Wheels, Tracks, and Wings event at Planes of Fame

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First weekend of May, Planes of Fame held their Wheels, Tracks, and Wings event. I was only able to attend part of one day. I got to take some shots of the static display along with the flyover of the B-25. Here is part of the presentation about the B-25:

The B-25 J-Mobile came before some other types of B-25s and believe it or not the B-25 was our first gunship.
They would install a 75 millimeter cabinet in those, about four or five 50 caliber machine guns.
It could carry up to 30 machine guns plus the 75 millimeter and it would be one of the best dive bombers even better than most of our fighters.
In fact, V-25 took out a destroyer with a 75mm gun, one time.
And also, in early.
during the 1941, took out a supper gun.
The aircraft was developed in 1939 at the request of the Air Corps.
They needed a medium bomber that could go about 300 miles an hour, carry about 2400 to 3000 pounds of weapons or armor, and go about 2,300 miles.
The aircraft is capable of carrying about 6 50-pound bombs, and it’s eventually before up to 18 50-caliber machines.
It was quite the aircraft.
The aircraft is probably best known for a little trip during the 1942 in April and with a ride with an aircraft carrier called the Hornet.
They put 16 of these aircraft on an aircraft carrier and headed off toward Tokyo.
The aircraft, the B-25, was finally retired from the U.S. Air Service in 1959.
Most of the B-25s after the war became training aircraft.

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The Patriots Jet Team

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Patriots Jet Team, is a group of performers who are ex Thunderbirds and Blue Angels. They perform a great show and do some wild tricks to delight the audience. Unfortunately one of the planes went down during the performance, but they were still able to complete the show a plane down.

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B-1B Lancer “bone” from Socal Airshow

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The Rockwell B-1 Lancer is a supersonic variable-sweep wing, heavy bomber used by the United States Air Force. It is commonly called the “Bone”. Max speed of Mach 1.25. The plane had a couple of production runs with the B-1A being started in the 70s, the B-1B was restarted in the 80s due to delays in the B2 program.

This is the bomber from the 37th squadron out of South Dakota that was on display at the Socal Airshow. This was shot during the takeoff and flyby at the airshow.

P-38 Planes of Fame Hangar Talk

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The plane unfortunately had some mechanical difficulties and didn’t make a full flyover. Here are some shots and details from the day.

This is the plane that was used in Operation Vengeance and it was designed, first requested a design from the United States Army Air Force for their call for a high altitude dog fighter. could climb up to 20,000 feet in six minutes. And so it was awarded to Lockheed to develop this type of plane and this is the same Lockheed that became the Skunk Works. She’s a rare configuration because she has twin booms and the twin booms are there to accommodate the twin allison engine which each one is 1710 cubic inch displacements and 425 plus power. Armament was 4 50 caliber machine guns and 1 20 millimeter cannon. Now, if you know anything about the 50 caliber machine guns, you could fire anywhere from 600 rounds to 800 rounds a minute. That’s 13 bullets per second. So you multiply that by four, you have quite a bit of firepower. Also, the 20-millimeter gun alone is a huge, huge round that will destroy another aircraft. So they have 13 bullets coming out of each gun, every second, and they’re throwing a couple of pounds of hope in front of you. This design also allowed the armament to be mounted in the nose. And the mounting there, that means the pilot is shooting at what he wants to shoot at is the direction he’s flying at. before other planes have those 50 cals out on the wings and they have to compensate for something called converging fire which means you both all four guns have to be planes in a direction about 400 yards ahead of you. P-38 is not like that. You fly at what you want to shoot at. Of the 10,000 or so built, there are quite a few not unaccounted for. So we have maybe only six of these incredible planes that we can fly.

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Thunderbirds High Speed Pass

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Thunderbirds 5 and 6 in the high speed pass. Unfortunately Day 2 wasn’t as nice, but at least I realized that I needed to pan from left to right vs right to left like I did on day 1. Pretty happy with this shot, just wish the background was nicer. Shot during the Naval Base Ventura County Pt Mugu 2023 Airshow, which included the Thunderbirds, Blue Angels, CAF SoCal, MH-60 parade, Vicky Benzing Aerosports, and more. This was taken with the Sony A1 and the Sony 200-600.

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