tales from an ordinary world
1999-02-17
Dad got 2 tickets for the Airshow at Avalon. It was one of the trade days today, which basically just meant less people - a good thing IMHO - I can't cope with large crowds, especially for that long...I'll chuck a quick braindump about it here until I clean it up later (well, if I decide to, anyway) :
portafloor - the main exhibit rooms were temporary things on top of a whole lot of gravel, and so the ground was covered with this grey plastic lego-like "portafloor" stuff that made weird crunchy noises as you stepped on it.
aircraft geeks - the kind of people who whinge incessantly about how the RAAF should have bought F16's instead of F18's, and so on. When we walked out to have a look at the aircraft, we stood near some South African "redhawk" attack helicopter thing, and there were a few of these geeks next to us, drooling over it, and arguing its merits against the Apache AH64 Longbow ExtraSpecialEdititon something-or-other. I'd be more elitist about it, but I'm guilty of being the occasional (less than I used to be, mind you) geek about other things, like computers and music and stuff. Oh well.
size matters - we found a B-52 way up the end of the runway, past the huge C5 Galaxy transporter plane that had its nose and tail bent up, looking like it was waiting to devour a few smaller aircraft for hors d'oeuvres. Dad was a bit disappointed in the B-52's size. Perhaps 'cause it was next to the C5 thing, it really didn't look that big or scary.
dodgy goods ? - as soon as we went inside to experience the portafloor, some guy thrust these little brochures at us, advertising some Military Free Zone mob (they have a webpage even) that, uh, want your excess military stock. Thanks for the brochure, guys, and I'll be sure to let you know if I've got any spare laser-guided bombs I can't find room for next time I move house...
companies - All the usual companies that make aircraft guff were there - Boeing, British Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, etc. down to people you wouldn't have really expected, like Praxa (some Melbourne IT mob). And PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The UK's Ministry of Defence (I think it was them) had these cool holograms of random bits of machinery, too.
The Asian Defence Journal's stand looked pretty sad and lonely. Especially when you saw the Janes stand, with lots of pretty cutaway pictures of your favourite flying things.
The Bureau of Air Safety Investigation - These guys had all sorts of bits of wreckage in display cabinets, with helpful explanations telling you exactly what happened to the plane (and how you could tell by looking at the particular piece of wreckage). A TV showed footage of air crashes. I don't know how intentional this was, but the TV was facing the coffee lounge - I mean, it's just the thing people would want to be watching in the coffee lounge before they go outside to watch planes flying over their heads.
Advertising - Ok, aircraft have plenty of buzzwords and acronyms. But some of the ads mentioned things that sounded more like management-level wanking - "prefragmentation" and "area denial". Or as one ad said, that featured the shadow of an attack helicopter on a cliff-face, "when natural barriers may not be enough to stop intruders..."
The F-15 - It took off, did some nifty aerobatics, and made a lot of noise. Meanwhile, the hundred or so speakers, mounted just in front of the fences that stopped us from pouring out to certain doom on the runway, played crappy 80's guitar music (perhaps we can blame Top Gun for this ?), as well as the standard Oh Yeah by Yello. As the plane did one of many passes along the runway, one or two people even shouted "woohoo !" and threw their hands in the air. Just like in the movies. Still, I guess I enjoyed it more than I expected - you could have sworn the plane was being held by a giant kid's invisible hand, the way it turned and rolled and stuff.
The business market - A few "business" planes did a few manoeuvres as a guy did the hard sell over the speakers. Apparently Joh Bjelke-Petersen had owned one of them, which I'm not sure makes for much of a selling strategy...
F-16 - see F-15. But a little bit sexier. And louder, as it took off the first time. "Converting fuel into noise", as the announcer put it.
Bob Hoover - apparently this guy's 74 or something - been in WWII, been a test pilot for years, and all that sort of stuff. He did a whole lof of weird but cool stunts in a pretty ordinary-looking plane. Some of these involved turning one or both engines off while doing loops and stuff. It was pretty impressive, but I'm sure I would have been more impressed if I'd known how to fly a plane, and hence would have understood exactly how difficult all that stuff was...
F-18 - see above. The coolest thing this one did was, at the end, to do a vertical climb to something like 50,000 feet. In a few moments, it was just gone. You couldn't see it. Five minutes later, as we were leaving, it reappeared and buzzed the runway again. *shrug*.
