Air Show

Here is Andrew's nerd blog. I went to an air show on Lake Washington. Here are the highlights.

This is a picture of two of the most famous of the WWII fighters. The North American (absorbed into Boeing) P-51B and the Supermarine Spitfire. They never told me which variation of the spitfire it was, but oh well.

They also had a tribute to the Coast Guard - Guardian style. This HH-65 Dolphin flew in and dropped in a rescue swimmer. It flew around in a few circles while the swimmer thrashed around pretending to get someone ready for hoisting up. Then got hoisted up. It was cool to see.




Next they brought in an AV-8 Harrier II. This is one of the coolest jets in the world because it can take off vertically. It can also hover in one spot and translate in two axes. They demonstrated the Harrier's ability to hover. It was pretty cool. This shows how it can hover and actually fly backwards.

It can do this because the Harrier has a thrust to weight ratio greater than one. This means that the engines produce more thrust than the airplane weighs. The thrust also gets put out through special ducts in the sides of the fuselage, wingtips, and nose in order to provide the stability necessary to keep it from rolling or pitching in weird ways. Its pretty cool. Check out the video.





And here is one of the most (if not the most) aerobatic airplanes in the world. This plane weighs no more than 1200 lbs. (about the weight of a Geo Metro) and has an engine capable of over 400 horsepower (about 100 more than a classic Ford Mustang - I would have used the example of the AC Cobra 427 GT, but I don't think that most people know what that is) (Wouldn't that be cool - a metro with an AC 427 Cobra engine in it?). This plane could hover using its prop as a helicopter rotor!

And I know what you're thinking Ross... "This is my kinda crop duster!" (Watch out Melanie, if Ross ever starts a sentence with the words 'Remember that airplane on Sarah and Andrew's blog...' - The answer is 'NO!')





Next up was one of my favorite airplanes of all time! The C-130 Hercules. I don't know why I like it so much, but it's awesome. Its a turbo prop that has a ceiling altitude of 35,000 ft. It was designed for short runway take offs. Short take offs mean less than 0.5 miles. For those who don't know, a 747 can sometimes require up to 3 miles to take off. Most cases (if not all usual cases) require over a mile. After it takes off, it can climb at an angle of 45 degrees (most airplanes that you ride on never exceed 20 to 30).

Anyway, this one is especially cool because it is the one that takes all of the Blue Angels' gear around! His (yes, I know that planes and ships are usually 'her's' for some reason, but honestly would you name your daughter 'Albert' - if you would, you should be shot) name is 'Fat Albert'.


So, the reason the C-130 was here was because the Blue Angels also did a demonstration! The Blue Angels are Navy owned McDonald Douglas (now Boeing) F/A-18s. The video shows them flying in formation. Their formations force them to keep a minimum distance of 18 inches apart, but it sure looks closer than that some times.

What's even cooler is that you can see the aerodynamics at work. If you look closely you can see that the airplanes are staggered at different heights. This is because they need to stay out of each others' wing tip vortices. These vortexes are created because of how an airplane flies. The wing creates lift by making pressure differences. The bottom of the wing is making a high pressure and the top part makes a low pressure. The high pressure then pushes the airplane into the low pressure lifting the airplane up. So, when you get to the wing tip the high pressure on the bottom goes around the tip to get to the low pressure on top. This makes a swirling motion. When you're creating 40,000 lbs of lift, the vortices could put you out of control (see Wikipedia article for examples of crashes from wing tip vortices). Doesn't it make the flying that much cooler to know that these guys are precision pilots, and that inches could put them into a wing vortex that could throw their plane out of the sky?





So, now you can see that airplanes are awesome, and I am a nerd. I even left out some of the interesting details, like the eliptic planform of the Spitfire. I was also just looking through the pictures and noticed that it doesn't look sunny. Believe me, it was. I got sunburned. I guess that's what Seattle's sunny looks like.