Event coordinator Beth Ann Schneider believes the Heber Valley Air Show has been around 20 or 30 years. It's hard for her to say exactly, perhaps because she always remembers the valley's strong support of vintage aircraft and enthusiastic local pilots.
"The airplane owners and hangar owners out here consider ourselves to be family," she said. "It's a very close-knit group of people out here.
"There's 10 or 12 people out here today just because we can be. We call our hangar our cabin in the woods. We have a grill out here that we pull out and throw the hot dogs on."
Schneider and her friends won't be grilling for the 8,000 to 10,000 people expected at Saturday's air show near Heber City, but there will be other attractions, including flybys and displays of almost every kind of vintage airplane. Festivities will begin with a remote-control airplane show, 10:30-11:30 a.m. Then a group of F-16 fighter jets from Hill Air Force Base is scheduled to fly over in formation around 11:55 a.m.
Following the F-16s, a missing-man formation will fly over, with a P-51 Mustang and a Pitts S-2C. The Mustang was a World War II-era bomber, and the Pitts is an acrobatic biplane. The formation is in honor of Russ McDonald, the namesake of Heber's air strip and a lifelong aficionado of vintage aircraft and flying, who died last December.
The flybys provide a great show for crowds on the ground but also serve as tributes to McDonald, other veterans and the era of these planes, Schneider said.
"It's part of the enjoyment and the thrill of the air show," Schneider said, adding the pilots are "doing it to pay tribute to Russ because that's one way an aviator can pay tribute to another pilot. Our local pilots will be doing that with thoughts of Russ because he's not here for our air show this year."
One of the main attractions this year is Miss Mitchell. The B-25 bomber is like those that dropped bombs on Tokyo during the Doolittle raids in World War II, the first major air strike against the Japanese.
Terry Stern, one of the B-25 pilots, said the bomber is preserved as closely to its original state as possible. For $375, people can purchase a tour and 25-minute ride in the bomber. The two 1,700-horsepower engines and noise reverberating through the airplane's body ought to make for a memorable experience, Stern said.
"There's nothing that's been upgraded during this flight," he said. "They're not insulated. It has a unique smell inside — fuel and hydraulic oil. They were made for a specific purpose. They weren't built for comfort. They were built to get a job done."
Despite the hefty price tag, the ride is worth it, Schneider said. The Heber air museum gets a percentage of the money from every ticket and the rest goes toward maintaining the bomber. Tickets for $10 will give people the chance to win a ride on the plane.
The air show is scheduled to end around 3 p.m., Schneider said, which means the thousands of people on the black tarmac will sit through the heat of the day at high altitude.
"You plan for a 90s kind of a day," she said. "If it's 90 (degrees), it's 100 on the tarmac." Schneider suggests bringing plenty of sunscreen, water, hats and sunglasses to last the afternoon. There will be a few shade tents available to children and seniors, and the air show will provide free water and sell water bottles.
Food booths operated by Heber-area nonprofit groups will offer hamburgers, Mexican food, barbecue pork and chicken, hot dogs, baked goods, ice cream, popsicles, Navajo tacos, cotton candy, snow cones, popcorn and soft drinks.
The show is sponsored by OK3AIR, an aircraft supplies company that fuels planes and runs a flight school.
E-mail: kswinyard@desnews.com