This year the annual air show came at the end of May instead of the end of July and I must say that was a welcome change! It was much nicer out and the weather was much clearer than last year’s hazy sky. The change in location was a mixed blessing though. Moving it to Charlotte beach did have the advantage of getting us off the hot tarmac at the airport. There were also trees for shade and of course the nice breeze that is usually coming in off the lake in combination with the fact that it’s often a bit cooler by the lake made it a much more pleasant experience. Of course a beach is always nicer than an airport, isn’t it?
Not everything about the beach location was better. At the airport you have much better sight-lines for seeing approaching aircraft and at the airport there was a big ground display of various aircraft of all types which was nonexistent at the beach and Dan and I were both a bit disappointed by that. Since my main interest was shooting the flying events the change was mostly positive although the improved visibility in all directions at the airport was somewhat missed.
There were a few familiar events at the airshow such as the Geico sponsored stunt plane and the F15. There were some new shows as well and some new planes to see flying too. Still no F22 sadly but an A10 graced us with its presence. The show featured some water events as well with the Coastguard rescuing a seemingly unwilling “volunteer” from the water. The water demonstrations would have been much more interesting if they had just had the A10 strafe the water with some rounds from the ridiculous Gatling gun it has shoved in its nose. It would be been cool to see an A10 parked on the ground as well since they didn’t have one at the airport last year. Dan and I both wanted to see just how big that gun was in person.
The A10 was definitely an interesting plane to watch, it is nowhere near as fast as the F15 for example and nowhere near as loud either. It still seems to move pretty well though for being a flying tank.
The F15 was a lot of fun. I’m disappointed to have missed the F18 (we were eating lunch while it was out) but at least I got to get some good shots of the F15. Bringing my 2x teleconverter made all the difference this year since I could really fill the frame with the plane at times and didn’t have to crop everything like I did last year.
Being able to have that much more reach with my lens also meant I was able to get some shots that weren’t possible last year. The heat distortion behind the F15 was clearly visible with the 400mm lens (70-200 2.8 + 2x TC) as the plane flew away from me. There are a couple shots of that in the gallery below so check them out, it’s interesting to see how sharp part of the plane is and how distorted other areas are because of the intense heat.
This year we traded in the Thunderbirds for the Snowbirds from Canada. The Snowbirds flew much smaller jets which weren’t nearly as fast as the Thunderbirds but they flew in a formation of nine planes and did some very cool formations with all nine planes.
The Snowbirds also outdid the Thunderbirds by performing close passes at high speed with two planes coming from each direction. That was a crowd pleaser and I was lucky to get one frame with all four planes in it and so close together.
Of course the photos above aren’t everything. Like last year I shot quite a bit (unusual for me!) and I’ve picked some more shots from the show out and included them in the gallery below. Some of them have a brief description so check the gallery out and let me know what you think!
