THUNDERATION!!!

It was a loud and noisy Saturday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky as the city began its annual celebration for the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May. It all began with a bang as the Kentucky Derby Festival got things kickin' with their annual Thunder Over Louisville air show and fireworks display.

The day began with the Navy's Leap Frog parachute team dropping out of the sky from about 10,000 feet...well at least that anyway. One of the jumpers waited till he was at about the 2,000 foot mark to pull his cord causing a lot Wows among the hundreds of thousands lined up along the Ohio River banks. From there they swirled around they came down on the Great Lawn where several hundred people waited for their arrival. Personally I was never one to want to jump out of perfectly good airplane. Now give me a ride on one of those fighter jets and I'm as happy as a clam......well a clam with an appetite for going at mach 10 with my hair on fire that is. These guys did know what they were doing though. I'm sure their number of jumps totaled into the upper hundreds if not thousands. For me however the best show was to come as me and my camera waited for the new kid in town.

This was the one I was waiting on, the F-22.

Now the F-22 is supposed to be a stealthy kind of fighter and on just about every radar out there it would be. Today, however, it came in with as little stealth as it could with both afterburners in the engines lit up about as bright as they could be. This bad boy would be on top of you before you even knew it if you were out in the middle of a field somewhere.

One things is for certain.The thousands lined up along the riverbank got a good look at this puppy as one of its high speed passes had it only a few hundred feet over the ground. I knew it drew a lot of 00Hs and AAhs from the groups that were around me......and a lot of ear holding too. He was definitely lit up like a Christmas tree on the 4th of July. There were a lot of other military jets the took to the skies too. The one at the top of the post is an F-15, one of my favorites at the show because the pilot turns into a showstopper every year with it's two big engines dishing out as much as they can give. Below this are several others that showed up for the big dance.

Now the first of these above is the A-10 Warthog. If you ask any Warthog pilot what they think of these plane they will tell you they never want to get out of the cockpit once they get inside. It may not be the prettiest in the fleet but it do be da baddest. After that is the B-2 bomber, which I must admit I was little disappointed in. Seeing the B-2 is always great but the pilot never took it out over the river and into the air show area. He made two small passes over the Indiana side of the river and then was gone. The next one, however, put on a real show. That is the F-16 Falcon. These guys are called the Ferraris of the skies and aren't afraid to light things up as you can see here. F-16 pilots are like Warthog pilots. They never want to get out once they get in.

Of all the things at this year's show this CH-47 Chinook impressed me the most. Actually it was more the pilot than the helicopter. Back in 1973 and 74 I was stationed at Ft. Campbell with the 101st Airborne Division and worked as a clerk with a batallion of Chinooks. I also got to fly twice with a crew chief I knew at the time. The pilot that flew this ship you see here was better than any I had seen at Ft. Campbell. He had this helicopter gliding across the river and through air as smoothe as a ballet dancer on a stage. If I were to ever going flying in a Chinook again I would definitely want this pilot behind the stick. It was obvious that he had put in thousands of hours flying one.

Of course seeing the Apache helicopters come is always a fine sight. The pilots of these didn't hold back any punches with these gunships and made the adrenaline gland go into hyper mode. The 'firebird' had everybody along the river bank standing on their feet and waving their arms in approval. The pilot also cooled them down a little as he dropped low enough to the water to provide a little cooling spray to the crowd....which they all absolutely loved.

After that came what everybody had waited for, the big fireworks show with more than 50,000 rounds of fireworks blasting into the air. From here on I'll just let you sit back and enjoy the show. The bigger Derby Festival events start Saturday. Here's hoping you have a blast.