James and I went to the Miramar Air Show today. I've never been to an air show so I thought it would be pretty cool to check out. I thought that it would be pretty crowded, most air shows are crowded right? At least the ones I've read about or seen on the news are packed. I was really more interested in checking out the "static" exhibits than the aerial show. James said that it was free as unless we wanted to get into the grandstands to watch the actual air show. We figured that if it got interesting enough we can always buy grandstands seats once there.
As we got closer to the air base, we were getting worried that it might actually get cancelled! It was drizzling quite a bit and there were clouds for as far as we can see. We couldn't even see a "window" of sunlight anywhere!
Sure enough, as we got off the freeway, it was a straight shot in to the base... no waiting. All the worries about being able to make the "cut-off" for people getting on the base pretty much became jokes.
Once we got there and parked the car. It was still very overcast and there was a light drizzle every now and again. Right at the parking lot, they had a bunch of these helicopters all lined up. I have to say that seeing one up close is cool but seeing a whole line of them is freaking impressive!
The static exhibit they had was very cool. They had some older jets and as you can see it was very cloudy that morning.
Front
Back
The public was able to enter some of the larger panes and helicopters in the exhibit.
The announcer kept telling the crowd that the Stealth Bomber was going to do a fly-by but James and I kept missing it every time it flew by. It was still overcast and well... it was pretty damn fast! I was finally able to get a few shots of it only because the announcer was telling the crowd from which side it was going to be flying in from.
I don't know if these were the actual pilots flying it but they sure made it into the crowds rather quickly considering they just flew by less than 15 minutes ago.
I wanted to say that there was a crash but no one was hurt but the smoke was from a jet truck racing through the runway. Yeah, a jet truck... oh brother.
That bomber in the back was huge! From what I was told it isn't even the biggest! Yikes!
They also had a few demonstrations.
Then a "window" in the clouds and a biplane flew in to do a few aerial stunts.
But as quickly as the window appeared, it closed up just as quickly. Never saw these guys take off.
By noon, we went through the whole exhibit and a couple of air stunts/demonstrations. The clouds were getting thick again and since we did not bring any chairs, we decided to go ahead and leave. On the way out, we saw that the line of cars still heading into the show and the base stretched pretty far out. It almost went all the way back to the freeway but not quite. We were glad we decided to get to the show as early as we did, parking would have been insane!