Birds n bugs's Blog

The year we had three B-25 Mitchells on hand.  Panchito, Barbie III and Killer Bee.  All three were on static display and were hosting three of the remaining five Doolittle Raiders.  Panchito was it’s normal gorgeous self in shining aluminum, Killer Bee was decked out in Camo looking for a trip to North Africa and Barbie III was showing off her 75mm cannon and some 50 calibre inverted cleavage on static display. 

Unfortunately, the show was pretty busy with the Doolittle Raiders so shots of the static aircraft were difficult.  Panchito and Killer Bee were moved to the south ramp prior to the ground attack demonstration.  They can be seen together in the image at the top of this entry.  I thought I wouldn’t see Barbie III in flight but, Monday morning, I heard the engines and got a distant shot of her being escorted out of town by a T6 also decked out for ground attack.

I managed to catch one shot of the front of Killer Bee showing a more conventional gun layout and the cockpit after landing.

My favorite shot of Killer Bee though was on climbout.  Unfortunately, the nose art was only on the port side.

Panchito was, as usual, lookin’ good on the simulated attack runs and on the  ground.

One of the real crowd pleasers at any airshow is the Heritage Flight.  In these flights an older warbird leads a formation of modern combat aircraft from the various USAF flight demonstration teams.  This year we had a fourship formation with a P-51 Mustang leading an F-22 Raptor, F-16 Fighting Falcon and an A-10 Thunderbolt II.  OK, I like Viper and Warthog better myself but, since the link above is to the Air Combat Command site I thought I would let the bureacrats win one.

Flying this kind of formation isn’t easy.  Each aircraft has it’s own characteristics and the pilots train for quite a while before acceptance into the program.  In fact, Air Combat Command has a training program specifically for the Heritage Flights.

Here are a couple of other shots from the flight.  The first was caught as the flight was breaking formation.   In the second, the Raptor driver seems to be making an adjustment.

After several diamond flybys, the aircraft departed in a line formation.

This weekend, the Florida International Air Show rolls into town.  I went over to the airport today to see what might be going on that could be worth photographing.  As soon as I got there, I noticed an old DC-7B in Eastern Airlines livery doing a  visual check along the runway before making a landing.  That gave me just enough time to get to one of my favorite spots to get this shot.

Once it landed, I heard jet engines spooling up and looked down the taxiway to see the Heavy Metal Jet Team rolling down to take off.  Looks like their website isn’t up to date because I didn’t see the T-33 that is listed as one of their aircraft.  Instead, a new Aero L-39 showed up in a non-standard paint job.

This one ran solo passes while another 4 L-39s did formation work.  At the end, all formed up with the black one in the lead.  Here are a couple of the formations.

I stuck around until they ended the practice and noticed one of the local fliers looking pretty hopeful as one of them landed.  Fortunately, he was disappointed by a safe landing.