On The Road

After two years of traveling almost every single month my travels have been drastically scaled back to save up for some big trips in the planning stages right now.  So with no flying trips to write about I figured I could post about the small trip made this past weekend to Hill Air Force Base.

This week was Air Force Week in Salt Lake City followed by the Hill AFB Air Show.  Hill AFB is a huge sprawling complex about seventy miles north of my house.  In reality, most of Utah is either a National Park of some sort of Military playground.

I haven’t been to an air show in a while and I’ve never been to one in the West and Karleigh and Ryan had never been to one so I was looking forward to it all week.  Plus I needed a pick me up after watching game five in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. (It’s still painful to think about.)

The layout was a bit different than the airshows I’ve been to in the past but that’s just because of the location of the hangars on the base so it kinda broke up the static display area into two different areas.  It also wasn’t as big as the others but that’s because I’ve been spoiled with the Dayton air show and the Andrews AFB/Department of Defense Open House.  It was still awesome and had plenty to see.

They only had a few planes that you could go through and the lines for those were pretty long.  The line for the C-5 for example was the length of the entire aircraft which is a bit too long of a line for me.  The main thing I wanted to see though was the aerial demonstrations.

Right as we got there an F-16 screamed overhead then as we walked closer another one took off along with a P-51 Mustang and an F-4 Phantom.  Then there were some aerobatic demonstrations which are always cool and I saw my favorite move, the hammerhead, a few times.  Then there was a C-130, F-16, A-10, and an F-22 all flying in formation then the F-22 broke off and did a few maneuvers which was way cool because I’ve never seen one of those in real life before.  Then there was an F-18 demo and some bi-planes followed by the Thunderbirds.

Just as the Thunderbirds were getting ready to go a huge rain cloud started rolling overhead again.  It had rained earlier in the day but it was mostly cleared up by around noon.  The Thunderbirds took off and started their show but halfway through they had to stop because it started raining a ton and it even hailed for a bit (which kinda hurt).  Luckily they stayed airborne and after the clouds rolled through and visibility improved they finished their show.  It was awesome and I kinda laughed when they would scream overhead and all the little kids would start crying.

     

After they landed we walked around and got a few more pictures then headed home for some Five Guys Burgers and Fries for dinner.  In the pics I’ve posted keep in mind, my wife is the professional photographer not me, we forgot the zoom lens in the car, and the light was pretty bad with all the crappy weather.  So if it’s a cool pic, Karleigh probably took it