tgies | air shows are great (Reply)

hee hee

Highlights of the air show:

MITSUBISHI A6M DAMN ZERO IN REAL LIFE WHAT THE HELL also lmao the announcer said "jap" you can't say that. NOT EVEN FOR HISTORICAL ACCURACY
The MiG-17F is basically awesome; Randy "Complete Maniac" Ball was flying it and he did a bunch of low passes with full afterburners at upwards of 550 kn
but the F/A-18 was faster and better in every way. they made a point of this. reds go home.
USAF did that "heritage flight" thing they do where an A-10, a P-40, and an F-15 (three generations of aircraft) buzz around in formation for a little while.
"And now: thrust reversers"; C-17 touches down and immediately rolls backwards very very fast
Fagen Inc. showed up with their MX-2 ethanol-fueled stunt plane, right? And the announcer was making hell of a deal about how it is ~environmentally friendly~, right*? Well, that's exactly when it chose to belch a ton of soot all over everybody. It was the weirdest thing. I'm still picking soot flakes out of my stuff. Unsurprisingly, the pilot then "[saw] something he [didn't] like" and went back in early. I'm not sure what that was about; I bugged the Fagen guys, but they were pretty tight-lipped about it.
Why did they play Kraftwerk's "Schaufensterpuppen" during one of the aerobatic demonstrations? I think this is a good question

* The ~environmentally friendly~ bit was repeated for the C-17, so I don't think that these guys have the same definition of "environmentally friendly" as everyone else