Rare Air: Work in the Stratosphere

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“People used to always say, ‘Oh, your sponsor is Mopar? What, do you have a Mopar engine under there or something?’?” says Clark. “I got so sick of people asking what the connection with Mopar was. There isn’t a connection. What a pilot does for a sponsor is contribute to brand awareness.”

That confusion sometimes went both ways, with Mopar’s management questioning why they were sponsoring a plane.

“Every year, it seemed like, they would say, ‘What’s the deal with the airplane? Why are we supporting an airplane?’??” she says of Mopar. “The reason they really liked what we did is that every week we did a Mopar Monday memo. We told them how many people we flew in front of. Every intangible piece of media, whether it be radio or TV, that I couldn’t put in the portfolio they saw every year, we documented.”

Those numbers added up, and before long, Mopar noticed that Clark’s numbers were better than Mopar’s NASCAR Dodge, as she performed in front of as many as 350,000 people during a weekend show.

“You can do it without sponsorship, but it’s very hard,” says Dax Wanless, assistant to veteran air-show pilot Greg Poe. Poe travels to shows in his ultra-aerobatic Edge 540; Wanless brings equipment and supplies in a small five-passenger plane. Poe’s current sponsor is Minnesota-based Fagen, a company that designs ethanol-producing plants for automotive use. “What you want is a main sponsor, so you have the dollars to do it right and do it safe,” says Wanless.

Tchaikovsky & Capitalism

Most pilots see sponsorship as still emerging when it comes to air shows. “It’s complicated,” says Nikolay Timofeev, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia. “Not a lot of pilots have sponsorship. For me it would be more difficult. Other than maybe Smirnoff, there aren’t a lot of companies that would want to be associated with a Russian.”

With the hassle of finding and keeping a sponsor, some pilots prefer to rely on fees from the air shows, often supplemented with other income.

For Timofeev, air shows are just one part of a busy schedule of teaching and competitions. “I come to the air shows to perform and have fun and feel like a pilot again,” says Timofeev, who has been living in the United States for the past seven years.

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