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Danny, Alan Sr, and Alan Jr Szabo
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Alan beating on the Raptor 90
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Alan demonstrated this little Piccolo
was no slouch! In light winds he was doing sustained piroflips with it.
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Danny beating on his Raptor 90
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Andrew (left) with 'The Man from
Beirut' instructor. If you look closely you can see the insanity building
in their eyes.
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Me at work with the M16 having a
free and frank exchange of views with Osama Bin Laden. Osama was hurting
after the M16, but he was DONE after I introduced him to the AK 47. The
Man from Beirut commended me on my handling of the AK 47.
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Travelling to LA in the Grand Caravan.
View from the reclined back seat.
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Venice Beach, Los Angeles
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Words fail me with this guy. I don't
know what his deal was. He was nearly all naked with some plastic snakes
draped around him. He'd stand on one leg on an upside down bucket and
look crazy. We fed him popcorn.
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American Adventure - Page Two
THE SZABOS
Don is also right into helicopters, and both he and I were very keen to go out
to the local field to meet the Szabos and see them in action. We had planned
to do this on Sunday, after a meeting we had in the morning. However Don was
called to go to an afternoon meeting as well, so he missed out on coming to
the field with me.
After a 20 min taxi ride out into the suburbs, I arrived to meet Alan Sr, Alan
Jr, and Danny Szabo.
The Las Vegas field is a very nice one, sealed run way, covered pit area and
plenty of parking. However, over the other side of the run way is thick, dense
scrub. Danny commented that if your plane went down in that, you pretty much
had to forget about it and move on.
Both Alan Jr and Danny spent a lot of time with me going over their machines
and answering questions. Both fly very basic, stock machines with little in
the way of upgrades or enhancements. The radio setups are also quite basic in
their Airtronics Stylus radios.
Alan started up his Raptor 90 SE for a demo flight for me. Having tried to
photograph Curtis when he was in New Zealand a few years ago, I'd learned some
lessons, and had come equipped with Don's bad ass Canon 10D camera that is sooo
much better for taking pics of helicopters than the compact cameras.
Just as with Curtis, standing so close to the action when the helicopter is
flying is something else, even more so with Alan Jr who tends to fly closer.
Alan's terminal velocity tail slides right till the last nano-second are something
to be seen as well as his supreme orientation and cat like reflexes.
This was clearly displayed during a demonstration of Alan's world renowned piroflipping
technique, very fast and aggressive piroflips under complete control which was
superbly illustrated when he executed a clearly defined piroflipping loop.
Anyone who feels that Raptors are a sub-standard product has obviously not seen
Alan in action as this one was very impressive. The ferocity and crispness of
the machine under Alan's control was remarkable.
What really impressed me was the hospitality and down-to-earth nature of the
Szabos. I had extensive discussions with Danny on the helicopter scene in the
states, Raptors, the bullshit that goes on in the forums and the future of F3C
and 3D among other things.
Danny then sparked up his Raptor and showed me some of his moves which were
more than a little impressive! You can see from the pictures that Danny can
more than hold his own!
The whole Las Vegas club field had a very relaxed feel to it, planks coexisted
with the helicopters and everyone got on very well.
Alan Sr and Danny were kind enough to give me a ride back to the Hilton. On
the way back I was telling them how I was surprised I hadn't seen a Humvee at
all. Given we were in Vegas, I was expecting to see these things all over the
place. As we pulled into the Hilton, we pulled up along side the longest, stretched
Hummer you have ever seen! As always, once we saw one, pretty soon they were
everywhere.
THE STAR TREK EXPERIENCE
All the hotels in Las Vegas have some kind of attraction in them, the Hilton
has the Star Trek Experience. This is where they have built two virtual reality
experiences into a section of the hotel.
One of these rides is the Klingon experience. This is where you suddenly get
transported onto the flight deck of the USS Enterprise which pretty soon comes
under attack from a marauding Klingon ship. The ride develops then to an evacuation
exercise from the Enterprise back down to the Las Vegas strip in one of the
mini space ships, which is really a flight simulator you sit inside. Ofcourse
it's not that simple cause you're being chased by Klingons up and down the Strip
until you end up back at the Hilton.
The other ride is the Borg experience which is a 4D ride where you get kidnapped
by the Borg who try to assimilate you while the USS Voyager tries to rescue
you.
Both rides are highly entertaining and if you're in Las Vegas, you simply must
experience them!
THAT'S A SMOOTH RIDE…
Andrew was out and about buying new guitars when the taxi he was in drove past
a gun shop which offered shooting range facilities. The taxi driver told him
you could actually go there and pay some money and shoot any gun you want. Andrew
was right up for this kind of action and came back to the hotel to excitedly
tell us we were going shooting right after the conference the next day. Being
a lad of country descent, I was naturally up for a bit of this., so Chris, Andrew
and I went off to try out the shooting range.
Walking into the shop yielded wall to wall guns and the friendliest staff we
had met of any shop in Las Vegas. They were only too pleased to help us and
encouraged us to take all the pictures we wanted.
On the wall behind the counter were a range of automatic rifles and sub-machine
guns we could choose from to fire. However, the center of attention, mounted
on it's own shrine, was the Squad Automatic Rifle (SAW), a belt fed 7.62mm serious
piece of machinery. There were also plenty of hand guns to choose from.
We decided we'd start off with the hand guns and work up from there. I choose
a Berretta 9mm, Andrew chose a 44 Magnum and Chris chose something else which
looked like the Berretta. You could also choose what targets you wanted to shoot
at. There was Saddam Hussien, Osama Bin Laden, various other bad looking dudes,
and conventional targets. There were no George W Bush targets (you've got no
idea how often we've been asked that question).
We were led into the shooting range and were given instructions by guys you
would not want to pick you up on a dark lonely road in the middle of the night,
and shortly we were blazing away at our respective Saddam's and Osama's.
Shooting anything with a pistol is hard enough, let alone the Hollywood shoot-a-fast-moving-target-at-over-100-meters-with-a-pistol-while-running
thing! Infact, both Andrew and Chris had trouble even hitting the large target
paper with the 44 Magnum! The thing was so powerful it pretty much jumped out
of your hands each time you fired it. Infact Andrew even got the creepy range
warden to test it for him to prove it wasn't him. It was.
We all had a go with each other's hand guns. I by far preferred the Berretta.
The Magnum was just too damn intimidating. You'd see the hammer slowly pull
back and you'd know any time now the damn thing was going to leap up and nearly
smack you across the head no matter what you did to prevent it.
Now it was time for the automatic rifles. Andrew selected the M16 9mm which
is apparently used by SWAT teams, Chris went for the M16 7.62mm version, and
I went for the AK 47.
This time we had an instructor who appeared slightly less unstable than the
previous one. Although this guy was very quick to point out he had nine confirmed
kills in Beiruit.
It was right about this time that a short, muscly Latino man brought a customer
in who had obviously just brought a new hand gun and they wanted to demonstrate
it. The Latino instructor was easily the most enthusiastic man we'd met up to
this point. We was giving tips and advice to the customer who was obviously
thrilled with his new purchase. However towards the end, the instructor was
obviously desperate to display his skills to his customer and the customer was
only too glad to see this take place. The instructor blazed off a clip, then
stepped back and declared to everyone in the gallery "Goddamn! That's a
smooth ride!". The customer just glowed with pride and they walked out
as happy as can be. The three of us looked at each other, it was all we could
do not to laugh out loud. Probably prudent given that there were guys equally
as excited about the whole thing as the instructor and his customer, and these
guys had guns too.
We resumed our activities with the automatic rifles. These things were much
easier to shoot accurately than the handguns that's for sure. Our instructor
enthusiastically demonstrated how to operate the weapons and instructed us to
do three round bursts until he tapped us on the shoulder and then we could just
go fully auto. The M16's were nice, but the AK 47 was better mainly because
it had a bipod which made it much easier to group the shots.
I have to say the instructor was highly impressed with my shooting with the
AK47. I often felt compelled to remind Andrew and Chris of this commendation
whenever I felt they were getting out of line for the rest of the trip.
In all we'd spent about three hours or so at the range and we'd had a lot of
fun doing it, however it definitely does not inspire me to go forth and commence
a gun collection!
LOS ANGELES
We'd hired a Dodge Grand Caravan so we could drive to LA for our flight back
to Melbourne, however we had a few days in LA before we were due to fly out.
The trip from Vegas to LA was pretty straight forward, I had marked out the
back seat in the caravan as my own and made Chris sit up front with Andrew on
account of me not being entirely sure Andrew's left hand drive driving skills
would be up to the task. I figured that if anything happened, it would happen
to those two first. Plus, it didn't hurt that the back seat reclined like a
lounge chair either…
We checked into the Sofitel hotel opposite the Beverley Center, and spent the
next few days cruising around Hollywood trying to see famous people's houses
(we saw none, but got lost plenty of times). There was plenty of shopping done,
eating, drinking, and we visited a great Japanese restaurant on the hill near
the Hollywood sign that overlooked LA.
On our final day in LA, we visited Venice Beach and spent the afternoon wandering
up and down the boardwalk looking at the sights and the people (and there were
some pretty unique people there).
We'd left plenty of time to get to the airport, which was lucky as we got badly
lost trying to get there. Eventually we managed to locate the rental check in
area and said good bye to the Grand Caravan and proceeded to go through the
ordeal of checking in at LAX. The Tom Bradley International terminal is pretty
basic in comparison to other airports I've been in. Pretty old and not overly
comfortable, I was glad we didn't have to spend much time there!
The flight home was uneventful with most people sleeping. I however had a score
to settle with the Tetris game on the inflight entertainment system.
The US trip was thoroughly enjoyable. It's a different way of life than I'm
used to, however I can't wait to get back there and visit again!
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