Blue Angels at Fleet Week 2012

You may have found yourself wondering 'what about the Blue Angels' all last week. Well, they performed last, so I saved their post for last, too. This may actually set a new record for most photos included in one post. The Blue Angels shots had the highest percentage of good shots to taken shots of each of the performers. I think you'll enjoy these results.



























This guy right here is what everyone bought box seats for. Oh yeah. Seagull.

Six L-39Cs at Fleet Week 2012

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a six-jet exhibition squad called The Patriots. This turned out to be my favorite performance of the day. These guys are amazing. They do incredible stunts and maneuvers at such high speed I couldn't get many in-focus shots. So here are the ones I got:

Fun fact: The Patriots fly Aero Vodochoy L-39 trainers, a Czech plane. 


Fun fact: The L-39 is the most-used jet trainer aircraft in the world.


Fun fact: The "C" in L-39C stands for Cvičná, which is Czeck for "training."


Fun Fact: These planes can fly as high as 36,000 feet. (That's not really that high.)


Fun fact: I'm out of fun facts for today.

F-22 and the Heritage Flight at Fleet Week 2012

Words can't really express how great a plane the F-22 is (from a design standpoint, anyway.) So let's just check out some photos here.














I'm not really one for bragging, so I hope this doesn't come across as such. All these photos were taken with a 30-or-more-year-old manual-focus camera lens with a TX mount to M42 and an M42 to K adapter. There's so much room for manufacturing intolerances in there, that this lens' ability to capture such sharp images is an incredible testament to the nerds who designed it. With slide rules and protractors. Yeah. This was before computers. Pretty amazing engineering and manufacturing quality.

Following the F22 demonstration, the jet was joined by two other planes for the heritage flight. Lots of people wearing flag bandannas and dew rags wept for this.



So, that last photo is NOT a composite. However,I  did lose the Mustang's propeller to the edge of the frame, so I re-built it from another image. I made the sky by mirroring the other end of the image. Totally worth it.

FA-18 Hornet and Super Hornet at Fleet Week 2012

Boeing introduced the F-18 in 1999 and the plane remains in production with more than 500 built to date. At a cost of $67 million per plane, this is a pretty expensive piece of equipment, but the performance speaks to why. This first plane was from the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). The latter I'm not sure about since it isn't listed on the Fleet Week website as part of the show. Odd.


Fun fact: The RCAF Snowbirds are officially called the 431 Air Demonstration Squadron.
Fun Fact 2: That previous fact was a fact but not fun. I apologize for misleading you.


Fun fact: the Super Hornet and Hornet can be discerned by looking at the air intakes. The Super Hornet has rectangular air intakes and the hornet has ovular. (This plane was introduced as a Super Hornet by the announcer, but those air intakes look distinctly ovular to me.)


Fun fact: My DSLR sensor was super dirty during the air show (a few photos on this page show the dirt dots) and I spent no less than five times as long editing dust dots off  the 200 images I kept as I did taking the initial 1,500 photos. No kidding. And I didn't even catch half the spots.




By now this plane has returned to the true north. The next hornet is an actual Super Hornet (the photos with the air intakes allow the intake shape to be made out more clearly. This is a U.S. plane and did some nifty stuff.


A high-gravity maneuver.



Right on the sound barrier's cusp.


"Wait, no, I can't land there. That's water, not a runway."


Some nifty con trails coming off the vertical stabilizers.


A-ha! Rectangular air intakes.

Two Stunt Planes at Fleet Week 2012

Day 2 of the Fleet Week post showcases two stunt planes. The first is the Lucas Oil plane, the second is the Team Oracle plane. Firstly, the Lucas Oil plane:

An acquaintance, upon seeing that shot, put it best: I'd not want to be in that plane." You know, what with it falling out of the sky and being on fire and such.

That seems a better trajectory.

That would be an outside loop, I think. The plane makes a loop but the cockpit on on the outside of the loop.


This guy liked flying upside-down.

These next images are of the Oracle plane. This is the only plane in the world, apparently, that can tumble tail-over-nose forward through the air. It's pretty darn cool to see in person. This first image is a composite that I made for fun and doesn't have anything to do with the end-over tumbling.



That actually wasn't the lowest that he flew.

T-33 Shooting Star at Fleet week 2012

Day 1 of the Fleet Week post showcases the T-33 Shooting Star. This plane is FAST. I hadn't gotten to my box yet, so I was trying to shoot between some old buildings at Fort Carson. I can't put into words how fast this jet was. I know modern jets are faster, but dang. This would be a fun jet to fly, I think.



Interesting fact: The T-33 . has served in the air forces of more than 30 countries.



Interesting fact: This T-33 started life in the Royal Canadian Air Force as an RCT-33 trainer aircraft. Any T-33 with two seats was used as a trainer aircraft, though a few nations used gunnery trainers on the front lines.




Interesting fact: More than 6,500 T-33s were produced. And the ones that still fly are all still super fast.