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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Saturday 2 October 2004 (Day View)

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02.10.2004 – Saturday 2 October – Amberley Air Show

• Today I went to the Amberley Air Show. I caught the train into the city, then to Ipswich, and a bus from there to Amberley. It was very busy, very hot, and very dry and dusty. I managed to get a bit sunburnt. The air show itself was great. Every aircraft Australia has in operation was on display, and flew. I found the Caribou the most impressive. While F-111’s and F/A-18’s doing dump and burns and barely subsonic flypasts just a few hundred yards away are incredibly imposing, there’s something unutterably impressive about a full-size airplane dropping two tonne pallets from a metre above the ground, or landing within a few hundred metres, and taking off within another few. They’re absolutely amazing aircraft – there’s apparently not much else out there that can match them. Anything that can fly a metre from the ground without being able to hover impresses me no end, and their landing and takeoff seemed to defy gravity. A car dropped from a Chinook has a certain “coolness” about it as well. In fact, the whole show was quite good – the roulettes were spectacular, all the jets ooze power, Blackhawks and Super Seasprite’s are cool, Hercules are just big, and the rest had complicated names I can’t remember. We also got to witness an unplanned demonstration of airstrip fire fighting after an incendiary bombing raid unsurprisingly but unexpectedly caught the surrounding countryside on fire, creating dense smoke. It was quite interesting having a close look at fighter jets and helicopters too – they had several navy helicopters powered up showing some quite interesting avionics and scanning stuff.
  I dropped by uni on the way home, but didn’t stay long.