Re: O/T Blue Angels freqs.


Message posted by Mike on May 14, 2002 at 23:34:37 PST:

Well, Zipper was right about Saturday. We had a monsoon come through and the airshow was a complete washout! Sunday was very cloudy with a cloud level of 8-900 feet. Went out to airport and was able to see "Bert" do his JATO take-off (Blue Angel support plane C-130 Jet assisted take-off). Never seen anything like that before! Very cool. Takes off and then lights up the the jets and goes damn near straight up in the air and then levels out with huge trail of smoke behind him. Did some serious banking and came back around to thunder down the runway going flat out. I honestly didn't know a C-130 could go that fast ... our local guard guys don't seem to fly our resident C130s like that at all! Next up were the Blue Angels and they put on a decent low level show. Interesting to hear the lead call for maneuvers and how fast the other Angels checked in (sort like calling an audible in football!). Hank and Gary's lists of frequencies worked fine and I had all of Hank's freqs. programmed into the Sony. The main freq. when they were flying was 345.900.

Paper said around 20,000 people came out on Sunday. Two day attendance had been expected to be 70,000. Organizers were pleased with turnout on Sunday considering it was cloudy and cold. Couple of interesting notes... during Friday's full practice upon landing #5 throttled back up and took off over the Angels that had already landed. Had a problem with his anti-lock or skid brakes and was going to land using his emergency brake. After Sunday's show he let quite a gap develop between him and the other Angels in front of him before he landed. Also heard that the back-up plane had to be used on Sunday. At some point the fuel tank was holed on one of the FA-18s and supposedly this plane has been left at the Guard base to be fixed. Apparently they were able to safely drain the gas that was left in the tanks. I witnessed and heard over the scanner #5's braking problems and heard the fuel tank story second-hand from a good source who talked to a local Air Guradsman. Anyway, had fun watching the jets this past week - especially on Thursday and Friday while it was sunny.

Photography notes: Used Fujichrome Sensia 400 and Kodak Gold 200. Used a Nikon F3HP and 70-300 lens. Friday I tried using the Nikon N80 which is an auto-focus camera and the AF wouldn't track very well at all! Really you only have to do very little focusing so losing AF wasn't that big of a deal - besides, the old F3 will crank out 5.5 shots per second... twice as fast as the N80.

"Sedalia" Mike / Waterlogged Central Illinois


In Reply to: Re: O/T Blue Angels freqs. posted by gary on May 10, 2002 at 8:38:57 PST:

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