After a quite evening and recuperating from my 9 hour KC-10 flight, it was back to FIDAE early in the morning. Today was my first real day of shooting the air display acts. The line up was sparse at best since it was a practice day and half of the teams weren’t even preset yet. Not that it mattered much since the layout of the Santiago airport has you starring into the sun till about 2am. And thus really bad for photography. So I ended up wandering around a bit and visiting the various air crews. Such as Ritz, pilot of the F-15E Strike Eagle Demo Team, speaking to some Santiago engineering students from a local university.

And of course, one of the best things about airshows is the kids. Here is a future piloto del combate if ever I saw one.

And then it was off to the stuff in the air. Here is a Bell UH-1H from the Chilean Air Force.

A Cessna A-37B taxing out for it’s demonstration. The heat haze was paramount throughout the week.

Chile uses the Northrop F-5E as a trainer / fighter for their Air Force.

And the top line fighter for the Chilean Air Force is the Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon. Here she is on her take off roll for another demo flight. And you can see the ever present smog in the background. Today was a ‘good’ day.

Then it was time for some pure and raw noise, courtesy of the mighty US Air Force B-1 bomber!

And here is the BONE passing by the monstrous Andes mountains. I can only imagine what this must be like on a clear, smog free day. Too bad we didn’t have a single one.

And how do you follow up a BONE doing a barrel roll? Why it’s the world famous Ritz and Wild in the Mountain Home F-15E, of course!

Wave high to the crowd guys!

And with the show over, it was time time to open the runway back to regular traffic.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 6:29 am and is filed under Adventures, Aviation, Life, Photography. 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.