I had a busy weekend. I went to Oktoberfest with Gregg on Saturday, and then Sunday I went to the Air Show with Ryan. Apparently there were 38,000 people there on Sunday. Ryan and I parked on the street in downtown Cleveland and then just walked, to save $12 (because I'm broke). I needed the exercise anyway.

It was a pretty great show, one of the better ones I've been to. The rocket truck was a little disappointing (mainly because I just couldn't get my photos taken at the same time the afterburner was running), but the A-10 demonstration was great (the A-10 is one of my favorite planes), F-15s are always impressive, and there was an AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter demonstration - I've never seen one fly in person. There was a "heritage flight" in which an A-10, F-15, and P-51 Mustang from World War II flew in tight formation, a Harrier jet demonstration, and then of course the Thunderbirds.

You know, this wasn't a new realization for me, and maybe it's just because of my age, but I was really noticing the degree to which the air show seems to be one huge recruitment event for the military. I mean, the Air Force even had a crazy modified Ford Mustang on display (complete with attractive women). I don't know. I didn't really bother me necessarily, it just seemed... a little too obvious.

I'm really happy with the photos I took, considering I wasn't expecting much. There were guys with loads of professional photo equipment everywhere. I'm sure their photos are better than mine, but I'm still really pleased with the results. I've put 12 photos up on my Flickr page. Here are a few of my favorites:

Apache:

F-15, A-10, and P-51:

6 Thunderbirds up close (unlike some of my other photos, I didn't even need to crop the original image!):

I can't believe I actually got this one:

And I always find time for an HDR (this is the plane painted to look like the Memphis Belle for the movie of the same name):


Some of this is better in video form. Here's a video I took of the Heritage Flight:

And this is an A-10 on a simulated attack run:


Sorry about the black dot in the upper left of the videos. It's like I have dust on the lens, but it never shows up in my photos... drives me nuts. I also took a video of the Apache, which you can see here, I just don't want to clutter this post up too much more. Check out the climb at the end!

Sorry about the shaky cam too, just pretend you're watching Battlestar Galactica or District 9 - it's all the rage these days.

current weather: Partly Cloudy, 68, Wind: NE 3, Rain today: 0.16"; Nearly stationary rain showers around today

Tags: air show, airplanes, photos, videos
Current Location: 41.144N 81.501W
Current Mood: accomplished
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Really impressive video of the fire-fighting 747 in action on the Station Fire near Los Angeles:


If you're easily bored, it makes a pass with the fire retardant at about 4:00 into the video. Also, you might want to turn your volume down just so you don't have to listen to local news reports babble.

747s are pretty impressive to begin with, but they sure weren't ever designed to be loaded up with fire retardant and flown at such low altitude and banked around like that. I watched a solid 7 minutes of that video.

On a similar note, there was a C-5 Galaxy flyby (from Wright-Patterson AFB) at the Reds game I went to last weekend. I was out getting a hot dog and taking pictures of the city when it flew overhead, so I didn't get any pictures, although I did nearly poop my pants.

I'm an airplane sort of mood right now. Sunday I'm planning on going up to the Cleveland Air Show with Ryan - the weather's looking really good at the moment.

current weather: Partly Cloudy, 73, Wind: NW 5; puffy cumulus clouds

Tags: airplanes, video
Current Location: 41.144N 81.501W
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: none

There was a video on APOD yesterday which shows flight patterns over a 24-hour period from US Federal Aviation Administration data.

It's a little hard to discern patterns over the continental USA just because there are so many flights in the air during the daytime, but a few things stick out:

- In the evening on the East Coast, a bunch of flights leave for Europe
- In the very late evening on the West Coast, a bunch of flights leave for the East Coast (the red-eye flights)
- Seeing the explosion of domestic flights in the morning on the East Coast, which then spreads across the country to Hawaii and Alaska with daylight



current weather: Mostly Cloudy, 37, Wind: E 3

Tags: airplanes, video
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Röyksopp - Remind Me (Someone Else's Radio Remix)

Two quick stories, both having to do with airplanes:

I had an interesting experience on my flight home on Saturday from Fort Lauderdale: an aborted landing. We were coming in to land at Hopkins, and were down to about 250 feet or so, when all of a sudden the pilot punched the engines and made a really rapid ascent - the most rapid I think I've ever experienced in a plane before. Everyone got thrown back into their seats, and within a matter of seconds we were back up at about 5000 feet above the airport. Then they made a circle out over Lake Erie, came back around and landed normally.

When the plane pulled up to the gate, the pilot came on and said: "Just to uh... clear up any confusion about what happened a few minutes ago, air traffic control was trying to do us a little bit of a favor, Saturday's one of the lighter traffic days, so they had moved us to a different runway so we could land a little early, but our aircraft wasn't properly configured for the use of that runway and we had to do a little bit of a "run around," that's an industry term, just had to come back around and use original runway."

Actually that didn't clear up anything at all for me, but Dad suggests that what most likely happened was that the runway the ATC was telling our plane to use was in fact too short for our 737 to land on with the flap configuration it was in. They most likely realized this right before they were about to land, and had to come back around, to, as Dad says, "avoid 'pulling a Toronto'."

In other news, one of the top stories in Cleveland right after my return was that a pilot flying to Gallipolis (Liz's hometown) found a 4.5 foot snake in his instrument panel while inflight. Yes, you read that right - real Snakes On A Plane, not to be confused with the upcoming motion picture.

Personally, I think it was a promotional stunt for the movie :).

I'm flying home Thursday morning.

current weather: Clear, 85, Wind: calm; It hit 98 today - unfortunately the wind has died out and it's supposed to be even hotter tomorrow, with a bonus dose of an ozone alert thrown in

Tags: airplanes, travel
Current Location: 32.753N 97.067W
Current Mood: tired
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