And looks like an F-111.
There were 7 of them. Couldn't get all in one shot due to restricted access, but you can see some more tail rotors in the background. All flying. Used for agricultural spraying in the orchards here in the Okanogon Valley of WA. Also a couple hulks that were parted out. Image Unavailable, Please Login These always remind me of Thur nights in college, watching Riptide followed by Magnum PI, followed by hitting the bars.
Growing up in a suburb of NYC, my dad would take me to a local field to watch the USPS Sikorsky come in for the days' Mail. Fun for a kid. Maybe that's where it started?
Yu' n' me ! My mom used to take us kids to the old Wash. D.C. airport (where the Pentagon is now) and I watched Curtiss Condors, Ford Tri Motors, DH4 mail planes, and sometimes autogyros. That was 1932 -'33.
Don't mean to show off, just staring some great memories. I saw the most modern airplane in the world there when a Pennsylvania Central Airlines Boeing 247 came in. Then another amazing airplane came in a couple of years later, called the DC-2. I could go on but I won't because that would involve things like Lockheed Vegas, Stinson Tri Motors, and those beautiful Northrop Gammas and Deltas. Bolling Field and Anacostia NAS across the Potomac had things like Martin B-10s, P-26's, Grumman F4F's and a lot of other stuff.
Looks very much like a photoshop to me. For some of the real cool pictures of the SR 71 take a look at the books from Brian Shul "Sled Driver" and "The Untouchables". I just browsed through them again. Just fantastic!
Jim- An airshow is not a low level. Have done a few airshows myself and they have nothing to do with low level ops.
The first time I saw an SR-71 in the air, it made some low-level passes at the Abbotsford air show in British Columbia, probably some time in the '80s. After his final pass, he lit those humongous afterburners and headed skyward. I understand that this was part of a regular mission: he came down from about Mach 3 at 80,000 feet to do his air show passes, and then headed right back up to where he had come down from! At a later Abbotsford show, the SR-71 actually landed and parked within sight of, but well away from, the crowd, since I know that they leak like a sieve when they cool down.
The funny thing is that the flash point of the fuel is so high that you could throw a match into a puddle of it lying on the ground and it wouldn't catch fire. That's why the engines were so difficult to start; they used to use a special starting cart with two Buick V-8 engines on it; later they switched to more efficient engines. And they needed a specialized fleet of KC-135s configured to dispense only that type of fuel (JP-7?).
You can throw a match in a pool of JP-8 and it will not light, either. Just do not try it with JP-4, which was gasoline based.
I believe that JP-4 is a 50/50 blend of kerosene and gasoline, and more volatile than either one. A 1963 crash where a Pan Am 707 was brought down by lightning was attributed partially to the use of JP-4, which was commonly used on Puerto Rico (where the flight originated) because of the large amount of military aviation activity on the island at that time. The FAA immediately banned the use of JP-4 in commercial airliners.
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