While the previous act was underway, the Mustang and Sabre took off from one of the other runways, and soon had a little formation going .
Then the F15 eased in alongside...
At one point the Sabre fell outsdie and behind... not sure what the trouble was, but it took another circuit to get it together again.
As the F16 dropped in, it was time for the first pass, across the showline.
Pretty good, but how about another?
No problem... they seem to be in the groove now...
A nice breakaway maneuver this time... sweet!
Time to focus now on the superstar of the Century-series American fighters. This is the only airworthy F104 Starfighter in the world (at the moment), one of three owned and operated by the Starfighters airshow demonstration team.
She's a two-seat model with a brutish 9,000-hp Orenda engine... this important Cold War interceptor design was called "the missile with a man in it", and rightly so...it's a supersonic, 30,000-lb. GTW aircraft with a 21-foot wingspan. It doesn't like to fly slowly, but man, does it like to fly fast!!
This was the first fighter capable of sustained flight at Mach 2.
Nothing looks or sounds like it... a very special airplane. Sexy.
Pilot Rick Svetkoff kept the 104 pretty high and pretty far from the crowd for most of the display, except for a few low 600-mph passes which were a bit hard to catch with my camera
. But I got some decent shots... here the air brakes are deployed before a turn.
An inverted pass...
A peek at the fiery fury of the Orenda...
I managed to make good use of the one really good photo pass... note the flaps; she was dawdling at about 200 mph or so.
Next: the Blue Angels!
