OK, here we go..... These pictures are some from Friday, some from Saturday. In the Blues, you'll see some shots with 2-seat planes, which were flown by #2 and #3 on Friday. Shots from Saturday are all four single-seat, their regular aircraft.
F/A-18F Super Hornet showing how hard it can pull air.
This group was called Team RV. There are actually 12 of them, but we were missing one this weekend. They fly homebuilt kit planes, and most of their show is is flights of four, but some of their formations assembled all 12 together. They call themselves the world's largest airshow team.
F-16 peeling out from a cloud of its own making
Air National Guard sponsors this 2-ship team
And a jet truck
They have a race between the planes and the truck. This is a cell phone pic because I knew what was coming, and it wouldn't fit in the lens I had on the "good" camera. (Jet truck is gone already, not in the frame.)
I got to see an Osprey demonstration, my first time ever seeing it at a show.
Army Black Daggers, a Special Forces parachute demostration team
A wickedly maneuverable aerobatic plane sponsored by Breitling, makers of Instruments for Professionals. (Professionals with lots of cash!!!) These two shots are less than a second apart! He was doing a set of forward somersaults over the nose. Somehow.
They don't do the JATO any more, but he does a low transition (wheels up maintaining minimum altitude,) accelerates and pulls up 45 degrees to climb out rapidly. Note the tip contrails off of the props.
He makes a couple of passes, then a short-field landing, diving hard for the ground, as if to avoid enemy emplacements or to land in a valley field surrounded by mountains.
Then we get to the jets! After the diamond takes off and does a half-Cuban-eight to pass back by the field, Number 5 does a dirty roll on takeoff, pulling up hard and rolling through inverted back to upright before retracting the gear. His wheels are barely off the ground here, and the tail is closer to the ground than the wheels. That is pulling up sharply!
Number 6 follows with a low transition, accelerates down the runway at about 8 or 10 feet, then yanks the stick to go vertical at the end, keeps pulling through a half-Cuban-eight to pass the crowd at high speed and turns sharply to exit after passing.
More passes from the show:
After that echelon roll in the last picture, the announcer asks the crowd to watch how the formation turns to come back to the show line, but those of us who've been around the block know what's coming next:
#5 sneaking from the left at about 720 miles per hour, followed immediately by #6 from behind the crowd.
A couple more solo shots, including one that I timed about as well as I've ever done!
These guys are so fast, this is motion blur in a shot at 1/1000th of a second. I was following #5 from the left and watching for #6 to appear in the eye that wasn't looking through the viewfinder.
The diamond makes a looping turn to pass in front of the crowd, then separates sharply:
They each make a large turn to return to the field from four different directions and cross over in the center:
All six planes come together for a couple of maneuvers. Here is the delta roll:
Followed by the loop-break-cross. The delta breaks on the down side of a loop, separates in six different directions, each performing a half-Cuban-eight, and crossing together at the center, having approached from nearly 5 miles out at almost 500 miles per hour!
That ends the air show. Except for Friday, when they had a twi-night show starting just before sunset. That's next.
