| The Vandenburg Airshow
is held at Vandenburg Air Force Base, an hour or so north of Los Angeles
on the California coast. Unfortunately, this is another one
of those "mystery" shows whose organizers don't see any need to tell people
what aircraft are expected. Perhaps partly for that reason,
it wasn't very crowded so there was plenty of space to set up anywhere
you wanted. The sky was beautiful, but the light was horrible, with
the sun in your face throughout the display. There's space for the
aircraft to bank around the crowd area both on the left and the right,
but most performers didn't do this tightly enough to allow many good banking
shots.
There were good individual
displays of modern military aircraft by an A-10 Thunderbolt II, an F-16
Fighting Falcon and this F/A-18C Hornet but they were a little too far
from the crowdline for good photography.
The F/A-18C is distinguishable
from the F/A-18A by the two little bumps behind the canopy, which contain
some electronics. |
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| As
well as its solo display, the Hornet also performed one of the US Navy's
Tailhook Legacy Flights with this F8F Bearcat. I didn't get any shots
of the legacy flight worth writing home about, but a few from the Bearcat's
individual display came out OK. This particular aircraft was built
in 1948 or 1949, depending on who you believe, and currently belongs to
the American Airpower Heritage Flying Museum based in Texas. It's
the youngest Bearcat which is still flying, out of a total production of
about 1200. Although Bearcats were just too late for world
war two, American-supplied aircraft were used by the French in Indo-China
before American combat troops got involved. |
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| The
Navy does its Tailhook Legacy Flight and the Air Force does its Heritage
Flight, which took the form at this show of a display by the F-16 and A-10
which had previously done individual displays, flying in formation with
a pair of P-51D Mustangs. Again, I didn't get any decent banking
shots of this display, and the wind which started picking up soon after
the displays began prevented the aircraft from flying very tightly together. |
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| One
of the highlights for me was this P-40 Warhawk, one of about 20 still flying,
which did a brief simulated dogfight with a Japanese Zero fighter - not
the Chino Air Museum Zero with the original Japanese Sakae engine, but
an original Zero airframe with an American Pratt and Whitney radial.
You can just guess who won the dogfight (hint for those who aren't sure
- the American plane always wins). The base commander's
blurb in the airshow programme talked about how the P-40 "controlled the
skies over China", but as I remember my history they actually employed
hit-and-run tactics against the nimble Zeroes, and avoided getting into
dogfights with them. The Warhawk was the first American fighter
able to exceed 300 miles per hour, and it ended up as the third most numerous
American-designed fighter built during the war, serving most famously with
the Flying Tigers, who were American volunteers fighting the Japanese in
China before America and Japan were officially at war. However,
as already mentioned, the aircraft's performance wasn't as good in several
aspects as the enemy aircraft it faced, and it's not considered one of
the first-rate aircraft of the war. |
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| This
Russian world war two Yak 9u fighter was another pleasant sight.
Unfortunately, I believe that it's not a restored aircraft, but a replica
recently built in Russia. It's also been modified to have two
seats, and this one has a slightly ugly looking but probably very functional,
canopy. To please the crowd smoke generators have been added underneath
the wingtips, but he did a good display both with and without smoke, so
I shouldn't complain too much! |
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| Most
people can't get too excited by training planes, but I thought this display
was probably the single best thing I saw at the show. On the
bottom is a world war two T-6 Texan (or more accurately an SNJ, since it's
in US Marines colors) and on top is the most recent training plane to enter
the American inventory, known here as a T-6A Texan II, in honor of its
earlier namesake. The Texan II isn't actually an American aircraft,
it was designed by the Swiss company Pilatus, which calls it the PC-9.
I saw one of these fly in the
Royal International Air Tattoo in the UK in 2002, which was one of
its first outings. In the USA the Beech company, which is now
part of Raytheon, claims credit for the Texan II, it's quite a trend in
America for foreign aircraft to be fielded as if they were produced by
a local company, perhaps to decrease the ever-present risk in America of
politicians objecting to the planes on the dubious grounds of patriotism. |
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| Anyone
who has been to more than one California airshow this year has probably
seen the three ship Patriot team in their L39 Albatros jets.
The Patriots are a civilian team who do a very good act, including tricks
such as tail slides which none of the military jet teams do, but the black
paint is not ideal photographically. I was surprised to see the water
vapor on the L39's wings, since there was a very cool wind and humidity
was low - though of course Vandenburg is right by the ocean.
The Albatros was designed and built in the Czech Republic by Aero Vodochody
as a jet trainer for communist air forces, and they're a very attractive
looking aircraft which have become highly sought after by civilian warbirds
enthusiasts. In America Boeing claims credit for them, which
at least saves people from having to mangle the pronounciation of the real
manufacturer's name! |
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There were 4 or 5
different types of helicopter on static display at this year's show, and
two UH-1 "Hueys" did displays, one winching people from the ground while
still in flight, and this one with a water bucket.
If you want to see
a Huey and water bucket in action during a real fire, then visit my Bound Brook
Flood Helicopters page, which will open in a new window. |
| As
is so often the case, much of the best stuff was only on static display,
with one of those big old USAF E-3 Sentry AWACS planes with a 30 foot diameter
rotating radar dome on top, a world war two C-46 Commando cargo plane,
a B-17 Flying Fortress and various other goodies, including this strike
version of the Tornado from the German Air Force. You can see various
interesting bits and pieces on this aircraft, with some type of missile
on the wing, a pair of HARMs (high speed anti-radiation missiles) under
the fuselage to destroy enemy radar stations, the retractable in-flight
refuelling nozzle extending from the top of the engine air intake, and
the 27mm Mauser cannon at the bottom of the fuselage, below the tip of
the refuelling nozzle. |
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It's not well known
in America, but the German Air Force has a large number of people stationed
at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, it's very convenient for them
because there's so much empty space out there for them to do their combat
training. The two German pilots at the show are both instructors,
they weren't at Holloman during the recent PhanCon event, instead they
were at Tyndall. They were allowing people to sit in the cockpit,
something I don't recall being allowed in American fighter aircraft!
Unfortunately foreign aircraft like this Tornado don't get much opportunity
to fly at American events, one of the very few exceptions being the
Holloman airshow.
As you can see, there's
no "glass cockpit" here, just lots of analog dials and switches!
Of course this is the pilot's cockpit, the navigator's cockpit behind him
has a few screens, but nothing like a more modern military aircraft.
The yellow and black loop at the front of the seat is the handle to activate
the ejection seat, presumably they had that deactivated at the show.
I'm not sure what the triangular looking thing on top of the seat is, perhaps
the pilot's Lederunterhosen? |
| This
is an MC-130P "Combat Shadow" Hercules, which is used for clandestine operations,
which usually carried out at night. Although this is an air
force plane, it has the large pods under the wings to allow "probe and
drogue" refuelling of other aircraft - which in this case usually means
helicopters. The nose, however, has nothing to do with refuelling,
it's more of a testimony to the versatility of this type of aircraft, which
entered its fiftieth year of service this year (a fifty year old Hercules,
the oldest one still flying, did a
firefighting water drop at the Prescott Air Fair a month or so before
the Vandenburg airshow). This huge nose contains some type
of powerful radar, and the black thing underneath isn't a nose goblin,
it's probably a FLIR (forward-looking infrared) unit or something similar.
Perhaps most interesting, though, are the four projections at the front
of the nose. These are the remnants of "Fulton" air recovery
equipment, which was used for a short period to rescue downed airman.
Two metal rods, about 10 feet or more in length, were attached to the nose
by those projections. In normal flight they were folded back
along each side of the nose, but to perform a rescue they were moved forward
to form a large "V" shape. The airman would use a helium bottle
in his inflatable raft to inflate a balloon attached to a 450 foot (135
meter) long nylon rope, the other end of which was attached to a harness
he wore. The Hercules would then fly at 150 miles an hour (240
km/h), hook the line between the rods and wrench the airman into the air.
Crew members stationed at the open rear ramp would then snag the line and
winch the crew member on board. It must have been one heck
of a wild ride! You can read more about the Fulton system on
this C-130
variants page, under the MC-130E/H section. |
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| This
F-117 Nighthawk "stealth fighter" was also on static display, with its
engine outlets covered in black tape - a very belated decision by the Air
Force that it wants to keep these outlets secret, especially considering
how many tens of thousands of photographs of them people have already taken!
There were also a couple of guards on duty around the aircraft, but not
fielding
machine guns as they have done at other shows. The four rods
sticking out of the front of the Nighthawk aren't guns, they're pitot tubes
and other equipment. You can see how strong the wind was from
the way the ribbons are waving around! This particular aircraft
is the oldest Nighthawk in existence, in fact it was originally a YF-117
test aircraft, but was later brought into operational status when budgets
were cut and the number of aircraft to be built was reduced.
Two F-117s have been lost that we know of, one that disintegrated during
an airshow in Maryland in 1997 and one that was shot down over Serbia in
1999. There are only 54 of these aircraft now, 36 of which are on
active duty, and they're all stationed at Holloman Air Force Base in New
Mexico. |
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Vandenburg is not
a good place to go if you suffer from compulsive camera and lens envy,
because some of the guys there were packing pretty impressive rigs!
This is one of the systems they use to track and record the missile launches
which are the bread and butter of Vandenburg's day-to-day operations.
As you can see from
the guy's jacket, the strong wind made it pretty cold, I was dumb enough
to leave my jacket in the car so I just had a thin polycotton shirt on,
luckily it didn't become intolerable. More of a problem was that
I left all of my spare batteries at home and the one that was in the camera
showed up mostly empty when I first switched it on. So I could barely
do any chimping and in the end I had to switch over to the 1Ds and stick
a teleconverter onto the 100-400mm lens, which reduced me to one functional
auto-focus point. With the batteries on that getting run down I had
to make this a one day show, which at least allowed me to get home and
pretend to have a rest - at least until the next two airshows, the Jackie
Cochran airshow next week and the Nellis show in two weeks! |
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