Hola! Como estas? I hope that things are well where every you guys are. I’m rocking day 4 here in Santiago. Or should I say that it’s starting to rock me. The adrenaline is starting to wear off, and as should be expected, I’m starting to slow down a bit.

Yesterday was a pretty awesome day, so it’s going to be hard to top that. The kids that we met were so awesome and it was hard to come back to the show site and resume “business as usual.” The air expo is the main priority, but I’m so glad that the US Air Force is doing humanitarian missions while they are down here. I was speaking to some of the crews that went with me yesterday and they were just raving at how much fun it was and how much they got from it. Some are even planning on volunteering to go to other orphanages during their days off.

But today, it was back to interviews and photography. When I got to FIDAE this morning, I was hitting the ground running. No sooner then I had gotten out to the ramp, Captain Nathan Broshear (the uber cool PA for the 12th AF), had lined up a one on one interview with Mr. Bruce Lemkin. If you recall from yesterday’s post, he’s the Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force (International Affairs) and is one of the top civillians in the Air Force. I was very lucky to have some of his time.

After that I had a chance to meet and photograph Mr. Paul Simons, the US Ambassador to Chile.

He took some time and met with the F-15E and F-16C crews and maintainers.

After that I went to visit with the Make A Wish Foundation as the toured the March AFB C-17. The US Air Force had stuffed animals and other toys for them. In addition to that, they went and visted with numerous US companies who had booths at the trade show and were given goodies.

It was a pretty cool trade show. They had a ton of information, and some really cool toys.

After that I just wandered around the statics and took some images.

I was just killing time till my next shoot; shadowing the Plane Captain of the F-15E Strike Eagle Demo team as they launched the bird for the demo.

After the demo, the guys were nice enough to set up a shot of their birds from Mountain Home and the Predator UAV.

And that was my day. Tomorrow I’m hoping to do some more shooting of the aerial acts. Hope all is well with you guys!

Buenos noches.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Aviation, Air Shows, Photography, Adventures, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.