The BLue Angles are too aggressive and gung ho? The first time I saw them I nearly fell asleep it was so boring. Once I saw a non-Blue Angel U.S. Navy pilot doing some aerobatics. On takeoff he tried to turn to soon and his wingtip would have struck the runway had he not checked himself. He flew again the next day and I noticed he waited a few more seconds before turning.
The Snowbirds were better/more exciting then the Blue Angeles, but still not terrible impressive. I do have a semi-funny story about these guys, though. They were using a room in my flight school for their briefings. I was in a room down the hall practicing instrument approaches on some modified PC simulators. I forget what the simulator was called, but they had these big boxes with basically a fake cockpit on the user end, and there was a yoke coming out of it and buttons for example where the heading bug knob (OBS, or whatever you call it, I forget) were to move the heading bug around, etc. Anyway, it was all pretty cheesy, in my opinion. Well, this Snowbird pilot comes walking along and sticks his head in. "MY GOD" he says out loud with a tone of incredible awe, like he just saw a F-16 take off going backwards. He stood there in the doorway for about fifteen seconds, slack-jawed in awe of all our cheezy simulators, then walked out. I thought it was funny as hell, because someone who probably has access to state-of-the-art military sim technology was blown away by our cheezy yoke-sticking-out-of-a-box sims--even our old, stained, clunky Frasca 141 sims where about 10 times better than these cheezy things. Maybe Canadian pilots are that strapped for cash then don't even have PC-type simulators.
The Snowbirds weren't the only military pilots who used our flightschool for various purposes when they were in town. It was always neat to be getting weathing info in our flight planning room right next to U.S. Air Force pilots, who usually came in for airshows. I always thought "don't these guys have some secret sattalite uplink programmed right into their cockpits". But our flight palling room was pretty good.
Anyway, the first time I saw the Thunserbirds, I was as slackjawed as that Snowbird pilot at the sight of our cheezy sims. They are the best I've seen, and an order of magnitude better than the Snowbirds or Blue Angeles. Real balls-to-the-wall stuff with the Thunderbirds.
I'm not a big fan of aerobatic flight and don't catch them very often anymore, but the best (military and civillian) I've seen is Patty Wagstaff in her Extra. Imagine if you could clone her and have some all-Patty Wagstaff formatin flying. That would be incredible.
And that just reminded me--this is just dumb gossip--but I had a friend who years ago was at one of those camps where rich parents send kinds who are hooked on drugs and basically total screwups, and he said Patty Wagstaff's kid was there too.
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