The Red Bull Air Race World Championship made a welcome return to San Diego in April 2017. Set on the Pacific coast of California the location provides the perfect backdrop for a race. San Diego last hosted a Red Bull Air Race back in 2009 when Nicolas Ivanoff won in the skies above the Pacific coast, and proved extremely popular with the fans that have often asked when the Air Race would return. The answer to that question is right here in 2017.
Besides the city skylines as major background it was great that we had the historical USS Midway to fulfill our photographic challenge.
ABOUT USS MIDWAY
USS Midway (CVB/CVA/CV-41) was an aircraft carrier of the United States Navy, the lead ship of her class. Commissioned a week after the end of World War II, Midway was the largest ship in the world until 1955, as well as the first U.S. aircraft carrier too big to transit the Panama Canal. A revolutionary hull design, based on the planned Montana-class battleship, gave her better maneuverability than previous carriers.
She operated for an unprecedented 47 years, during which time she saw action in the Vietnam War and served as the Persian Gulf flagship in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm. Decommissioned in 1992, she is now a museum ship at the USS Midway Museum, in San Diego, California, and the only remaining U.S. aircraft carrier commissioned right after World War II ended that was not an Essex-class aircraft carrier.
FELIX BAUMGARTNER, THE “SUPERSONIC MAN”
Felix Baumgartner, the “supersonic man” who became the first human to accelerate though the sound barrier in free fall, is in the skies again, right here in USA, but this time he’s flying a helicopter at the Red Bull Air Race World Championship stops for the third year in a row.
Baumgartner will be working to shuttle race officials, take exhibition wingsuit flyers to jump altitude, and enable photographers to get shots of the race planes in the heat of the action.