Far East Cynic

Air show blues!-Part I

There is so little to do in this town, no wonder the air show is a big event.-The S.O.

For someone who says she likes it here, the S.O. has made more than a couple perceptive comments along these lines. Maybe I’m not the only one missing Japan.

We went to the Air Show today. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 6.5 and that’s being generous.

We went later in the morning because the S.O. was really not keen on being out in the sun for 6 or 7 hours. Her whining voice was in top form today, so I thought it prudent to humor her desires. So after breakfast I used the time to get some errands done. While we were out-I was hungry so I stopped in for half a dozen Krystals. Prudent decision #1 of the day.

Let me back up a bit. Yesterday when I came out of the apartment to go work out, as is my routine after work-I heard a strange noise up in the sky. While our place is relatively close to the airport one does not hear normally hear the low pitched whine of the mighty T-56-427 engine coming roaring overhead. I looked up and what did I see, but this manly airplane:

The mighty war hummer......
The Mighty War Hummer!

The major problem was, it took us an hour and a half to get from the entrance to the Intermodal Jet Plex to the parking area. I’ve been to the Reno Air Races it did not take near that long and that is a much bigger show in terms of numbers visiting. The big reason for this was because it seems the constabulary cannot plan traffic flow that well OR it could have something to do with the geography of Shopping Mall’s airport-which at is a commercial airport and not that big a one at that. Plus they did not want to disrupt commercial traffic which meant one runway had to stay open and that traffic flow into the airport could not follow the usual pattern.

Thus we took the long way. Come see where it took us!

After we finally got there and the S.O. was forced to discard the drinks she brought in her plastic bag we made the hike across the tundra:


Note the number of cars behind us!

So the acrobatics had already started-I wanted to see the static displays:

Which took a while to get to:

Another A-10 was doing a show while we were in the traffic line!

Wonder if I could save up money to buy one of these:

With the glass cockpit!


Of course, I would need to learn to fly it!

Of course, Brand X had to be there:

Things did get interested once the flying started however. Come back to the next post for that!