Air Show Excitement

Air Shows draw all sorts of buzz and excitement. The summer of 2008 offered two distinctly different types of air shows. Cleveland hosted its annual Labor Day weekend air show, complete with the armed forces elite air team.

2008 saw the Blue Angels make their traditional and stunning performance (see right, click to enlarge).


The sight of cluster of Blue Angels racing over downtown Cleveland is a sight to see (left, click to enlarge). I remember going to an Indians game at Cleveland Municipal Stadium one Labor Day Weekend and getting a BOGO deal: watching the Indians play while the air show buzzed by overhead. Thanks to the acoustics of Municipal Stadium, thunderous jets are magnified when the sound is trapped under the lower deck... and the lack of fans of an Indians team long-since out of contention reduces sound absorption too.

Akron, Ohio hosted a vintage World War II air show in June, 2008. As a warbird buff from my childhood days, this was a great opportunity to see some memories revisited. While traditional favorites such as the P-51 and B-25 were present, I'd never had the chance to get up close to some other ones. It was a great joy to be able to peer into the cabin of a PBY Catalina (see right, click to enlarge) and then watch it fly around the field (see below, click to enlarge).

What makes an air show in Akron so appealing is that you don't have to fight the crowds like you do major city air shows and the price is very affordable. Yes, you can get sucked dry by the concessions and souvenir stands, but the tickets to get in are tiered nicely for families and getting in, out and parking is a breeze. Over the past several years different organizations have sponsored air shows at the airport.


The star of the Akron show was the F-4U Corsair, which was built just off the grounds of what today is the Akron Fulton Municipal Airport (click for link to historic Corsair/Goodyear photos). In the shadow of the legendary air dock where Goodyear built blimps. the F-4U rolled off the assembly line to fly in World War II.

The North American B-25 Mitchell to both fly and sit on the line for close-up viewing was the Panchito. An Akron native piloted the Panchito (see right, click to enlarge) in World War II. From a story in the Akron Beacon Journal (June 15, 2008):

Panchito's visit to Akron this weekend is a homecoming of sorts. Panchito is a B-25 Mitchell bomber first piloted during World War II by an Akron man, the late Don Seiler. The plane, with Seiler's name still painted on its cockpit, flew into his hometown to be one of the attractions at Wings Over Akron at Akron Fulton International Airport.

Right is a little Photoshop fun with Panchito. I was able to get a nice close side shot of the nose art, and it was easily "erased" in Photoshop leaving the nose art bare. I dropped that into a fly-by picture of the B-25. Shot against a flat blue sky, it was also easy to copy, paste and reduce two copies of Panchito and drop them into what looks like a squadron of B-25's. The intended effect was flying from the past into the future by having the black and white photo effect of the 1940's give way to the full color restoration of the plane(see right, click to enlarge).

While the Akron air show was a small affair, Cleveland's air show is packed with a day's-long worth of things to see and do. I had not been to one in at least a decade if not twice that. It is a major entertainment affair (read: bring lots of cash), but definitely worth the cost if you are willing to spend the time. I thought it was an amusing juxtaposition to watch a multi-million dollar jet piroutting in the sky while kids romped on inflatables (see below, click to enlarge).


Living along one of the landing approaches to the Akron-Canton airport, there are times when the solace of the day is broken by the sound of the rotors of the army's CH-47 Chinook on approach after a training flight. It was neat to walk inside one of these and to capture the skyline of Cleveland out the window (see left, click to enlarge). Chinook's currently see active duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan .


It's nice to get inside some aircraft to get a sense of what our soldiers deal with when transporting equipment or themselves. As I waited to climb up into the cabin of the C-117 Globemaster, a B-17 taxied back from a demonstration flight. It was an interesting point of view to take a picture of a B-17 from the cargo bay of the C-117 (see right, click to enlarge). From the cramped conditions of the World War II vintage bomber, to the cavernous interior of the Globemaster, complete with sleeping bay aft of the cockpit.

The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress had just returned from doing a re-enactment bomb run. Major air shows are definitely different from when I was a kid. Speakers and pyrotechnics have been set up so as the B-17 approached on its "bomb run" you heard the distinctive rattle of .50 caliber machine guns and then an explosion with flames from the airfield. I found it funny that in this reenactment the onlookers are casual, including one on a cell phone. The black smoke with a the plane in the background looks more like a crash has just happened (see right, click to enlarge).



Another new twist that I don't remember, is for two pilots to have a running dialog with each other in a mock Cold War-era dogfight between a Russian and American jet.

Both jets had striking paint jobs of a dragon and American flag. Billed as "Red Star vs. the Dragon", the BAC-167 Strikemaster (see left, click to enlarge) was the craftily detailed allied jet.


The Blue Angels are accompanied by the "Fat Albert" C-130 which ferries the support team and ground crew (see right, click to enlarge). Fat Albert pulls the first demonstration duty before the Blue Angels soar into the sky.

But what would an air show be without the ear-splitting road from the high performance fighter jets. The F-18 (see below, click to enlarge) certainly lives up to that standard as it darts across the sky and disappears into the haze over Lake Erie, only to vault by and burn through the downtown skyline.













- J.