The Red Bull Air Races are a flying competition held in ten different cities around the world.
The 13 different pilots fly single-seat lightweight propeller aircraft around a predefined course marked by inflatable pylons.
That's the San Diego Convention Center in the background.
The competition is held in a knock-out format, where two pilots are paired up and only the faster one advances to the next round.
The pilots fly between inflatable pylons. For red pylons the wings have to be vertical, for blue, horizontal.
Hitting a pylon has no effect on the plane, but will incur a time penalty.
The whole course runs over San Diego Bay.
The other cities hosting races include Abu Dhabi, UAE; Rio di Janero, Brazil; Monument Valley AZ, Istanbul Turkey; and Interlaken Switzerland.
Races were also held in London, Budapest, and Porto Portugal. The final race will be in Perth, Australia on Nov 4th.
These pylons serve as the starting gate and finish gate.
Flying over the Midway aircraft carrier, which is now a permanent museum in San Diego.
This is what happens when a plane hits a pylon. The crews can replace a pylon in under three minutes.
All of the planes start with a fly-by of the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, docked on Coronado Island.
The day started out overcast and a little rainy, but cleared up quite nicely.
For the "Quadro" gate, shown here, the planes fly through in one direction, then circle around and fly through the other side.
We had a great view of the races and the city skyline from the beach over on Coronado.
You can see the blue gates off to the right.
We spend the day with our friends Kandice and Mike.
The helicopter was there filming all the action. They will be showing the race on Fox Sports on November 11th.
Here are the crowds over on the "paid" side. I think we had a better view and it didn't cost us $25 bucks!
Mike pretending to be a dad.
Smile!
Look!
The had some skydivers to entertain the crowd between rounds of racing.
They also had a stunt helicopter that could fly complete upside down loops.
Really, no photoshop!
The obligatory picture of me to prove I was there.
A little advertising to take advantage of thousands of people looking up.
The US Navy also gave us a little flyby.
These planes are part of the adversary squadron from Top Gun.
