It isn't that common to get fighter jets here. If we do - it's normally just fly-overs. We see military craft often. Usually a pack of Huey's. A couple of days ago however, it was different. You could hear that deep roar. The unmistakable deep powerful growl of what I thought was a fighter jet.
I'm not really into planes. They don't have all those things that set off my tard gene. Ginormous Datronics monitors, spiny wheels, crazy lights, concrete breaking sub woofers. Okay.. maybe they have the last part. Which is probably what made me rush outside.
To my surprise there were four of them, and they were doing rotations around the house. By the noise, I thought they were flying much lower. The interesting part was - they would fly over the house making this wide circle. You could hear the deep loud roar all the way until they got the nose around and pointed right at you. Then, it was absolutely quiet. Not just quieter. I mean.. absolutely no noise at all. It would last about 5-10 seconds. Then the roar would catch back up to you. It was the most fascinating thing ever.
The whole thing surprised me because this is hardly the first time I've seen or heard jets. I used to work near Moffett Field where the Blue Angles used to put on a show every year. We'd go up to the roof of the buildings and watch them. But there was always a tons of people, and freeway noise.
Somehow in my quiet burb the impact of just how stealthy those jets can be left a bigger impact.
When we lived at Andrews AFB we would hear the jets and C-5's all the time. The C-5 always sounds like it is going to crash as it is landing.
ReplyDeleteAfter a year or so we got so used to it we stopped hearing it. SO I was driving a friend to the airport and said "I wonder how much it sucks to live next to the airport, with all of those planes flying overhead all the time."
She looked at me like "BUH?!"
Yeah, I'm freaking brilliant, I know.
It freaking sucks! One of the reasons we moved from our old place was - we were a couple of miles from the tiny airport. While it was interesting seeing the hueys, occasional fighter planes (old and new).. and blimps ( I have an odd fondness for blimps)sometimes even a CAL fire deployment - it was the small craft pilots that annoyed the hell out of me.
ReplyDeleteExperimentals. The guys who would fly too low. And one of the government entities here had a ginormous 737-ish plane that would always fly out around 11 at night. The plane was far too big for the size of the airport. We can still hear that plane from our house now - several miles away.