
Mundell, 50, lives in Green. He’s a certified flight instructor with 2,300 hours in his logbook, and works as a quality assurance manager for a snack-food company. He is married and a father.
He started racing airplanes in the Formula 1 class two years ago.
Mundell’s base is a small hangar at Akron Fulton International Airport that he jokingly calls his “second home.”
Earlier this month, Mundell, his crew chief and family disassembled his plane — No. 33, “Second Wind” — for its journey to Tunisia, where Mundell will be one of 18 pilots from Europe and North America to compete June 8 in the first leg of the Air Race 1 World Cup in the coastal city of Monastir.
Three weeks later, Mundell will hop the Mediterranean for the competition’s second leg in Lleida, Spain.
Air racing conjures images of dashing aviators in leather jackets and silk scarves. Mundell favors a polo shirt and baseball cap.
He doesn’t come across as a daredevil — he warns visitors not to stand beneath his hangar’s raised door because ... you never know — but he has been going fast since childhood.
He grew up in Akron and Warren, the second oldest of Rick and Kay Mundell’s five children.
Speed was a family hobby. First go-carts, then a 1964 MG Midget that Rick Mundell fixed up for autocross competitions in which drivers compete for the best time on a course that requires precision rather than power and speed.
Because autocross drivers raced one at a time, Mike and his older brother, Jeff, used the same car. So did Rick and Kay.
Jeff Mundell, 51, of Niles, stayed with auto racing. He ran his first stock car in 1986 and raced at tracks in Pennsylvania, Barberton and Canton. About three years ago, he switched from racing on asphalt to dirt tracks, where he drives his No. 11 car in the economy modified class.
The brothers have a friendly rivalry.
“It’s easy to beat him,” Mike said.
“But I got the first trophy,” Jeff shot back.
THE GOLDEN AGE
Asked why he likes to race airplanes, Mike said: “I don’t know. I think it’s the nostalgia for the ’20s and all that.”
It was never something he planned to do, he added.
Jeff doesn’t buy it: “When we were kids, he always talked about racing at the Reno Air Show.”
The Reno National Championship Air Races have drawn pilots and spectators to the Nevada desert since 1964, but the sport of air racing is decades older.
The first contest was held in 1909 in Reims, France. Competition increased during the sport’s Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s. Pilots and engineers pushed airplanes to the limits of speed and endurance, often beating the performance of the era’s military aircraft.
Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami hosted races, but Cleveland “was the Mecca of air racing,” said Tim Weinschenker, president of the Society of Air Racing Historians.
In 1929, the first National Air Races held in Cleveland drew 100,000 spectators on the first day and drew three times that number to the opening parade.
Racing stalled during World War II, but returned after the conflict. Surplus fighter planes gave pilots even more speed. But one group of postwar flyers, with Goodyear’s sponsorship, started what became the Formula 1 class of air racing in 1947.
“They wanted to have a class of racers that would be home-built and more affordable to people to build and race,” Weinschenker said.
Pilots had to use the same engine and there were limits on an airplane’s size and weight.
The Formula 1 class still competes in North America and Europe.
EXTREMELY SIMPLE
Air racing’s danger was its downfall in Cleveland. Pilots had always faced death — six perished in connection with the 1929 races — but the annual event ended in 1949 when a plane crashed into a home in Berea, killing a woman and her baby, according the Cleveland National Air Show’s website.
The Reno air races carry on Cleveland’s tradition. Mike Mundell has raced there twice, and was rookie of the year in 2013. He flies a stripped-down sport plane called a Cassutt IIIM.
“It’s extremely simple,” said Doug Keck, Mundell’s crew chief. “It’s as close to a remote-controlled airplane as you can get and still have a pilot in it.”
Keck, the owner of Keck Aviation in Barberton, was working on another plane at the airport when he saw the Cassutt in Mundell’s hanger and begged to work on it.
The airplane is built from a steel-tube frame, wood, fiberglass and fabric. It has a 100-horsepower engine, but it’s nimble and fast. “Second Wind” can hit 250 mph, although race speeds are closer to 220 mph.
Some Formula 1 pilots build their own airplanes. Mundell bought his first Cassutt in 2013. He was used to flying Cessnas, and wanted to buy a small sport plane that could do aerobatics or cruising to a pancake breakfast.
“It’s not a pancake-breakfast plane, though,” Mundell said. The Cassutt wanted to go fast.
He signed up for the racing school in Reno, but before he got there, a storm collapsed the hangar he was using at the Portage County Airport and crushed his new plane. So Mundell bought a second Cassutt, naming it “Second Wind.”
INTERNATIONAL FIRST
Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and HYFAST Aeronautics in Parma sponsor Mundell’s team, and he is looking for other backers.
The Air Race 1 World Cup, billed as the first international series for the Formula 1 class, is sanctioned by the American, British and French Formula 1 racing associations. The three-race series concludes at Reno in September.
Unlike the Red Bull Air Race World Championship, in which pilots compete one at a time, the Air Race 1 events feature eight pilots simultaneously flying 10 laps around an 5-kilometer oval course. The planes launch from a standing start on the runway, then dash for the first pylon.
As hectic as the race sounds, the adrenaline starts rushing when the planes are still warming up on the runway; Mundell said waiting for a race to start is the longest five minutes of his life.
“I’m just watching the little flag,” he said. “Then the flag drops.”
Original article can be found here: http://www.thesuburbanite.com
Pilot Mike Mundell removes screws before removing the both wings in one piece.
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