The Blue Angels

So, that thing I said I'd post about that was fun instead of political but I needed to go through all the pictures first? Yep. Here it is!

I've blogged before about the excellent air show put on annually in Rexburg, one of the few worthwhile things to see there.

This year they skipped the air show, because the Blue Angels came to Idaho Falls, and no matter how good your show is (Rexburg puts on one of the best), you can't compete with that. So several of the planes that regularly show off in Rexburg were in Idaho Falls, instead. And this time, I had a great camera to capture it all!

I'm going to try doing this a bit differently. Instead of embedding dozens of high-resolution photos in this post, and making the page take forever to load, I'm just embedding a few of my very favorites. The rest I've sorted and posted to my gallery at deviantART, and I recommend you check them out there. You can download the full resolution images to use as desktop backgrounds or whatever. I'm thinking of ordering one or two as prints, and if I'm satisfied with the quality for the price charged by dA, I'll make them available there as prints, too.

Any of you who know me or read my previous air show post know that the best plane ever is the P-51 Mustang. Also, this is my favorite plane. (That it's the best is a fact; that it's my favorite is just my opinion.) A particularly cool thing at this airshow was a flyby of a Mustang with the more modern F-16 Fighting Falcon, which served a similar role to the Mustang:

There wasn't as much emphasis on the Mustang at this show as there is in Rexburg, but at least it was there, and had its chance to show off. Greg Poe was there to do his aerobatic routine, which is always fun to watch:

A popular act at the air show each year is an aerobatic routine in a Beechcraft Model 18, popularly known as the "Twin Beech". The reason this routine is so unique is that it is a plane not at all suited to aerobatics (it was designed for such uses as cargo carrying and aerial firefighting). Flying this plane like they do at the show is like drift racing an eighteen-wheeler.

Kyle Franklin was there to fly his Twin Beech, and did not disappoint:

And, with a hint of what's to come in this post:

Are you getting excited? No? Look at that picture again. How about now? Good!

Kyle Franklin wasn't done, though. He followed this up with another routine, in which his wife Amanda stands on the wing of his "Mystery Ship", and performs a "pirate" show. This was tons of fun:

I have a new goal in life: Stand on top of an airplane while the pilot performs an aerobatic routine.

There was more, too, but those were the best highlights except for the final, main act: The Blue Angels. Ooooooh, yes. I have wanted to see these guys for forever. You'd think that having expectations set so high for so long can only lead to disappointment, but you'd be thinking of things not as cool as the Blue Angels, 'cause they lived up to the hype and then some. My brother and I managed to get pretty much as close as was possible to the show without being in the special VIP area for friends and family of the performers. We were just a couple hundred feet, if that, from "center point" of all the maneuvers.

These guys are amazing. Angels 1 through 4 perform fly-bys in formation, and while they circle around 5 and 6 play chicken, performing "knife-edge" passes. Except for a couple slow "dirty" passes, all the maneuvers are at 400 to 600 mph, and at that speed they fly at a "minimum separation" of 18 inches apart. That's close enough that if they could open their canopies, they could reach out and grab their wingman's wingtip. And when they fly by a mere couple hundred feet away at 600 mph, the thunder makes every bone in your body shake. It is a truly awesome experience, and if you ever have the opportunity to see them perform, take it.

In fact, I predict that a man can find himself at the final Judgment after he dies and hear these words: "Well, you've lived a perfect life, except for one thing: You had the chance to see the Blue Angels, and you decided to feed homeless people and take a stray sick puppy to the vet instead, and also you ended war forever. What are you, stupid? We can't let you in to Heaven, sorry."

That last picture reminds me about how I forgot to take sunscreen, and I got super, super sunburned, and didn't even care because it was totally worth it.

I took quite a few photos, and these are the best of the best, but the rest of the best are here in my Airplanes folder at my deviantART gallery. Please take a look!

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: