By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Magic by Moonlight. This weekend's Great Bend Airfest will feature several spectacular aerobatic routines during the day, but some of the more graceful flying will take during Saturday's night show. Arkansas-based Matt Younkin, a third-generation pilot, will fly his Twin Beech 18 that evening. A set of lights atop the plane highlight its frame while a series of twinkling strobe lights provide a memorable effect on the bottom of the craft. Saturday's Airfest performance will be set to music.
"The lighting platform is paired with a very powerful soundtrack that only the Twin Beech can pull off," Younkin said. "It's timed, the light changes, with the different crescendos and highlights in the music. It's short and sweet, and when the music quits the airplane disappears and that's all she wrote."
Younkin, who began flying at the age of 14, will also perform daytime aerobatic routines in the Beech 18. His plane was built in 1943, and the twin-engine, twin-tail planes were often used to train navigators during WWII. After the war, the versatile planes were used for just about everything, including crop dusting and hauling freight. Younkin imagines a time when young pilots flew the armed planes into enemy fire.
"When you think about the young men who were tasked with that during the war, and the young men and women who actually built those airplanes in Wichita and other places to make that war effort happen, it just takes you back and takes you down a peg," he said. "It's almost surreal to get to fly in something like that."
Gates at Great Bend Airfest open at 9 a.m. this Friday with the airshow beginning at 11:30 a.m. Gates open at 10 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday's Twilight Airshow begins at 7:30 p.m. with the Night Airshow to begin at 9 p.m.