Gulf Coast Salute

This past weekend, I went down to Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City Beach in Floirda to the 2005 Gulf Coast Salute Air Show. The featured act was the Snowbirds of the Royal Canadian Air Force. For someone who has never seen them I was blown away. Whereas the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels are more about power and noise, the Snowbirds were all about finesse and show. I thoroughly enjoyed watching them, and I hope to get to see them again someday. Additionaly, the show had several top notch acts including an Extra 300S flown by Patty Wagstaff as well as a Yak-54 performance called Russian Thunder (both very very impressive displays) as well as the East Coast F-15 Demonstration Team. Additionally the USAF Heritage flight consisted of the East Coast F-15C and a locally based F-4E! The F-4 took off first, in full afterburner, and after years of not being able to hear a Phantom it was a most pleasing sound….not to mention loud! After the F-15 did its demo, the F-4 came back, and they did several passes together before they broke off and F-4 did a full afterburner high-speed pass followed by a sharp left turn followed by the F-15 about 10 seconds later. I was in heaven! Anyway, I took a ton of pictures at the event with a friend’s digital camera. I didn’t take too many aerial shots because the camera in question wasn’t really designed for it, but I’ll post a few that I took. I was going to start with posting pictures of several of the aircraft on static display. There were some awesome aircraft on static display, so I’ll try to get to most of the pictures I took though it could take a while. In the meantime enjoy these pictures of some of the F-4’s on display.

First, an F-4G…

Then, an even better looking F-4E complete with shark-mouth!

(my current desktop picture)