Topic: Warbirds in Town

[Johnie]

The annual Experimental Aircraft Assn. (EAA) Convention is in town here in Oshkosh, WI. Caught this shot of the warbirds going over yesterday. Quite a sight to see. Plan to see the Blue Angels for the first time on Friday. This will be the Angels first trip to EAA and looking forward to it.

[Stev-o]

Very cool. Are those ^^^ pics taken at your home?

[Johnie]

Yes...

[ekpent]

Must have put 2 stroke engines in them with all that smoke !!  Air shows are fun and those powerful jets always amaze me especially when you realize they are flying at the shows no where near full throttle,break too many windows    Enjoy the show John.

[Don R]

 I was going into work in the early 70's at a factory on Friday for second shift. The blue angels had gotten into town and were flying around making some advertising noise, one of them saw us gathered outside, 3 of them kept us busy watching while the 4th flew around low on the horizon and sneaked up behind us loud, low and inverted. I swear I could see him laughing inside his helmet and mask. And yes, he got us good.

[ekpent]

I used to fish at a lake that was part of the Ft Custer Air National Guard base. At that time it was a major base of the A10 Warthog.  Lots of times while fishing there it was like being able to have our own personnel air show as the Warthogs would be out flying around the base and lake. Sure the guys were having a great time in those awesome planes.

[Sigop]

My father was a tail gunner in a B17 in WWII out of England into Germany.  Before he died I was able to get him up a couple years ago in a restored B17, "Nine-O-Nine" out of the Collings Foundation. I could see him replaying some of his personal movies--very powerful.  Also, nothing like the sound of those 4 engines coming from miles away.  Unmistakable.

[Johnie]

This flew over the house the other day. I believe it is the B-29 named FiFi. Get to see the Blue Angels today.

[MrGardman]

Johnie, you are going to love the Blue Angels. I have seen them perform a few times and am always amazed with what they can do with a jet.

[72 yellow]

This flew over the house the other day. I believe it is the B-29 named FiFi. Get to see the Blue Angels today.

Remember seeing FIFI at Selfridge Field in Michigan years ago.  A group of protesters threw red paint on her.  They ended up getting their asses kicked as the AP's sort of took their time breaking it up.

[Geeto67]

This flew over the house the other day. I believe it is the B-29 named FiFi. Get to see the Blue Angels today.

That' the B-17 "Aluminum Overcast". They were doing tour stops on the way to Oshkosh and stopped in cincy and cbus the week before. The CAF's B-17 "Texas Raiders" was in the week prior to that so I got two consecutive weekends of b-17's  shooting approaches over my house (I live in Don Scott's flight pattern).

[SOHC4 Cafe Racer Fan]

I'm lucky.  The Blue Angels are doing a show over Huntington Beach this year in late September.  My buddy is going to anchor offshore so we can watch the planes fly overhead.

[Johnie]

The Blue Angels were fantastic! So happy I finally got to see them. Hard to believe it took them that long to get to EAA. Last Friday night they had the largest group of Apollo astronauts in one place at one time. Jim Lovell, Buzz Aldrin and Gene Kranz the NASA flight director to name just a few.

[Geeto67]

I have seen the blue Angels roughly a dozen times in my life at various venues like Oshkosh, Sun and Fun, even Republic Airport when Dad used to be park the mooney there. The best venue to see them at is the Dayton Air Show. If you ever get a chance to see them there it is worth the trip. Because of the airport configuration and the crowd they get lower and closer there than anywhere I have seen. If photobucket wasn't dead I would post some pics shot with a DSLR  wide angle lens where you can read the writing on the helmets.

[RAFster122s]

Dayton is fun if you have some shade and it is not raining.  I lived in Westerville for 19 years and lived in Dayton for 6 months of hell one winter, the ice storms were bad but the Air Force Research Labs group and SAIC group's mgmt made it hell.

That was AT6 and SNJs in your early mass flight photos...very popular trainer aircraft.  The non-target airplanes (target aircraft being any aircraft without guns) are super expensive these days as typical mustang, corsair, thunderbolt, etc are multimillion $ aircraft nowdays.

[flybox1]

I'm lucky.  The Blue Angels are doing a show over Huntington Beach this year in late September.  My buddy is going to anchor offshore so we can watch the planes fly overhead.

They are spectacular.  I take my kids to see them every year when they are in Seattle for SeaFair!
They practice for a few days before their show.  Freeways need to be closed to keep the cagers from crashing into each other 

[SOHC4 Cafe Racer Fan]

Not that the Thunderbirds are any slouches (I've seen them, too, more than a few times), but the Blues fly without a G-suit (because activation of the bladders in the suit can nudge the stick and risk air-to-air contact in tight formations).  The pilots are pretty extraordinary in that they have to sustain all of those g-forces the old school way. 

[RAFster122s]

Both teams have suffered their losses when the lead failed to pull up and one or two or none of them survived on a couple bad crashes in practice.

Friend was chief mechanic for the A10 West demo team several years ago and they had a goose ? Strike flying over the water on a circuit before coming back over the crowd.  They picked bird parts deep out of one of the vertical tails and had to fly a new tail unit in to replace it.  He showed me photos but could not share them.  It was a pretty knarly hole it punched into the vertical tail.  It was a pretty gruesome sight and it was like exploding feathers when it hit.
Plane flew back to land without major difficulty but was unsafe to fly back from Seattle to Tucson for maintenance.

[SOHC4 Cafe Racer Fan]

Both teams have suffered their losses when the lead failed to pull up and one or two or none of them survived on a couple bad crashes in practice.

Friend was chief mechanic for the A10 West demo team several years ago and they had a goose ? Strike flying over the water on a circuit before coming back over the crowd.  They picked bird parts deep out of one of the vertical tails and had to fly a new tail unit in to replace it.  He showed me photos but could not share them.  It was a pretty knarly hole it punched into the vertical tail.  It was a pretty gruesome sight and it was like exploding feathers when it hit.
Plane flew back to land without major difficulty but was unsafe to fly back from Seattle to Tucson for maintenance.

The A-10 Thunderbolt aka Warthog is a pretty amazing machine.  Designed for extreme survivability and tank killing (pretty much designed around its 30mm depleted uranium gattling gun firing milk-bottle sized rounds).  It has had whole sections of tail and wing shot off and still brought its pilots home (in a titanium bathtub surrounding the cockpit, no less).  It is old but still bad-ass.   

[RAFster122s]

In combat the mission is not finished until it gets the aircrew home, same rules for flight are not in effect when not necessary.
  Thus, the reason to repair it in Seattle rather than fly it home.  It is likely to have made the trip without incident, but they play concervative when allowed.

[TwoTired]

"Combat" implies military pilots flying under military rules, outside of FAA purview.
Vintage warbirds are flown under FAA rules called FARs. Federal Aviation Regulations.
One of these rules does not allow initiating flight with an aircraft that is not fully airworthy.
A violation of a FAR can result in the suspension or revocation of your pilots license.
Cost or convenience of repair to airworthy, does not suspend any FAR.

If you can do it, you can fly an unairworthy aircraft to a landing site of your choice.  But, there it will sit until repaired to airworthy status.

Cheers,

[RAFster122s]

In the case of the A10 Warthog it was a military aircraft flown by a military pilot as part of an aerial display team on the airshow circuit.  Odds are FAA rules apply for all aircraft participating in an airshow.

[ken65]

"Combat" implies military pilots flying under military rules, outside of FAA purview.
Vintage warbirds are flown under FAA rules called FARs. Federal Aviation Regulations.
One of these rules does not allow initiating flight with an aircraft that is not fully airworthy.
A violation of a FAR can result in the suspension or revocation of your pilots license.
Cost or convenience of repair to airworthy, does not suspend any FAR.

If you can do it, you can fly an unairworthy aircraft to a landing site of your choice.  But, there it will sit until repaired to airworthy status.

Cheers,

You sound like a barrel of laughs 2 tired. Please excuse my boorish aussie ways.

[TwoTired]

The FAA officials have their sense of humor forcibly extractacted upon acceptance into service and replaced with an authoritarian device which automatically places blame on pilot in command for any and all mishaps or anomalies.

I am an FAA licensed pilot.  Watch the movie "sully" for a much more flattering portrayal of Government official action in the face of heroics.

Military pilots can break any rule upon reciept of an order from a higher ranking officer, including those rules of the FAA.

Guess who was still flying after 9/11 when the FAA grounded all civilian aircraft?

Cheers,

[ken65]

Fair enough. I actually  only watched Sully a couple of weeks ago.
Would you say it was an accurate telling of what happened?
It appeared that they wanted to throw the book at him.

[TwoTired]

Fair enough. I actually  only watched Sully a couple of weeks ago.
Would you say it was an accurate telling of what happened?

Yes. For sequence of events. But, not for the ending praise attitude portrayed by the FAA actors.  They would never admit to getting it wrong.

It appeared that they wanted to throw the book at him.

They always want to blame the pilot's decisions.  It's an easy box to check on the report form.  The FAA is a bureaucratic paper mill, funded by bureaucrats, which has evolved to remove as many pilots as they can, in order to improve safety numbers.  Humans ARE fallible.  Accidents are going to happen, even if rare. The FAA would have a perfect safety record if no pilots were allowed to fly.  And the appearance of an action taking watch dog enforcer, plays well on capitol hill, regardless of the actual facts.  Blame must be assigned when sigificant property is lost, and the news media makes it into a show, for politicians/ bureaucrats to get in their sound bites, seldom do they have the slightest knowledge about what it takes to be a good pilot.
Pilots are a minority, which makes them an easy target from those less educated about their abilities/capabilities.  If motor vehicle drivers were required to have similar training, there would be 90% less drivers out on the roadways, imo.

Cheers,

[ken65]

Thanks for the insight.  cheers

[jlh3rd]

not a far off remark by twotired but in this case they exaggerated the FAA and NTSB actions to build suspense for the movie. what they did not show and does support twotired comment is that sully made a comment, after takeoff and before hitting the geese, that it was a nice day to fly.Technically, that violates the sterile cockpit rule. The FAA initially wanted to pursue that but the pilot's union and American officials basically said really? are you serious?....so it was dropped
     a friend of mine who i fly with sometimes made a comment saying that the FAA is always out to get us. I said, well...not necessarily'...but there are a lot of things they can get us for...
    i've been an airline pilot since 1986.....guess who i fly for...

[Geeto67]

not a far off remark by twotired but in this case they exaggerated the FAA and NTSB actions to build suspense for the movie. what they did not show and does support twotired comment is that sully made a comment, after takeoff and before hitting the geese, that it was a nice day to fly.Technically, that violates the sterile cockpit rule. The FAA initially wanted to pursue that but the pilot's union and American officials basically said really? are you serious?....so it was dropped

Am I wrong in thinking that the Sterile Cockpit rule is outdated? I get the need for it, esp in the wake of Eastern 212, but it was a rule instituted during the days of needle ball and airspeed commercial flying without the aids they have now. The biggest area of concern is around the communications between the PIC and the cabin attendants. I feel like the FAA's over-zealousness in enforcement in this area scares crews away from having communications regarding potentially proactive approaches to things prior to them developing into actual emergencies. There are plenty of cases where the air crew waits untiil the emergency develops before notifying the Flight deck.

I don't know a single GA pilot that doesn't think the FAA is out to get them and all I have met believe that the FAA thinks of GA as a nuisance. The FAA's approach to GA hasn't exactly been friendly and has spawned groups like the EAA and AOPA to become advocate groups to protect GA rights instead of the clubs they were started as. Where I get worried is when the insurance companies start to push more to the hardline FAA guidelines instead of the usual GA practices as a means of denying claims. For decades insurance companies didn't really care about expired medicals if they expired close in time to the incident and the individual would have passed a medical subsequent to the incident. Now, some (like AIG) are hardline about the medical - 1 day expired? yeah you aren't covered. The worst part is some how they got the AOPA to go along with this and now push these policies to AOPA members (AOPA acts as an ins broker for those who don't know).

[jlh3rd]

make sure you don't mis understand me. i am always on the pilot's side. you are very much spot on with the FAA and GA. the FAA did their best to destroy one of the best pilots ever in Bob Hoover. I will never forget that. neither have others. I"ve also known pilots who have killed themselves and others because of their brashness and disregard of rules....it's a balance...
don't get me going on the medical and the FAA, thank god we were able to stop that sleep apnea/BMI bull....
    actually, the sterile cockpit rule is even more scrutinized today. in company training, line checks and FAA observation. It doesn't matter what i think. this is my training, and there's no arguing with the results.      too bad about AOPA complicity
    however, in this case (sully). obviously it was moronic for the FAA to pursue that enforcement. which does illustrate the FAA knee jerk reaction sometimes...

[Geeto67]

make sure you don't mis understand me. i am always on the pilot's side.

No misunderstanding here. I do happen to think some GA pilots take their paranoia of the FAA too far but it isn't without a long justifiable history. My comments were not accusatory, just observational.

you are very much spot on with the FAA and GA. the FAA did their best to destroy one of the best pilots ever in Bob Hoover. I will never forget that. neither have others.

I met Hoover several times as a kid through my father's friend Charlie who knew him from the airshow circuit. Even flew in the Shrike once in the 80's. I will never understand the FAA's approach to the situation, I'm not saying they didn't have some merit but it seems to be the FAA's SOP to handle things in the least sensitive manner possible. In my mind they earned every inch of that hate from pilots.

don't get me going on the medical and the FAA, thank god we were able to stop that sleep apnea/BMI bull....

yup. It was pretty crappy. Then again I have known more than one GA pilot to cover up their open heart surgery scar with pancake makeup when they go to their physical so....you said it before it's a balance.

   

actually, the sterile cockpit rule is even more scrutinized today. in company training, line checks and FAA observation. It doesn't matter what i think. this is my training, and there's no arguing with the results.

Rather than adjust their hardline policies, they put it on the airlines to manage. I am skeptical of this because it creates a situation for inconsistency from airline to airline, and the FAA just sits in judgement as it comes up.

     too bad about AOPA complicity

yeah it's a real mess, and I don't think a lot of pilots realize the situation. There is some talk right now of a class action law suit against AOPA because in recommending any of this insurances there is a question as to whether they broke their duty to the client as a broker by recommending insurance that had greater restrictions than what is industry standard. A friend of mine is going through this at the moment - blew a tire on landing and veered into the woods in his new taildragger (not new to him, a 6 month old airplane) - now the ins company is telling him to go screw because his medical was 3 days expired at the time of incident. he's fine but he's superfly pissed at the AOPA because he doesn't feel they did a good job explaining the policy to him and really hard pushed to sell him an inadequate policy. we will see how it all shakes out.

[edwardmorris]

I'm lucky.  The Blue Angels are doing a show over Huntington Beach this year in late September.  My buddy is going to anchor offshore so we can watch the planes fly overhead.

They are spectacular.  I take my kids to see them every year when they are in Seattle for SeaFair!
They practice for a few days before their show.  Freeways need to be closed to keep the cagers from crashing into each other 

I'm lucky as well, as I've been watching the BAs practicing from our 27 floor terrace at work in downtown Chicago for some years. Nothing short of spectacular. Totally agree about closing the freeways, Lake Shore Drive in Chicago tends to get out of hand with distracted drivers during these events. It used to be really bad when the former Prez would drop by and his Ospreys (Chinooks earlier) just start descending in a parking lot out of the blue.