God Bless America
Say ‘allo to my leetle fren’, Shockwave. He’s a Peterbilt mounted with three Pratt & Whitney J34-48 jet engines (angled slightly downward so it doesn’t launch itself directly into the stratosphere). Zero to 300 mph in 11 seconds and burns 400 gallons of fuel per mile on a speed run. And THIS, my friends, is why we simply must drill in ANWR.
Yep. I went to the RI Air Show this Saturday. The British Red Arrows (the RAF’s version of the Blue Angels) were there. They got here by hopping from England to Scotland to Iceland to Greenland to Northern Canada to the civilized world. Uncle B sent me a Red Arrows t-shirt last year, so I had to wear it. Turned out to be a collosal mistake, since they weren’t selling Red Arrow merchandice at the show (pff! Brits!). I nearly got mugged for it, when I wasn’t being mistaken for Red Arrow support staff.
There were some fantastic stunt pilots there, but Weasel’s into the milporn. And there was plenty and plenty of it. Quonset was once our main Navy pilot training base (it’s a peninsula, and the wind from the ocean apparently simulates a deck landing especially well). It’s an aviation museum now, so it’s all over the place with the decommissioned aircraft.
Sadly, the planes on the ground were covered in children, and the ones in the air were too fast or too far away for me to catch properly (a few pics on my Flickr page. Please to ignore all the typos and sorting errors I just noticed).
It was awesome.
At one point, a stunt pilot flew in low, raised the nose until the belly of the plane faced the crowd, and waggled it side to side in a maneuver I cannot begin to wrap my head around the aerowotsis of. The woman next to me said, “wow! But…I can’t help thinking about all that wasted fuel.”
Liberalism really is a mental disease, isn’t it?
June 30, 2008 — 2:57 pm
Comments: 40