The American Airshow

Today was finally the day I've been looking forward for quite a while: Airshow at the Andrews Air Force base in Washington DC. Due to exams, I had to miss my local airshow, Ursel Avia, which really annoyed me. But the airshow today totally made up for missing Ursel Avia. They had much more cool aircraft here and the shows were so much spectacular. While many acrobatic flights are forbidden in Belgium, you can basically do anything you like in America. 

This morning I left with my roommates to Andrews Air Force base, prepared for an unforgettable, but very hot day (around 30° C). On our way, we were already treated by a fly-over of the B-2 stealth bomber (look up that aircraft, it's a beauty). The day could not have started any better :) . Once arrived at the base, it just became hotter. There were no clouds, you were standing on hot concrete all the time surrounded by more than 100,000 other visitors. But all the aircraft displayed made you forget about all of that. You could enter many of these aircraft if you didn't mind waiting in line for a while. Definitely check out some of my pictures of these awesome aircraft. With help of my housemate, Nick, I finally got my cool, but professional LinkedIn profile picture. Of course there was an aircraft in the background ;) .

I remember being in a lecture of Coen de Visser, my control theory professor last year. He was showing a movie of thrust vectoring of the F-22 and told us to look up some more videos about this aircraft on youtube, which I did. That night I ended up watching lots of videos of this awesome aircraft doing all sorts of awesome maneuvers, ranging from vertical flight, to sharp turns creating clouds of condensation over the upper wing and fuselage. I found that so extremely cool and I kept watching it for a long time. Today I had the full experience!!! Seeing it was awesome, but feeling it was even more incredible. You could feel the sound vibrations through your entire body when the F-22 Raptor flew over. It was just insane. I didn't take many picture since I was just overwhelmed and enjoying it. Besides, there are much better pictures and videos online then those I could take. So just go to youtube and look for a video of the F-22. It's f*cking amazing.

The Raptor was by far the best moment of the day, but the F-16 Thunderbirds formation team was pretty awesome as well. Again, the show reminded me of Coen's lectures since he used a picture of that team a couple of times in his powerpoints and briefly talked about them. Seeing 6 aircraft flying really close to each other at high speed is really spectacular, seeing two F-16 flying towards each other and just moving away second before they would cross is even more spectacular and even a bit scary. Again this was a show that you could feel all over your body. It has been an incredible experience and I really hope I can go to more shows like that. 

Definitely check out the pictures and videos I posted and talk to you next week!