Rexburg Air Show

It's been just over a week, and I finally have pictures of the Rexburg Air Show to post.  This is the only non-school (non-field trip) event I look forward to regularly in Rexburg; it's really a surprisingly good show for a place this small.  The Legacy Flight Museum here in Rexburg has a very nice collection of World War II planes, including 3 (2 and 1/2, since one's wrecked) P-51 Mustangs, which are my favorite plane of all time.  The flight show also has some impressive stunt pilots, but for me the WWII planes are definitely the highlight.

I wish I could say I took these pictures, but sadly my camera sucks, so I had to depend on my dad to take good pictures.  He wasn't able to make it to the first bit, but he caught all the good stuff.  You can't really catch acrobatics in a picture, but these do a pretty good job:

Two planes playing chicken:

They do these stunts extremely low to the ground, just a few feet lower and there would be fewer planes next year.

This guy can land his plane on a tiny platform on top of a truck.  He can't actually see the platform, by the way.

This next guy was awesome, but the pictures don't do it justice.  By next year I'll have bought a video camera.

While he was doing that, the Jelly Belly plane was climbing and climbing, preparing to do his "deadstick" routine.  At a certain altitude, he cut power to his engine, and did aerobatic stunts while gliding.  The idea is that he has to very carefully use the energy he has due to gravity, to manage every planned stunt before having to land.

And when it's all done, he had exactly enough energy left to land and coast to a stop at exactly the point where his friend had been standing on the runway throughout the entire routine.

All the pilots are Idaho locals, but they perform and compete all over the U.S.

Now the historical planes!  First, an L-39 Albatros, a Czechoslovakian jet trainer from the 70s.  This plane burns all its fuel in an hour of flight.  Unfortunately I don't have a good one of it in the air, but here it is after its flight:

A bit older than that is the A-1 Skyraider, built right after WWII through the 50s.  It's a predecessor to my favorite modern plane, the A-10 Thunderbolt II (known as the Warthog), and was used through the 70s.  There were two at the air show, each a different variant:

Now WWII planes!  The next plane is the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber.  George Bush senior flew this one in the Pacific in WWII, and was shot down on September 2, 1944.  At the time he was the youngest navy pilot.  Here's the one at the flight museum:

The P-63 Kingcobra was developed by the U.S. but used by the Russians in WWII:

The B-25 Mitchell bomber was used after Pearl Harbor in the famous Doolittle Raid.  They show this raid pretty well at the end of that ridiculous Pearl Harbor movie, the only interesting part of the whole move.  They really did remove guns and all sorts of other things to make the bomber light enough to take off from an aircraft carrier.

They also had a WWII trainer plane (two, in fact) from 1938:  The T-6 Texan.  This plane had every conceivable quirk and difficulty imaginable, and they said if you could fly it from the back seat, you could fly any plane.  The pilot they had at the show was supposedly a master at flying from the back seat.

There were a few more planes, but I've hit on all the really interesting ones except the very best:  The P-51 Mustang.  Just to clarify, the car was named after the plane.

This is NOT a Mustang:

THIS is a Mustang:

They were kind of a disappointment when they were first developed, until the British got the idea to put in a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.  The 1,695 horsepower made the Mustang more than a match for any Luftwaffe fighter (even their fancy new jet, with a good enough pilot, like Chuck Yeager), and it was a reliable plane with enough range to finally escort a fleet of bombers all the way to Germany and back to base.  It was the most successful fighter of WWII, and some say of all time.

The Legacy Flight Museum here has two and a half Mustangs, two owned and flown by John Bagley.  John actually wrecked one of them (hence the half) on Main Street a couple years ago, right in front of the air port.  He's crashed three planes, which you'd think means he's a bad pilot.  Actually, a bad pilot typically only crashes once.  A good pilot knows when there's trouble and brings the plane down on his own terms.  Bagley had just installed a new engine in this Mustang and it failed during the flight test, and he couldn't quite get it back to the runway so he tried to land between lanes on Highway 33 (Main Street).  Unfortunately, the wing clipped the ground just before the gear, and it rolled.  They're restoring it, and say it'll be ready next year.  John Bagley also owns this Mustang, which has been featured in over 1000 air shows in North America and holds the world speed record for a prop plane coast-to-coast from California to Florida in five hours and twenty minutes:

After each event, the pilots got a victory ride in this awesome Jeep.  Bonus points for anyone who can identify the retired BYU-I geology professor having a good time driving them around:

My own Jeep will look like that someday, but doesn't right now (those are my grandparents in the picture with me):

They had some other cool WWII ground vehicles:

And then to wrap it up, they flew the Missing Man Formation, to honor pilots who have died in combat.  During the maneuver, the awesome bagpipe player from my St. Patricks Day blog post played various tunes, including of course Amazing Grace.  The formation was flown by the two Skyraiders and the Avenger.

I'll finish by mentioning that I totally forgot sunscreen, but the show was well worth the horrible sunburn, and by adding more picture of the best plane ever, the Mustang: