Category Archives: military

Planes of Fame Review

After a period of relative inactivity, I have been a bit busier recently on getting material together for GAR. After a piece on the tenth anniversary of the first flight of the A380 and a review of Dream Machines at Half Moon Bay, I had my first real show of the year. I took a trip down to Chino for the Planes of Fame show. This was the first time I had been to this show, despite the fact it is one of the highlights of the airshow calendar.

The piece went live on GAR recently and can be found at this link. http://www.globalaviationresource.com/v2/2015/05/12/airshow-review…e-airshow-2015/. Meanwhile, here are a few shots that I liked from the event. I will say how much I enjoyed the access you had at this place and it was a very pleasant change not to be herded out as soon as the flying stopped. It was also a lot of fun to hang with Mark, Kev and Jim. Their company made a good weekend great and also meant I didn’t miss the sunset show! Cheers guys.

Dream Machines Article

Leave a Reply

While it isn’t actually an airshow, Dream Machines at Half Moon Bay was my first aircraft event of the year. Hayman and I headed over there to see what would show up. I was also planning on writing it up for GAR again this year. That piece has now gone live at http://www.globalaviationresource.com/v2/2014/05/05/aviation-event-review-dream-machines-half-moon-bay/ so you can head over the GAR to see the finished version.

The piece focuses more on the aviation side of things than the cars since it is an aviation site. However, the cars were really cool. Here are a couple of cars along with a plane to give you a hint. I might add some more at a later stage!

USS Midway

Leave a Reply

I was watching something on TV recently and there was some footage of the harbor in San Diego. The camera panned across the waterfront and right across the USS Midway. The Midway was a long lasting ship. She was originally built immediately after the end of WWII. A variety of upgrades and rebuilds meant that she served for nearly fifty years. She was a big ship but not as big as the Nimitz class ships in service today or Forrestal and Kitty Hawk classes. Consequently, she could not operate F-14s and was the last carrier to operate Phantoms which were replaced by F/A-18s when the Phantoms were retired.

Upon retirement, she became a museum in San Diego where you can visit her today. I took a look around a few years ago when ISAP was holding it symposium in San Diego. I got there a day early to have a look around and a bunch of us went down to see the Midway.

The collection of aircraft on board is pretty cool. There are some unusual types on display and they are arranged about the ship. The deck and hangar space provides plenty of options for the displays given the size of the air wing she used to accommodate. The deck has been used for other events including launching Kirby Chambliss during the Red Bull Air Races one year and hosting a college basketball game.

One frustrating memory of my visit relates to something not on the Midway. I had been talking with my friends about how I wanted to shoot LCACs – the hovercraft the Marines use for coming ashore. While I was up on the deck, what should I hear but an LCAC. Unfortunately, I was at the wrong end of a long flight deck so only got a passing look at the LCAC as it went by. I did get a quick shot but not one that will ever win any awards!

Should you find yourself in San Diego and you have some free time, I heartily recommend a visit to the Midway. San Diego has a lot to offer but the ship is impressive enough on its own and the collection of aircraft onboard is an added bonus.

Stormy Raptor

Leave a Reply

As is so often the case, I was looking through some images for a feature that someone else was preparing when I came across some other shots that had never made their way on to the blog. In this case, they are some old shots of the F-22 Raptor taken in the UK. I had made a quick trip across the pond to go to the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. I had joined up with my sister and my nephew for this trip – their first trip to RIAT and one that has resulted in them going every year since!

We made a two day visit out of it. The first was for the arrival day and the second was the first day of the show itself. The weather on arrivals day was not fantastic! We had a lot of cloud dueing the day and it ultimately turned into a torrential downpour. We huddled under umbrellas and aimed to avoid getting totally soaked while those around us did likewise. A couple of guys in a tent bailing themselves out provided some amusement as we got pelted with rain.

Earlier in the day, the F-22 practiced its routine. The Raptor had come the previous year and the weather had precluded it from getting a public display as the show got weathered out. This time it looked as if it might be more of the same. However, things got steadily better over the weekend. My favorite shots were taken on the practice day. The weather had not gone totally downhill at that point but the moisture was in the air. Lots of cloud and poor light plus clouds of moisture and highly visible vortices. What more can you ask for – other than nice weather?

Anyway, here are some of the shots from that day. All was not lost!

DHS Citation with Radar

Leave a Reply

A buddy of mine recently photographed a Cessna Citation in Texas which, at the time, he didn’t pay too much attention to. Later, when he looked at the pictures he realized it had an unusual fairing mounted on it which we thought might be a radar of some sort. This triggered a memory for me of a Citation that I saw at Andrews AFB. This was operated by Homeland Security and included a modified nose with an air intercept radar. I don’t know which types it was but I seem to recall it might be a variant of the F-16s radar. Anyway, thinking of that made me dig out the original shot and here is the aircraft in question.

C-46 Commando

Leave a Reply

Even people how aren’t particularly into aviation have a reasonable chance of having heard of the Douglas DC-3, also known as the C-47 and the Dakota. Not only was it a hugely important aircraft in WWI but it also continued to provide the post war commercial services and, even today, to fill a niche in air transportation. Far less attention is given to one of its counterparts in the war, the Curtiss C-46 Commando. The C-46 never stuck in the public conscience in the same way and its use post war was a lot more limited.

However, they didn’t all disappear and one fine example still flies at a lot of air shows. I got to see it at Pungo in Virginia a few years back at an ISAP event. The symposium was being held in Virginia Beach and we spent a couple of days at Pungo. One was the day before their annual air show. We got to look around the collection and see the aircraft in action. The C-46 put on a few great low passes and I was at one end of the field and got a great view head on.

On the day of the show, the weather was not cooperating and the train came down heavily at various times throughout the day. The C-46 did fly in the gaps provided by the not so awful weather. They were not conditions conducive to good photos but I still got some of it. However, the practice day proved to be the better day for seeing this fine machine in the air.

Special Weapons at Cosford

Leave a Reply

I have twice been able to visit the museum at RAF Cosford outside Telford in the UK. On my second visit, I had a very surprising experience. I was looking at a Buccaneer that was on display in one of the hangars. As I walked around it, I saw something that I had not expected to see. They were some bombs but not normal bombs. When I worked on Tornado many years ago, some of the handling clearances we wrote were for what were euphemistically called special weapons. Even the outline of these stores was highly classified and anything we did that included clearances for them had a higher security rating than normal weapons. I never saw one for real. Only the drawings showing the shapes were available. Once I finished working on them, I figured I wouldn’t see them again.

Turns out I was wrong. The RAF retired their weapons as part of an overall strategic weapons reform and, once they were withdrawn from service, the classification was downgraded. This included allowing the weapon shapes to be declassified so they could be put on display in a museum. When I first saw them, I thought that someone must have made a big mistake but it turns out that everything was above board. I doubt many people walking past them were even aware of what they were and they certainly won’t have been as surprised as I was.

AMARG

Leave a Reply

The storage facility at Davis Monthan AFB in Tucson AZ is very famous. The storage of so many airframes that are either gradually being broken down for parts or that have the potential to make it back into service is well known and has been the subject of many books and articles. Getting access to the facility is a bit harder than it used to be but there is a tour that is run each day from the Pima Air and Space Museum across the road from the base.

The tour is on a bus that doesn’t allow anyone off so it is not ideal either from a photography perspective or from the point of view of exploring the more unusual aircraft. However, it is a simple thing to do so making the trip on the bus was the option I went with when I was there a few years ago. The bus had tinted windows which affect the photos quite a bit and you are stuck on one side of the bus so anything on the opposite side is a case of seeing what luck you have shooting across the bus. Reflections are a constant problem of course.

The storage facility is exactly as you imagine it would be. The lines of aircraft of the same type are very cool. It really doesn’t matter what the type is. Seeing so many of one type together, often with a wide variety of unit markings, is impressive. The big types like the C-5, the C-141 and the B-1B dominate their areas. The smaller types can be scattered in amongst them. Some look rather forlorn, often without the gear any more, mounted on wooden frames. Other locations have parts stacked up. A selection of wings from A-10s were stacked in a row. At some point I need to make the plan to visit and investigate the facility in a lot more detail.

Cutlass

Leave a Reply

When I was a kid, I saw a picture in an aircraft modeling magazine of the Vought Cutlass. The planes caught my imagination at the time but they were already long gone from service so the chances of seeing one in the UK were not good. However, I did come across one much later when visiting the Museum of Flight’s restoration facility in Everett WA. My first visit to the facility was when it was just a location where work was undertaken and you could drop in. More recently, it has been turned into a visitor location with a shop and entry fee.

Nothing has changed with the Cutlass though. It is apparently a bit of a basket case for restoration purposes with a lot of problems in the structure. Consequently, I don’t know what will happen with it or whether it will remain a work in progress indefinitely. However, it is cool to see a Cutlass at all. When thinking about this, I decided to see whether I had ever come across a Cutlass at any museum. However, I couldn’t find an example anywhere in my files so I guess this is the only one I have seen.

B-58 Hustler

Leave a Reply

A few people I know recently had pictures up on Facebook of the B-58 Hustler bomber. This was a supersonic bomber from the cold war era. It was a beast of an aircraft and one that I would love to have seen in action. Sadly, they were all withdrawn from service long before I had a chance to see one. However, there are a few of them scattered around museums and I have seen them in person, even if it is not quite the same. I thought I would throw in a few shots of my own of these outstanding looking jets.