re: Story behind a famous Navy flyby

Here is the pic of the P-51 that was piloted by Snodgrass at the Blue Angels airshow at Joint Base Andrews a few years ago. And that wasn't the lowest pass.

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That is one seriously sexy piece of flying machinery

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Quite possibly the most beautiful and cool aircraft ever built. At least in my opinion.

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Quite possibly the most beautiful and cool aircraft ever built. At least in my opinion.

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Aside from the one I posted... Second to the Mustang...

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Every time I see an F-14 I get a raging freedom boner.

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Saw one at a museum across from Davis Monthan AFB. It's a big plane and the tail hook is gigantic.

the reason I joined the Navy as an AE was to work on F-14's...I never realized this goal because my first duty station was helos...by the time I got to go somewhere else...the Tomcat had been decommed...

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the reason I joined the Navy as an AE was to work on F-14's

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I gave that rate a seriously hard look before stupidly choosing to be a nuke EM (and ultimately failing )

Do you work in a related field today?

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Quite possibly the most beautiful and cool aircraft ever built.

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Nah, brah. When the aircraft looks like this, its engines will not stop putting out more thrust until they literally begin to melt, and its primary defense is moving over 3,000 feet per second and then speeding up, THAT is the most beautiful and cool aircraft ever built.

Back in the mid to late '90s, I went to the air show in Belle Chasse and there was a Tomcat demo that day. They're very large and very loud. Towards the end of the demo, they showed off the power of the engines by making a low pass, engine nozzles only about 40' off the deck (flames were hitting the runway), at least 60 degree nose up attitude, and barely moving forward. Then, they went full burner (if they weren't already), dropped the nose and hauled arse out of there.

It was one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen at an air show. I don't know how wide the runway is, but the heat lit the grass on fire. They delayed the next act to roll the base fire trucks out to extinguish the fire. It was fricking awesome!

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Back in the day, guys could get away with some serious sh*t during deployment.


This was in 1988... everything changed in 1993. shite has been going downhill ever since.
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What happened in '93? Was that when the Tomcat pilot was hotdogging for his parents on takeoff out of Nashville and ended up killing some people?

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Those SR-71s are way smaller than I expected them to be

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Yeah, the lines of the plane tend to fool your eye and make you think it's way longer than it actually is, but it's just over twice as long as an F-16, so it's not a huge plane in the grand scheme of things. When you're talking about what it does, though, "100+ feet of airplane traveling at 2,200 mph 85,000 feet above the ground" is fricking staggering, and those numbers are just what the government admitted the plane would do to break and hold the records. Its actual top speed and ceiling are still classified, but Brian Shul claims to have hit Mach 3.5 over Libya with the engine still adding speed while outracing a SAM.

When the aircraft's retirement flight is to fly from LA to DC in 1 hour, 4 minutes, 20 seconds, that's just a giant reminder to everyone what being the king of airspeed really means. It flies across fricking North America in the time it takes you to load up your car and get to the airport.