| Point
Mugu Airshow 2004 Highlights |
| The
Point Mugu airshow isn't really a top-tier airshow, because of the limited
range of aircraft which fly, and the long gaps in the flying schedule.
However, I was interested in going because the list of aircraft flying
included this E2C Hawkeye, which I'd never seen in the air at any other
show. It probably didn't hurt the Hawkeye's chances of doing
a display that the commanding officer at Point Mugu used to pilot them!
As you've probably already realized from seeing the large radar dish above
its fuselage, the Hawkeye is a carrier-based Airborne Early Warning (AEW)
aircraft, protecting the fleet by tracking enemy aircraft. |
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| The
Hawkeye, and the C-2 Greyhound cargo plane which was derived from it, have
the widest wingspan of any aircraft flying today from aircraft carriers
- just over 80 feet (24.5 meters). Both a Hawkeye and a Greyhound
were on static display at the show, so it was interesting to compare the
two at close range. Although it's unglamorous, It takes skill
and courage to fly such a large aircraft onto and off of the relatively
narrow deck of an aircraft carrier. Since space is strictly
limited in this environment, the wings fold to allow more aircraft to be
packed into a small space. The Hawkeye is one of the few aircraft
which is able to take off from a carrier without catapult assistance, though
it's hard to see what use an early warning plane would be if the fighters
couldn't take off! |
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| Here's
a real glamor aircraft, an F-18F Super Hornet, significantly larger than
its F-18A/B/C/D Hornet predecessor, and distinguishable by the rectangular
air intakes (compared to the Hornet's rounded ones) and the small "dog
tooth" in the leading edge of the wing. Before you get any
ideas, this plane wasn't going supersonic during this flypast!
There was a lot of moisture in the air on the morning it did this high-speed
sub-sonic pass, and the partial vacuum surrounding the plane as it pushed
through the sky was enough to cause this moisture to condense out, for
a small fraction of a second. |
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Traces of vapor trail
off the leading edge wing extensions, which are actually designed to produce
vortices like this in order to keep air flowing over the tops of the wings
when the plane is flying at a high "angle of attack" such as this one is
doing. The Super Hornet has much larger wing extensions than
the original Hornet, because the earlier extensions caused turbulence which
impacted the vertical tail surfaces, resulting in some serious damage which
put the entire program into jeopardy.
If you want to see
more Super Hornet photos, with more technical data, then go to my Dayton
Airshow 2003 Super Hornet page, which will open in a new window. |
| Well,
the navy can't have all the fun, so here's an Air Force F-15 Eagle fighter,
with its afterburners lit. The Eagle is generally considered
to be the world's best fighter aircraft, it's certainly one of the fastest
and it can survive a lot of battle damage - one Israeli F-15 was successfully
landed after losing its entire right wing during a mid-air collision with
another Israeli aircraft, an A-4 Skyhawk. |
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| The
F-15 might not be as maneuverable as some other fighters such as the Russian
jets with vectored thrust from engine nozzles which can be pointed in different
directions during flight, but it's no slug either. The large
wing surfaces allow some very tight turning, such as this minimum radius
turn with afterburners. You can bet your last dollar that the
pilot is being pushed deep into his seat by this little trick! |
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It's good to see
where my tax dollars are going - straight out of the back of this guy's
engines!
Oh, but it's worth
it just to show that the air force can pull vapor bursts every bit as well
as the navy can!
But for a real display
of vapor check out the
2007 Point Mugu airshow, where almost every plane in the air was accompanied
by a large and fast-moving cloud! |
| Like
the Super Hornet, the Eagle is one of military aviation's glamor gals.
Here's a plane that isn't - an A-10 Thunderbolt II, which most people refer
to as the "warthog" because of its supposed ugliness. It's
a strictly utilitarian aircraft, largely designed around the barrel of
its 21 foot (6.4 meter) long gatling gun, which you can see extending from
the front of the plane. This enormous gun is the reason why
the nose wheel of the plane is offset to one side. To keep
it from overheating, the gun has 7 barrels which rotate as each 30mm depleted
uranium shell is fired; each shell is a foot long, weighs a pound and a
half and can penetrate 69mm (2.7 inches) of armor plate at a distance of
500 meters. The gun can fire an incredible 65 of these a second,
and as you can imagine the recoil as it does so slows the plane down significantly.
You can see two interesting features in this view of its underside - a
huge surface area devoted to the flaps which extend from the back of the
wing and allow the plane to stay under control even at low speeds, and
a large black teardrop in the shape of the canopy which was painted on
the plane to confuse enemy anti-aircraft gunners about the direction in
which the Thunderbolt is flying! |
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| Many
of the air force's top brass wanted to see the warthog taken out of service
- ground attack missions were generally considered to be the army's business,
and it just wasn't as fast and glamorous as those fighter planes - heck,
there were even jokes that the Thunderbolt was so slow that it was at risk
of taking bird strikes from the rear - meaning that birds could fly faster
than it could and ending up running into the back of its jet engines!
However, the plane was so successful in conflicts like the Gulf War that
it was impossible to retire. It might not be fast, but those
flaps you saw in the previous photo make it extremely maneuverable at low
speeds, and it is a very tough bird. The pilot sits in a titanium
"bathtub" which can stop a direct hit by a 23mm anti-aircraft shell; the
flight control systems have redundant backups; even the location of the
engines and the twin tail planes is designed to hide them from heat-seeking
missiles, but as some battle-damaged planes during the first Gulf War demonstrated,
those engines can keep running even if hit by quite a bit of ground fire. |
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| Here's
an even less glamorous air force plane, a C-130 Hercules cargo plane.
This is the very recent C-130J model of this venerable aircraft, instantly
recognizable by the propellers with their six weirdly curved blades.
The Hercules first flew in 1954, but since then it has been produced in
many variants for different roles, including the KC-130 air-to-air tanker,
electronic warfare EC-130s, and even as a flying gunship armed with machine
guns, cannons and a 105mm howitzer! One other variant was on
static display at the show a DC-130 "drone control" plane, together with
some of the target drones which can be launched from pylons below its wings. |
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| This
is obviously a show aimed more at people interested in modern military
jets than world war two propeller driven aircraft, however a couple of
the latter did fly. In this photo the F-15 and A-10 are flown
in formation with a world war two P-51D Mustang fighter, in what the air
force calls a "Heritage Flight". They've been doing this type
of display with different combinations of planes for several years, but
this is the first time I can remember three aircraft flying together. |
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| Not
to be left out, the navy started doing Tailhook Legacy Flights soon after
the air force started its Heritage Flights. Here's the same
F-18F from the earlier display flying in formation with a world war 2 F6F
Hellcat fighter. Only specially qualified pilots are allowed
to fly the Tailhook Legacy and Heritage flights, perhaps that's why the
Super Hornet's back-seat airman is missing from this shot. |
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| Even
though it's just a short drive north from Los Angeles, the show wasn't
unpleasantly crowded, possibly because neither of the two American armed
service jet display teams was flying. However, this gave an
opportunity for some of the smaller guys to show their stuff, in this case
a civilian team called the Patriots, flying their Czechoslovakian L-39
Albatros jets. The Albatros is a very attractive aircraft which
started life as a Soviet military jet trainer, but is now popular with
American enthusiasts with a thick wad of dollars in their pocket.
I was in the right spot at the right time to catch them as did their low-flying
Wall of Fire routine, ending the airshow with a bang! |
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Check
out the 2007 Point
Mugu airshow.
|
