Roswell at Dawn

So, now we’re twice around the Roswell pylons with the National Championship Air Races. The first year was like all first years—full of promise and a free ticket to learn. But the second year starts a trend, sets a direction. It lets us know where we might be headed.

And that direction is alternately promising, yet pierced with existential danger.

So, what’s right about Roswell? For starters, it exists. That a large, multi-class air race takes place anywhere is a small miracle in 2026, and this is the background for all following arguments. People have moved mountains to land the NCAR at Roswell, and we all should acknowledge that. After all, Reno hosted the air races for six decades and ultimately decided it didn’t want that in town, and it wasn’t like Chicago was going to resurrect Meigs Field for the honor, either. That anyone anywhere will buck the financial and cultural headwinds for a major league motorsports event these days is exceptional, let alone something as esoteric as pylon racing.

But wide-open New Mexico sees success with aviation events, witness the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, and the state has put amazing resources (code speak for train loads of taxpayer cash) in the Roswell NCAR spread, plus a much smaller but still significant effort into the Sport class SkyFiesta pylon race in Las Cruces. There is a three-year contract in place for the NCAR in Roswell, so the 2027 event is a given, but we can expect difficult questions after that.

All that state money has resulted in a fine place to race if you talk to the Roswell racers. Acres of new paving have formed an expansive staging area for racers’ pits, grandstands, and their camp-following concessionaires, STEM labs and so on. The racecourses themselves are typically larger, less G-intensive tracks, and when someone decided to lay the racecourses over the desert instead of over the pair of two-mile-long existing runways, a third (!) 5,000×60-foot emergency runway was paved on the far side of the faster courses this year. Try that in the Windy City.

And the infrastructure effort hasn’t been one and done. When rain inundated the Roswell pits in 2025, extensive new drainage culverts and above-flood ramps appeared in 2026. Rome in one day and all that; it’s holding true in Roswell so far.

Money has helped the racers, too. The purse has been raised for Roswell, and accommodations such as tents for the Sport class and hangars for F1 and Biplane are widely appreciated. It’s been a long time since we heard from happy racers, so that was good news.

If nothing else, Roswell has room. The sort of room that won’t be encroached on in any foreseeable future, which is the same as a promise to settle in for the long haul. If it otherwise makes financial sense, the bar to long-term investment in the Roswell event is low.

But then, there are the problems at Roswell. Overwhelmingly, it’s Roswell’s location far from a major population to draw from, and simultaneously at the end of this nation’s transportation system, posing the existential threat to its long-term viability. Getting to Roswell is a slog, no matter how much whitewash you splash at the issue. Yes, there are now airline flights right to the racing airfield, but they are necessarily expensive. And when you get there for race week, a rental car is far over $600 for three days. This probably isn’t even gouging, either, but likely the reality of having to truck in extra cars into what is a tertiary rental car market the other 51 weeks of the year. It still makes sense to jet into Albuquerque or El Paso and motor over three hours in a rental car to Roswell.

Should you be the hearty, drive-yourself racegoer, then Roswell is simply too long from anywhere, meaning a large population base to draw from. Reno was a California race run just over the border in Nevada. It was a minuscule fraction of nearly 40 million Californios, think what you will of them, who made Reno possible. It sure wasn’t the population of eastern Nevada spending their money in Reno that kept those races going.

Roswell has the same geographic disadvantage as Reno except far worse, and there’s no California nearby to save it.

Then there is the much-ballyhooed bit about insufficient motel rooms in Roswell. It is an issue, and what is not often admitted is the condition of some of those rooms. Sure, the guys don’t mind partying in fish camp motels once a year, but she does. Even the big chain accommodations in Roswell can have dirty carpets and scratched paint. The town just hasn’t had to attract and hold a three- or more-star audience previously.

Naturally following such remote and underserved status is the piracy commerce around big events in small markets. Event pricing is a reality, and here we must make a special acknowledgment to the Roswell mayor who’s gone out of his way to bring to heel the more entrepreneurial hoteliers in his town. At least from a pricing perspective, the local leaders have truly gone to bat (perhaps not literally) for the racers and fans, to which we’re pleased to give deeply appreciative thanks for such extraordinary effort.

Next is the product itself, the races. We do well to remember the NCAR saw scarily declining attendance in Reno for years. This was no blip, but an established trend. The demographic interested in air racing—at least as it’s been presented—is now very old. If you can remember Pearl Harbor personally, you’re old; if you can remember the 9/11 attacks, you’re already 30 or older. So the nostalgia of hearing a Merlin sing or feel the old emotions swell in the wraaaaap of a T-6 prop isn’t the inducement to Roswell as it was to Reno fans 60 years ago. Today’s youth are native to a far faster world, one saturated with stimulus and instant gratification. The luckier ones don’t think much of jetting to Europe for an early college-years walkabout. Propellers on airplanes are quaint, and anything less than six government jet fighters aurally pounding all speech and cognition to impossibility is tame. From a noise and blinking-light perspective, air racing leans to the cerebral rather than the tangible, and that greatly diminishes the prospective audience.

To grind the point, the masses have no personal understanding of aviation, or the skill and practice it takes to run a consistent race line or execute a slow roll 200 feet above the ground. It’s all spectacle to them, and an RV-8 running a 275 mph lap is hardly a spectacle to anyone, no matter how improbable the accomplishment.

Making matters worse, what spectacle there is, is kept too distant at Roswell. It’s simply too far from the spectators to the home pylon. And in an unfortunate confluence of celestial mechanics, the late-afternoon races at Roswell are backlit to silhouette by the famously powerful New Mexico sun. Even experienced racegoers—and the announcer—had difficulty in identifying precisely which P-51 that was motoring by in the big Gold race last weekend.

Roswell is also too expensive for the local crowd. A guy and his date, sitting in the stands and the car parked within expeditionary hiking distance of the main gate, is $200 for a day if you include the usual grilled gopher-on-a-stick nutrition and a T-shirt to memorialize the agony. Charging $40-plus to park in the endless expanse of the Roswell desert is ironically sinful.

Furthermore, there is the weather. Granted, this is a tricky one as some like it hot, but the only people we encountered who thought unshaded, egg-frying aluminum grandstand seating “just fine” were mid-20s youth from Amarillo, and we all know about Texans. All the rest were wilting under an absolute hammer of a sun, and it was 90-plus in what precious shade you could find.

So the fans voted this year by staying home. We hate to say it, but there’s no other way of putting it. Attendance was visibly down from last year, which was pretty much curious locals augmented by a few diehard fans making a pilgrimage. And it wasn’t just the spectators. The racing fields are thin with just one flight of T-6s and just enough Biplanes and Formula 1s to put up a Gold and Silver race, to cite a few examples. Then there are the volunteers upon whose back nearly everything at the NCAR is carried. Pylon judges, shuttle-bus drivers, timers, scrutineers, registration personnel, and so on are all unpaid servants to the NCAR. One shuttle-bus driver told us he and his wife, both many-year veterans of Reno, spent over $3,200 to volunteer at Roswell this year. They’re in their mid-70s, and the fact he brought up the subject says the cost is an issue.

We could go on, but the point is clear. Reno was a unicorn, and Roswell is the new reality. It’s a new venue with new possibilities and many new challenges. So what’s to do?

Assuming the NCAR stays in Roswell, and after what the state of New Mexico has spent, it better, then the town’s isolation and weather are the first two things to tackle. Unfortunately, that’s mainly work for a higher-than-human pay grade, but we can always try. First, making the big air races a destination event, catering to recreational vehicles, could help the housing situation by bringing in our own. Give the crowd a reason to stay at the airport in the evening after the races, a concert or night show, and RVing gains legitimacy. Pre-positioning rental RVs would help if that’s financially possible.

A huge advantage to Roswell is the room and ability for fly-in traffic, something Reno could have really used. Developing a fly-in culture to the air races à la AirVenture might not move the attendance needle much, but it would cultivate a cadre of influential fans.

There is much talk about moving the NCAR date to October, and yes, this would have been a fine example of the foresight expected when selecting a race venue, but as the locals point out, it’s a bit late for that. October is already booked in Roswell by multiple other events because it’s the one month with predictably bearable outdoor weather there. The motels are already full; bulldozing the NCAR on top of them would only cannibalize hospitality sales rather than extending their season.

Springtime? The almanac says April is best for temperatures, but the worst for wind, and howling, gusting, sand-spitting wind is disqualifying in the desert, especially when airplanes are involved. May is as hot as September, albeit drier, and March still sometimes freezes overnight.

So, we’re left with mitigating the heat and thunderstorms of September. Cooling stations for intermittent respites between races would help; some form of shade is mandatory. One boggles at the sales opportunities offered by cooler, shadier spots in a Roswell summer. Imagine climate-controlled box seating for the upper crust; imagine large, open tenting with misters for the hoi polloi.

As for the product—the races themselves—getting the fans more engaged can be done by moving them closer (see FAA), or running larger, noisier, faster airplanes, and educating the audience about what’s going on.

OK, moving the kids closer is a nonstarter, but faster, noisier airplanes are possible with afterburning jets. That might make the Mach course Roswell’s saving grace. This seems a pursuit worth the effort for the promoters.

As for educating the masses, providing a combination of technically in-depth material to read or watch would help with the technically oriented fans (and they are a real factor in air racing), while scheduling pit walks and building up the pilots’ and crews’ personal stories would do wonders for the human-interest story so important to everyone else.

Racing is far more interesting when you know something about the people and machines zooming past. This isn’t very expensive to do and would go miles to dismantling the elitist gap between participant and spectator in air racing. Instead of seeing the fans as a demographic to be milked of their discretionary income, why not welcome them to your air-racing party as guests to be shown around and introduced?

While it’s hard to give away money when you’re not making it, getting involved in Roswell civics is necessary to build the two-way street a big, invasive event in town imposes, and the lesson we should have learned when we were kicked out of Reno. Let the jet set build a vocational school at the airport, for one example. There are plenty of old airliners to dismantle, the industry needs technicians, and Roswell needs hope for its youth.

There are other concepts, of course, from immersive, real-time video and data streams to robotized timing and scoring. In short, there are new ideas, plus a host of proven tactics, to employ at Roswell. Success is hardly guaranteed, but the time to start trying something new has already passed, and 2027 looms. Do we have the leadership to succeed?