The Air Show

The Hill Air Force Base Air Show was this weekend. Luckily, Mark has some connections through his work. PP& G, the paint company that works with the base, and their distributor AIS are both sponsors for the air show. They hosted an open house on Thursday at the Ogden airport for us to go see some of the planes and meet the pilots. To be honest, their were only 8 planes there so I was a little dissapointed. But it was still fun. We got to sit in one of the bi-plane stunt planes. If it wasn't considered a conflict of interest, Mark would have been able to go up in the two-seater stunt plane. Alas, the government has this thing against bribes.

So we saw one of the Red Eagles' stunt planes. The pilot was so very nice, he's in the third picture with Matthew and me. He was so good with Matthew. We also saw the Red Bull stunt plane flown by Kirby Chambliss. We saw his performance at the air show, and he was amazing. I'll have to post a video later. His plane would literally look like it was falling out of the sky. I think the P-51 Mustang is a really good looking plane. We also go to see two MiGs take off. PP&G also sponsored a dinner at a nice steakhouse at the airport. The steakhouse overlooks the runway, and we got lucky and they parked two Osprey helicopters right in front of us. They parked, sat for half an hour, and then took off again. And then only one came back. Strange, but fascinating to watch. Luckily Matthew was well behaved at dinner because we were at a nice steakhouse, and he was the only child there.

The air show itself was a bit of a dissapointment. We went with my brother Aaron. After entering in through the metal detectors, the crowd is funneled through a C-5 cargo plane. The C-5 is gigantic to say the least. The coolest part is the cockpit area in the front of the plane folds up, so they can load from both the front and the back of the plane. So we walked in through the rear loading ramp and out through the front loading ramp. Crazy. The performances were really neat, though we only saw 3 or 4. Unfortunately, it started to rain and was super windy, so they delayed the air show. Then it really started raining, so we figured they would cancel and decided to go home. We were drenched by the time we got to the car. We got home just in time to here the Thunderbirds flying overhead to kick of the restart of the air show. Oh well. Next time we will pay closer attention to the weather.

The Red Eagles plane

Me and Tom Cruise

Kirby Chambliss' plane

P-51 Mustang

The Osprey