I mentioned last week that we spent a few hours at the annual Wings Over Houston airshow. Here are a few photos to prove it!
Sean D. Tucker is one of the guys who seems to be there every year that I don’t mind seeing over and over. I love biplanes and I love watching aerobatics!
I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t know which plane this is. It’s either an F-16 or an F-18. I like how I was able to capture it head on but from the underside — a bit of a different view than normal!
It was fairly humid that day, which made for good condensation trails off the wings of the jets.
The USAF Thunderbirds are the main attraction pretty much every other year. As usual, they didn’t disappoint!
NASA was there too, of course, and I tried not to complain too much about the general lack of information about what they were showing off. For instance, I have NO CLUE what this rover-looking thing is that Jose is sitting on. Could they not have posted a sign? Sigh.
The Super Guppy was parked out on the ramp. This guy is based at Ellington, so I’ve seen it many times before.
This is my favorite shot of the day, thanks to the angle and the sun flare. I’m looking up at the tail of one of NASA’s 747s — the plane used to ferry the space shuttle back to Florida after a landing in California. I won’t mention the person inside the plane doing crowd control who, after I finished asking him a question, turned and shouted to his buddy to “come over here and help me stare at the women.” Oops, I mentioned him. Just to prove that I hadn’t heard him wrong, he said it again. SIGH.
F-18. The F-16 has a single engine and tail, while the 18 has two of each; you can see it’s twin tails in shadow, peeking around from the top. Great picture!
Oh yeah — I should have totally been able to figure that out since I know the Thunderbirds are F-16s. Oh well. 🙂
The rover looks like ATHLETE… were you part of the JPL/JSC collaboration meetings we had a few years back? They talked about it a lot then as a good example of collaboration.
Yeah, I remember ATHLETE — but I thought it was much bigger. Maybe this was a mockup?
It’s an F-18, but looks like someone already told you that. 🙂 I am a jet nerd. Your pics of the Thunderbirds are awesome!