Friday August 1st: Thunder and Thnderbirds

Today we spent the morning looking at more of the grounds...there is so much you could spend the week here and not nearly see everything.  There are vintage planes and kit planes at every turn.  June gets a bit bored with it all, but I could just keep looking.

We even found a replica, including paint job, of my Super Decathlon RC plane.  They did a good job making it look like my RC :-) .

In one of the display hangers, we found a plane I wanted to buy, June says I can't..but it is pretty cool,and is an amphibious sport plane called the Icon.  I googled it when I got back to camp and it only costs about $200K, what is her problem...

We followed our routine from yesterday and went back to camp for lunch, but this time we rode the motorcycle to save our legs for the grounds. The campground is still very muddy and a it is a bit of a challenge but somehow we made it.  Before lunch we dropped our chairs at the flight line so we had great seats for the afternoon show, we could hear the PA system well and had a good view of one of the Jumbo-trons We even found our selves on the Jumbo a few times..



The weather was iffy all afternoon, smoking hot when we arrived but then it rained right about when the airshow started, so it was pretty cool during the show.  They did not stop the show, but it was clear they cut things due to the weather.  Still a fantastic show.

We saw the Osprey fly which is really very impressive, it does what a helicopter can do but can fly really fast.

It seems that Redbull has unlimited funding, yesterday we saw what the Redbull helicopter could do, today we saw the Redbull aerobatic plane, let's just say he is very good...more like nuts.

One of our favorites was the Aeroshell team, they fly T-6 Texans so tight you hold your breath, they define formation flying and the T6s sound awesome.

The show was supposed to include lots of  pyrotechnics, but much of it did not get used, so the sent up a plan just to set them off. The explosions were so big you could feel the heat from our seats.

The show wrapped up with the Thunderbird practice show, if it was practice, I can't wait to see the real thing tomorrow.






Tomorrow we plan to get generally packed up and check out after the afternoon show and head for Sturgis, it is about 800 miles and would would like to get a few hundred under our belt on Saturday.