• 
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

Desire to blow things up burns in pyro crew

Photo

Rich's Incredible Pyro

Rich's Incredible Pyro is performing at the Southern Wisconsin AirFest.

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

Tim Myers, left, works at capping milk jugs full of explosives while his boss, Rich Gibson, ties in fuses. Gibson is the owner of Rich's Incredible Pyro, which will be showing off the company's skills at Southern Wisconsin AirFest this weekend.

JANESVILLE — Rich Gibson’s red Ford pickup truck has a fake plastic bomb perched on its dashboard. It’s parked in a grassy field on the north side of the Southern Wisconsin Regional Airport, near where Gibson and his crew are setting up gasoline and dynamite bombs.

This weekend at the Southern Wisconsin AirFest, Gibson plans to blow the airport sky high. Sort of.

Gibson, 66, operates Rich’s Incredible Pyro, a 15-member, Rockford, Ill.-based pyrotechnics team that tours the world. Together with stunt plane fliers, the team recreates bombing runs and air attacks, mostly at weekend air shows.

“We blow up lots and lots of gasoline,” Gibson said in an interview Friday at the airport.

Simply put—but there’s a lot more that goes into one of Gibson’s shows.

A cavalcade of dive-bombing planes, explosions, and towering infernos, the team’s shows last a mere 12 minutes. But they take hours of planning and setup.

In the hours before each show, a truck fills scores of plastic-lined cardboard boxes with standard, unleaded gasoline. Each show requires 700 gallons of the stuff, Gibson said. Then, a complex network of detonation charges is placed under the boxes, wiring them to blow.

While gas supplies the towers of fire, Gibson says the boom comes from good, old-fashioned dynamite—about 50 pounds per show. He said crews rig the charges off the ground so the blasts cause noise but no damage.

Gibson says he learned pyrotechnics in the jungles of southeast Asia, where he dismantled explosive booby-traps for the U.S. Army 101st Airborne Division, during the Vietnam War. But he’s been fascinated with explosives since he was a boy in Philadelphia, Pa., when he tinkered with chemicals from his parents’ medicine cabinet.

“Now I get paid to blow things up,” Gibson said.

This year at AirFest, Gibson’s pyro show is set up about 1,200 feet away from crowds.

But during shows, some crews stay about 90 feet from the bombs, which are set off electrically. Crews communicate via radio with air show officials and the show’s pilots to ensure the show goes off without a hitch, Gibson said.

What’s it feel like when the bombs go off? Crew member Jeff Wearsch, 50, simply pointed to the back of his yellow company T-shirt. It reads: “Feel the heat.”

Gibson’s shows are set to blow at 2 p.m. today and Sunday. They’ll feature simulated strafing runs with red, white and blue explosions, replicated napalm attacks, and a towering wall of fire.

Two stunt pilots, Melissa Pemberton and Skip Stewart, will do bombing runs at the show. Stewart flies a super-modified Pitts biplane; Pemberton hits the skies with an Edge 540 high performance monoplane.

A special treat this year: The flyers will wage a full-on “battle” against a giant, inflatable gorilla.

“It’s King Kong. Let the (U.S. Air Force) Thunderbirds try and top that,” crew member Tom Skrobots, 67, shouted, hands over his ears as a fighter jet screamed past on a practice run Friday.

Gibson said the weather forecast this weekend, which calls for clear, calm days, is perfect for a pyro show. He said the worst problem for crews could be singed grass near the detonations.

“In the years I’ve done this, my whole crew still have all 10 fingers and toes, and no burns. That’s really the most important objective,” Gibson said.