Stuart Air Show 2024
In honor of Veterans Day, a few snapshots from this year’s Stuart (Florida) Air Show…
First, let’s see what can be done with the latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max. The “5X” lens (120mm-equivalent) works out reasonably well for very large aircraft and for formation/smoke displays:
Things quickly get pixelated with cropping:
How about using the Canon 800/11 lens profiled previously here for air show work? Here’s the heritage flight:
Maybe one of the positive things that will come out of the Election 2024 Nakba is that Donald Trump will bring back the A-10 Warthog:
Mike Goulian (yellow) and his former protégé Rob Holland (red/Black) were there. The 800mm lens is actually too short for these tiny planes unless one gets (white?) privileged access to a press stand. Heavily cropped:
Every glider needs two jet engines, according to Bob Carlton (the “Foxjet” pilot):
Getting back to the machines that impress everyone except the Houthis… the F-22 (see this lecture about F-22 fly-by-wire from our MIT class).
How about a show version of the F-16?
(If Greta Thunberg hadn’t been busy with a Queers for Palestine rally she would have no doubt objected both to the gratuitous waste of Jet A fuel and the fact that the F-16 is the workhorse of Israel’s air force.)
How about some relics of the old days when the objective in war was to actually win? P-51, T-28, and MiG 17:
Let’s finish with Nathan Hammond, whose night airshow performance is always the highlight of Oshkosh, and Bill Stein:
The Stuart airport (KSUA) is about to get a huge boost from the Trump Dictatorship v2.0. Any time that Trump spends at Mar-a-Lago the PBI airport will become painful to use. The (fuel-selling) FBOs at PBI will be as angry on January 20, 2025 as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.
Separately, seeing all of this military hardware makes me wonder what our military is for. If our borders our open then any enemy can order its troops to walk across our southern border and then attack the U.S. from the inside. That said, I am impressed with the bravery of every veteran who has flown a military aircraft, in which there are usually plenty of ways to get killed without enemy involvement.
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