This weekend was the annual air show that we always attend. At least, we’ve attended it together since we started dating. Before that, Jay would attend it with his dad or uncle.

This year it was the Thunderbirds turn to be the show-closing act. I’m more of a Blue Angels fan considering I’m married to a Navy guy.

The program ran along the same lines as in previous years.

The Jet Truck was there:

They had the A-10 Warthog Demo (my favorite jet!):

They had a C-130 demo:

Something new was the skytyping group of Texans:

What they did was pretty neat.

And then after cannibalizing Thunderbird #2’s jet and flagging down a passing ERJ-135 for a jump start, the Air Force had an FU-35 fly a demo:

So, yeah… Thunderbird #2 was MIA but nobody ever said why. They had one woman pilot so perhaps #2 was also a woman and she got lost on the way to the air show. Either way, it was a bit sad to see a “Diamond” formation with only three jets. Apparently when you use common core math a triangle is the same as a diamond.

After the show was over we walked the midway to look at the ground displays.

There was a whole herd of giant Air Force planes.

They had a knobby-nosed C-130 with some pretty boots painted on it:

It was neat to see invasion stripes painted on it, too.

They also had a C-5M Super Galaxy, which Jay was excited to see in person.

This plane is so big that when we walked up we could hear Jay’s cousin, Eric, but all we could see were his shoes behind the tires. He wanted to get an up-close look at the landing gear.

You can just see his red shirt above the tire in there. Jay crawled in, too, to point out how the tires rotate and get lifted into the belly.

It was massive. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this plane is able to get up enough speed to actually lift off of the ground. Not to mention that it does this while being chock full of various heavy cargo.

I’ve saved the best picture for last…

I call this photo “Perfect Timing.”