The Great Georgia Airshow!

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the 13th Great Georgia Airshow, held at Falcon Field in Peachtree City, in the south metro area of Atlanta. This has always been one of the nicer mid-size airshows that I've had the pleasure of attending, but for various reasons I hadn't made the show in several years. The gorgeous weather enticed me to go, and I'm glad that I did!

As the home base for the Dixie Wing of the Commemmorative Air Force, it would be expected to find some warbirds, but the more interesting ones were the visitors, including the Spitfire from the Fighter Factory and the P-40 from the Liberty Foundation. The C-130 was supplied by the Georgia ANG in Savannah. The SBD is part of the Dixie Wing and is one of only two currently flying (so I was told). Some re-enactors had a nice encampment set up, including what may be the most heavily-armed Jeep that I've yet seen!

And it seems that nowadays, every good airshow has to have a jet-truck act. That giant Saturn V, BTW, is supposedly a flying model!
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The flying part of the show was a nice mix of aerobatics, warbirds and modern military. Oh yes, and the jet truck.

To me, the most entertaining part of the show were the performances of Kent Pietsch and his Interstate Cadet sponsored by Jelly Belly. First he did his version of the old "flying farmer" routine, which began with one aileron falling off of the Cadet! It takes a great amount of skill to fly that "badly". Once the "farmer" finally got down, he got out of the airplane and kissed the ground! Then later, with aileron firmly re-attached, Kent did the "world's smallest aircraft carrier" routine; it isn't easy, as it took him three tries to get firmly anchored to the camper. Then they went around and he took off from the camper!

Gene Soucy was his old reliable self with the ShowCat and with crazy Teresa Stokes riding the wing. The old "Tora" re-enactment of Pearl Harbor has now been extended to feature the Doolittle raid and the Battle of Midway; with a Mitchell and a Dauntless on hand, that worked out quite well, though the pyrotechnic crew did a pretty good job of setting the grass on fire. That big explosion was supposed to be the Arizona going up. In the last shot the SBD is diving to the rescue!
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And isn't this what it is all about? I took a photo of a shirt that a fellow was wearing at the next table while I was eating lunch. As the old saying goes, "freedom is not free!"
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The story of that Spitfire is quite interesting; apparently it did carry those exact codes during its active service career. Here is the whole story, courtesy of Air Britain:

"This Spitfire was built at Castle Bromwich in Birmingham in 1943 and made her first flight on the 10th of December that year. At the controls for that maiden flight was the late, great Alex Henshaw. She was allocated to the Royal Canadian Air Force as MJ730 and was shipped to Casablanca. She saw service with 417 Squadron RCAF before being allocated to 154 Squadron RAF based in Corsica. Wearing the code HT-W she flew 95 bomber escort missions. Her next operator was 32 Squadron based at Kolomaki, Greece becoming the personal aircraft of Squadron Leader George Silvester DFC in whose markings she is shown here. The strange code was a result of a comment Silvester made to his ground crew in that "there was a bit of a question mark" over which identity letter to give his Spitfire because he belonged to neither 'A' Flight or 'B' Flight. The ground crew, as a joke, painted a large question mark where the individual code letter would have been. From that moment on MJ730 was known as 'The CO's Query'. Later operators included 249 Squadron RAF, the Italian Air Force as MM4094, and finally the fledgling air force of the Israeli IDF. She ended her operational career with an Operational Training Unit at Ramat David before being donated to a Kibbutz to be used on a playground. Salvation came at the hands of Robs Lamplough in the late 1970s and she was recovered to the UK, passing through a few different owners, before flying again on the 12th November 1988 at East Midlands. She was sold in 2000 to Jerry Yagin/Fighter Factory in Suffolk, Virginia, USA becoming N730MJ."

 

Geez, Bob, your airplane makes Kent's Interstate seem pristine by comparison!

 

Probably no worse than all the castor oil that WW I pilots ingested while flying behind rotary engines.....

 

I finally got all of my photos from Peachtree City into a Photobucket folder. Enjoy!

http://s1211.photobucket.com/albums/cc437/gatoraptor/Peachtree%20City%20Airshow%2010-10/