Yesterday Jeanne and I met our good friends Steve and Becki in DeWitt and then drove to Davenport for the Quad Cities Air Show.  A friend of mine had given me VIP tickets to the show with VIP parking.

Now I’ve never had VIP anything so I didn’t really know what to expect.  He left them at “will call” so we couldn’t park in the VIP section.  That later turned out to be a very good thing.  We were right on the flight line (front row center stage.)

There was mostly cloud coverage and a nice breeze so it was really pleasant for half the show and then the sun came out.  Whew!  It got pretty uncomfortable after that but the show was fun and lots of action so the weather was not that much of a distraction.  The low cloud cover eliminated some of the Thunder Birds routines but they still put on a good show.

The Chalet we were in was courtesy of  Doug May owner of One Step Printing.   We had a table, chairs, beverages and a nice lunch all complimentary.   What a nice way to see the air show

Camera Stuff:

I shot with the Nikon D3S the entire show.  I started with ISO 200 but with the cloud cover I was only getting shutter speeds of 1/250 – 1/350 sec at f8.  So I pushed the ISO to 400 and that gave fast enough shutter speeds to freeze the action most of the time.  I had very little blown highlights so it was a good choice and I dialed in -7 EV.  I used the 28 – 300 mm lens, which is a great all-purpose lens.  Didn’t get me quite a close to the action as I would have liked but good enough.  Most of the time I shot at f8 but sometimes at f6.3

I shot 1,474 images.  That’s a new record for me.  Heck when the first two planes took off for the show I ran off 47 images of just the take off.  🙂  The D3S @ 11 fps and a huge buffer can spit out some serious numbers when you are trying to capture the action.   After culling them this morning I have 429 left.  Boy am I glad we have digital now.  Can you imagine trying to shoot an air show with rolls of 36 exposure film.    (Actually I did that when the Dubuque Airport had the Thunderbirds several years ago.)

Above is one of the planes from the group where a pilot was killed at the airshow on Saturday.  As a tribute to him, his two team mates took off at the beginning of the show and flew over the field and then departed.  It was a solemn moment.

I shot 47 images of those two airplanes taking off.  The L-39  was made by a company in the former Czechoslovakia in 1984, according to a Federal Aviation Administration registry.  (From one of the web sites – Glenn Smith left a lucrative job at a Dallas-area technology firm for an early retirement of restoring Soviet fighter jets and flying to exhibitions across the country.

He died Saturday when his nearly 30-year-old training plane nose-dived during an air show in eastern Iowa and crashed into a field, authorities said. Spectators watched the 59-year-old Smith’s plane erupt into flames, followed by a cloud of gray smoke. Nobody on the ground was hurt.

Smith had been flying in formation with other members of the HopperFlight team at the Quad-City Air Show in Davenport.)

Then some excitement as two planes from the University of Iowa.  The UI planes are part of an effort by the defense department to help in the training of pilots.  Pilots all over the world with the proper credentials can log into the flight instrumentation of these jets and see the inputs and controls of various combat situations.  (Click on the images to make them bigger and see all the detail.)

I believe that sometime in the near future many of the most hazardous missions will be flown by completely robotic fighter planes.  We are already seeing that with the drone surveillance and attack drones.  This is the evolutionary process that will help get there.

You may well imagine that for the coming week you’re going to be seeing lots of airplanes in flight.  If you’re not a big fan of that I ask you not leave me.  It will only take a week to get though some of the pictures (which are pretty good if I do say so myself) and there are some really interesting stories to tell.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Labor Day Holiday and be careful.