Vandenburg AFB airshow

Vandenburg was another one of those American “mystery” shows whose organizers don’t see any need to tell people what aircraft are expected :mad:.

Well, it wasn’t very crowded so there was plenty of space to set up wherever you wanted. The sky was beautiful, but the light was horrible, with the sun in your face throughout the display (I know many of you Brits just dream of having the sun in your face throughout a display but trust me, it’s not as glamorous as it seems). There’s space for the aircraft to bank around the crowd area both on the left and the right, but most performers didn’t do this tightly enough to allow many good banking shots.

There were nice displays by an A-10, an F-16 and this F/A-18, but they were a little too far from the crowdline for good photography:

As well as its solo display, the Hornet also did a tailhook legacy flight with this F8F Bearcat. I didn’t get any shots of the legacy flight worth writing home about, but a few from the Bearcat’s individual display came out OK:

Again, I didn’t get any decent banking shots of the Air Force Heritage flight, and they didn’t fly quite as tightly as one might hope, which is understandable considering the wind which started picking up soon after the displays began:

One of the highlights for me was the P-40 Warhawk, which did a brief simulated dogfight with a Zero – not Chino’s Zero with the original Japanese Sakae engine, but an original Zero airframe with a Pratt and Whitney radial. You can just guess who won the dogfight :rolleyes:!

The base commander’s blurb in the airshow programme talked about how the P-40 “controlled the skies over China”, but as I remember my history they actually employed hit-and-run tactics against the nimble Zeroes.

Another highlight was this Russian Yak9u fighter, unfortunately adulterated with smoke blowers, but he also put on a good display with the smoke off:

Obviously it’s been modified to put a second seat and different canopy on it. I haven’t been able to track down any information about this plane beyond that it’s a Yak9u whose nose art name is “Barbarossa”. Can some knowledgeable person tell me if it’s a restoration or newly built?

Perhaps the biggest highlight for me was the T-6 Texan and T-6A Texan II flyby:

Like the T-45 Goshawk (aka BAE Hawk), the Texan II is another repackaged foreign aircraft, in this case a Swiss Pilatus PC-9. I saw one of these fly in the UK at the RIAT airshow in 2002, which was one of its first outings. In the USA Beech, now swallowed by Raytheon, claim credit for the Texan II.

Anyone who has been to more than one California airshow this year has probably already seen the three ship Patriot team in their Czech L39 Albatros jets (Boeing L39? Please! 😎 ):

The Patriots do a very good act, including tricks such as tail slides which no other jet team does, but the black paint is not ideal photographically. I was surprised to see the water vapor on the L39’s wings, there was a very cool wind and humidity was low – though of course Vandenburg is right by the ocean.

As usual, much of the best stuff was only on static display, with one of those big old USAF AWACS planes (designation, anyone?), a C-46 Commando, F-117 with its engine outlets covered in black tape and a strike version of the Tornado from the German Air Force. The two German pilots at the show are both instructors, they weren’t at Holloman when the PhanConners were there, instead they were at Tyndall. They told me that the Tornados are going to be in service for a long time yet:

Just look at that poor, poor man leaning into the breeze. Now am I just imagining it, or did the Tornado pilot leaves his underpants on the seat? Sure looks like Lederunterhosen to me ;)!

Vandenburg is not a good place to go if you suffer from compulsive camera and lens envy, because some of the guys there were packing pretty impressive rigs:

This is one of the systems they use to track and record the missile launches which are the bread and butter of Vandenburg’s day-to-day operations. As you can see from the guy’s jacket, the strong wind made it pretty cold, I was dumb enough to leave my jacket in the car so I just had a thin polycotton shirt on, luckily it didn’t become intolerable. More of a problem was that I left all of my spare batteries at home and the one that was in the camera showed up mostly empty when I first switched it on. So I could barely do any chimping 🙁 and in the end I had to switch over to the 1Ds and stick a teleconverter onto the 100-400mm lens, which reduced me to one functional auto-focus point. With the batteries on that getting run down I had to make this a one day show, which at least allowed me to get home and pretend to have a rest – at least until the next two airshows, the Jackie Cochran airshow next week and the Nellis show in two weeks!

Richard.