For over a decade now Rich Goodwin has been making a mockery of gravity and its laws with his special, heavily modified 'muscle Pitts'. A Pitts is a fearsome aerobatic bi plane, usually fitted with 300+ hp and capable of the most outrageous maneuvers. It's the equivalent of a super car for the sky.
No one in their right mind has ever thought of a Pitts as being slow and underpowered; well almost no-one. Rich created his first Muscle Pitts having found the original lacking.
A couple of years ago, unbelievably, he decided even that wasn't enough. So how do you make the already ludicrous even more so? Add a couple of jets, apparently.
So that's what Rich did. It's a Muscle Pitts with even more horsepower and then a pair of jet engines strapped on the sides for good measure.
The result of all this took Airshow Sunday 2023 by storm. It's basically capable of 'hovering' whilst pointing straight up. This is achieved by having what's known as a 1:1 power to weight ratio. So the laws of physics as they occur to aircraft are suddenly erased as Rich just sits there, looking straight up, usually in a huge thing of [deliberate] smoke.
It's lunacy, some might say, but just really really well built and thought through by a man whose day job is flying airliners (the correct way up).
So the coup for us this year is two fold; not only is he coming back for more but he'll be with us both days, despite having many other offers.