Spent 2 days this weekend laying out at the pool & watching the Madras Maiden fly overhead.

A friend of mine owns the Madras Maiden!

 

Not many people look up at airplanes now. The rumble of a couple of radials or the screech of a jet is all the same, just another airplane. I'm constantly looking up to see what's going over and I get comments from family and friend...."What are you looking at? It's just another airplane." When we have every make and type that you can think of from homebuilts to the Dream Lifter it is a nice airshow for me. And then there's the Paul Allen outfit 5 miles north , John Sessions bunch and a little out fit called Boeing, all within 6 miles. You bet I look up!

 

Envy you, Bob... constant airshow.

I look up too, grew up at the N end of the N-S runway at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque... Still can 'feel' the B-36's roaring over at a thousand feet.

The sound of a radial or a Beech Starship always gets me outside

 

I remember a B-36 going over at umpteen thousand feet one night and rattling the dishes in the cupboard. We could hear it for twenty minutes as it flew north.

 

I live near the flight path of Republic Airport on Long Island and I see those planes flying over all the time on holidays. Every Memorial Day weekend, July 4th and Labor Day weekend they have airshows and those planes are always the featured attraction. We live about 10 miles from the airport and yet I can hear them all the time. They look magnificent when they are flying over and yes the sound can be heard for a long time after they pass.

 

That's one thing that I was just a little too young to experience. My first airshow experience was 10 years later at Ramey AFB in Puerto Rico. They still had B-52s in Cold War colors carrying Hound Dog missiles - Cuba wasn't that far away.

 

Saw a couple of mass B-36 launches out of Kelly AFB when I was a kid. Noisy and spectacular. Kind of scary when you consider we were flying real nukes back in those days and the B-36 carried some real crowd pleasers without much in the way of modern safety features.

 

Max launches are scary with the B-52, also. I have posted before about witnessing one at Moses Lake in the 60's with KC-135's first and the the B-52's next. The noise, smoke , and desperate maneuvers of the B-52's to miss the airplanes ahead of them was one of the most intense things that I had ever seen. It took a long time for the smoke to dissipate. Nothing has a more painful and louder shriek than a KC-135 on take off with water injection. And to think, I worked on both of those programs.

 

In May '57 a B-36 DID accidentally drop a nuke several miles from Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque... and a few miles from my school. The conventional trigger exploded, leaving a crater and killing cattle, but it was not armed. Some radioactivity was released.
It was ferrying the bomb from another base to Sandia.

USAF didn't release that info to the public for several decades.

 

The famous MITO sequence from "A Gathering of Eagles" - a lot of noise and smoke!

 

And then there was the one that landed in Goldsboro, NC. That one went through all of the arming sequence, and was only stopped from detonating because the cockpit mounted safety was in the "safe" position when the plane broke up. That bomb was a single short circuit away from detonating.

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Or the one that was accidentally dropped on a kid's playhouse in Mars Bluff, South Carolina.

Or... well, there were more than a few of them.