FC Interview – CDR Richard “Corky” Erie, USN (Ret.) by FC Staff

Make a list of the most prominent, most exciting airshows in North America, and Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia, is sure to be on it. Fence Check was privileged to have the show’s director, Corky Erie, explain to us how he keeps the Oceana airshow at the top of its field.

Being passionate about his job – and being an ex-fighter pilot – Corky had a lot to say. Rather than condense the interview to standard Fence Check length, we’ve decided to run it in two parts. We hope you agree that his words, and his insights, are worth keeping intact.

Because you’ve been the face of Oceana’s airshow for several years, some readers might not be aware of your service background. Please give us a brief on your Navy career and explain how you became involved with the airshow.

Well, I was the child of a Naval Aviator. My dad got his wings in 1953 and did several tours in Vietnam flying A-1 Skyraiders, A-4 Skyhawks, and A-7s. I was born in 1965, in the middle of all that, so as you can imagine, Naval Aviation was in my blood from the very beginning. I graduated from San Diego State University, in the ROTC program, in 1988, got my commission, and headed to Pensacola. I got selected for Tomcats and went back to San Diego for training at NAS Miramar in 1990. From then on, I was an F-14 pilot.

I was stationed at Miramar until 1996; then I came here to NAS Oceana as an instructor pilot. After that, I got a posting to Japan as a department head with VF-154. That was going pretty well until I developed diabetes, right at the end of my tour. That immediately clipped my wings – I could no longer fly.

I was detailed back to the Fighter Wing at Oceana, which is the administrative command that runs training and readiness for all the squadrons. While there, I became involved in the airshow as the F-14 rep. I was the tactical demo schedule guy and the liaison between the Oceana airshow director, Deb Mitchell, and the F-14 fleet. In 2003, when Deb was leaving and I was coming up for new orders, the base asked if I wanted to be the airshow director, on active duty as part of the Operations department. I said, “Sure, I’ll give it a shot.” I showed up about 30 days before the 2003 show, which was planned by Deb Mitchell and executed by an officer on the operations staff. After the show, it was all mine from 2004 onward.


When I retired in 2008, I was able to locate a civilian position on the staff at Operations. I’m employed by Navy Region Mid-Atlantic as the Deputy Director for Air Operations Program. I maintain the airshow director’s job as a collateral duty. It’s not my primary job, but it seems very primary at certain parts of the year!

What’s your official position and job description with the airshow?

There are different titles for my role, but I like Director. One of the things I’ve learned from watching other shows is that, in an organization that pulls together different people from different areas, there needs to be the one belly-button who is visibly in charge of stuff. I’ve got a lot of great people working on this show, not just me, but if the Admiral or the Base CO has questions they’ll want to ask the director.

How big a staff does the airshow have?

There are about 100 people on my airshow committee during the year. Those are stakeholders in security; morale, welfare and recreation (MWR); sponsorship, marketing, public works, and so on. They are civilian and military, from all walks of life. There are no full-time people on this – it’s a collateral duty for them, but one that gets less collateral as the show comes closer.

I host a biweekly meeting, starting in early June this year, to bring everyone up to speed about where we are in the planning process and what has to happen next. As the show gets closer, the meetings get closer together, until execution week when everyone’s working full-time to bring the vision into reality.

During the show we get an injection of labor from the squadrons, the tenant commands, and MWR. Those are the worker bees – the guys that make it all happen by putting up tents, selling hot dogs, and so on.

How many volunteers does the show use each year, including military personnel?

There are volunteers, and then there are “volun-tolds.” The sailors don’t volunteer. The Base Commander says to the squadrons, “The airshow is coming up. Here are the numbers I need from each organization to help make this happen. Thanks a lot!” and the squadrons submit names.

If we had a big muster on Saturday morning of everybody involved in the show, I would say you’d get 1500 to 2000 people. You’ve got a large contingent of security. You’ve got a large contingent of medical – that’s about three to four hundred. You’ve got a large contingent of MWR selling stuff and moving stuff around and catering – that’s another 600 or 700. Some of the functionalities are fun. Some of them are hard work and back-breaking labour.

We do have an opportunity for the public to volunteer on our website, and we do get 20 to 30 folks each year who want to help out. We also get help from groups like Sea Cadets. But those aren’t groups we actively seek; it’s more an opportunity we give people because they want to help and because we value their help.

What is the timeline for putting together the show – when do you start, and what are the main areas on which you focus month-by-month?

It used to be a fourteen month process, with our request for the Blue Angels due August 1st of the year prior. Now our command leadership has inserted some earlier deadlines. In early June, I submit a request to my higher headquarters to have an airshow in the following year. Assuming they approve the request, I have to figure out a date. I’ll do some pinging back and forth with the Blue Angels, working around local events and their other commitments. If the date works, I’ll fill out the 2535 form [requesting the Blues] and send it in. Then I forget about the next year’s show for a while, as I’m within a month or two of the current year’s show.

Once I’ve put the current year’s show to bed, my first step is to develop the look for the next show. There are certain mainstays to Oceana, like the Fleet force guys and the Blues, that are always going to be there. For the rest, the question is, what flavor do you want the show to take on? Do you want a vintage-ey, Tora Tora Tora, “boom-boom” thing? Do you want to go all high-speed, low-drag? Top of the line civilian aerobatic folks? Then you select your performers to give the show that “look.”

I go to ICAS in December, but usually it’s just for handshakes. The deals have already been done – I don’t do a lot of shopping because I’ve already figured out who I want and called them.

My next step is the theme. What are we going to relate the show to, what is our message? I generally develop that while at the gym, pumping iron with music blaring in my ears, expressly not thinking about it. That engages my subconscious, creative mindset. Most of the themes I develop grow from a single word that sticks in my head and grows. Eventually, “Bam!” The idea hits and the theme comes together. The 50th anniversary show, for example: I’ve always loved the word “legacy,” I always wanted to use it as a theme, and that was my opportunity. “Legacy of Excellence” – I thought that was great.

The next process, and one of the key precipitative actions for me, is working on the logo. There’s always the core, central triangle shield with the Hornets on it, and then we incorporate the theme. When the logo is complete, it’s like a switch has been flipped for me. I sit down with my committee roster and fix that; I schedule the first committee meeting; I start the plan of action and milestones update. The logo is like a diving board to spring off of and start working.

Then it’s a matter of engaging with the committee to see who’s still here, who’s not here, and who’ll be leaving halfway through; dialing in the “who’s who” on base and at Fighter Wing; and contracting for performers.

By early summer, I’m meeting with different groups among the committee members, like security or public works, to make sure we get a handle on what’s expected. I tell them, “I don’t mind if you use last year’s plan, but you’d better look at it through this year’s lens,” because things are always different. Assuming things will be the same each year gets you into trouble.

Each committee member – whether it’s the vendor coordinator or my sponsorship director or the flightline setup guy or the marketing folks – knows the job he or she has to do. My job, most of all, is to make sure that they’re talking to each other. That’s the one place an organization will fail: it gets so stove-piped that people in one stovepipe are making decisions that affect people in another stovepipe and not telling them. I tell people, if you’re sending an e-mail and you only have someone in the “To:” block, you’re probably not doing it right. There’s probably half a dozen folks who need to be in the “CC:” block. What you’re saying may not directly affect them, but it might be nice for them to know for what they’re planning.

Things really start to gel when I start building the timeline. That’s a very interesting process. I look at the show from a spectator’s view: What is he or she going to see? My goal is to provide the crowd with something that keeps them continually interested, that gives them something dynamic to look at.

Here at Oceana you’ve got aircraft that move at 0.93 Mach, on down to a glider moving about 0.1 Mach. You’ve got a really wide disparity in size, scale, smoke, noise, abilities, and all that stuff. I’ve seen shows that just rack up the acts and hit “play”—and they lose the opportunity for an element of theater. You can juxtapose, say, Manfred Radius with the C-17 demo – “Oh, look at the graceful … Holy crap! Look at the size of that airplane!” And then you roll it back to something vintage, maybe. And then you step it up with a legacy Hornet demo. And then you roll it back to a wing walker.

You’ve got to really think to engage. I don’t take three solo aerobatic guys and put them back to back. If a guy goes up and does the same loops and rolls as the performer before, even though it’s a different paint job and a different airplane, the crowd’s really not getting a lot out of it. I don’t take three warbirds and put them back to back – probably about 5% of the crowd knows what those airplanes are and is tickled pink to see them, but everybody else is just a mom and a dad and a kid, and it’s just another three airplanes to them.

My timeline is just a vertical spreadsheet with the performer names, start times, and that kind of stuff. There are certain hard-points you’ve got to honor, like the Blues at 1500 – there’s a stick in the ground. Your Air Force guys are going to be grouped together, in an “Hour of Power” – there’s a stick in the ground. I can move the stick a little bit but they’ll stay grouped. Your F-117 flyby has to take off at 10:12 to make flybys at other shows. Ok, there’s a stick in the ground. You start with these knowns that you can’t change. Then you begin plugging other acts into place, realizing that it’s not just a matter of how long a performance is. When you’re building the timeline, you’re trying to honor the need to keep people interested, you’re trying to honor safety, you’re trying not to taxi the Hornet in front of the crowd when a sponsored act is trying to talk about their sponsor. All those little things have to be factored in.

For about a week; I sit with my laptop from about 8 PM to midnight, just staring at the timeline, moving acts around. I’ll get about an 85% solution, and then I’ll talk to people like Rob Reider or Snort [Dale Snodgrass] and ask them “What do you think?” They’ll say, “Pretty good, but you forgot that this guy needs five minutes airborne before he starts, to warm something up.” So that gives me a little bit more detail. As I’m making the final tweaks, there’ll be a moment of clarity as if the spreadsheet has been blurry for a week and all of a sudden it pops into focus. I go “It’s saved, that’s it, I’m done.” It’s a really neat moment.

I hold my last committee meeting on Tuesday of execution week, making sure the logistics are in place, making sure the performers are being taken care of, making sure the rental cars are going to be in position, making sure everybody who’s got a task is on top of that task. And then I go “Thank God, no more meetings.” From that point on, it’s all about doing, and that’s the fun part. You get involved in this process where a Master Jet Base with 250 strike fighters is turned into a circus in a matter of 36 hours. I’ve got some time-lapse video of it, and it’s really cool to watch. That process starts full-bore Wednesday morning, and by Thursday night they’ve moved all the strike fighters out, they’ve moved all the tents in, we’ve got static showing up, snow fences and chalets are popping up, 6000 folding chairs …. It’s just amazing to watch it happen.

Then the Friday practice hits, the night show hits (although not this year), the Saturday and Sunday hit, and at that point it’s basically a test of your plan. You’ve got to be pretty dialled in to react, to see potential conflicts and resolve them as fast as you can. Obviously, traffic and parking are a big deal, and we do our best with them, but there’s always something we have to react to, maybe modifying the plan a bit. But in general, we spend so much time on the plan that the framework of the house is pretty solid. We may have to change a few pieces of panelling, but that’s about it.

The show execution is one of my most favorite things. It’s like getting a birdie on your last hole in golf; it keeps you coming back.

Breakdown on Sunday – they get all that stuff they’d put on the flightline cleared by 9 PM, after starting at 5 PM. There are some logistical items to deal with on Monday, such as getting semis out of the back-lot area around the hangars. But 0600 Monday morning, the sailors are dragging the jets back out and we’re an operating Master Jet Base by 10 AM.

Do you feel your naval aviator background influences your planning of the flying display? In what ways?

Twenty years of involvement in Naval Aviation teaches you quite a bit. One of the most valuable things it taught me is about working problems backwards. Back when I was a Fleet aviator, we did “strike planning.” We were given a mission target and we were given a time, to the second, for ordnance to fuse on that target. You basically plan the strike backwards, rolling everything back from that time. You say, my fusing time is 12:01:45. How long does that bomb take to fall from 15,000 feet – thirty seconds? Then I’ve got to drop at 12:01:15. You continue working each element backwards. When you get to the start of the mission, you start to play what you’ve constructed forward in your mind to see what element you’re missing, or what conflict you haven’t planned for, or what potential failure you haven’t allowed for. Do I have enough HARM shooters, do I need more fighter support?

When I’m planning an airshow, the first thing I do is mentally walk through show day as a spectator, down to the level of walking the show grounds in my imagination. What is my experience? What do I see? Is that good enough? Maybe it’s not. Maybe I need more pyro. Maybe I need more funnel cake vendors. Whatever it is. Then I march the whole thing backwards, saying “OK, I’ve envisioned the ideal state, how do I get there?” A lot of folks will start planning from the front and not really know where they’re going. I know exactly what the show’s going to look like because I planned it first and then I marched it all backwards.

I spend a lot of time on risk analysis and barrier analysis: have I thought of everything that has the potential to be a problem? For example, when you’re formulating your strike plan, did you know there’s an enemy fighter base 60 miles off the centerline of your strike? Same thing for this: did you know that there’s a half-marathon the day of your show? No. Did you know that this particular funding resource for security personnel has gone away this year? Oooh, didn’t know that either! As you’re rolling back and forth over the plan, you look for hard spots and things that kind of poke at you.

That’s the skill set Navy training has helped me with in terms of planning. In terms of briefing, I finished up with a couple of thousand hours in fighters so I’ve done a couple of briefs. Fear of speaking in public? I’ve got no problem with that! I spent enough time in leadership roles to have no problem stepping up, saying “Here’s what we’re doing, any questions?” But I’m fair, too; the second thing I tell people on the committee every year is, “I’m not the smartest guy in the room. If I say something wrong, please wave the ‘dummy’ flag on me and say ‘Wrong!’ Then I’ll fix it.”

Part 2 to follow soon…

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