Best air show I’ve been to in decades. There were actually 2 F15 demos. One clean and one fully loaded. B2 flyby, F35C demo, A10s, EA18, F22, and a rare Navy heritage flight. Fantastic
Wow hopefully that will be an airshow favourite for years to come ❤. Question - why no single seaters? I hear it is intended as an intercepter / missile truck in which case a RIO would be a good option. And I understand it’s also multi-role. Is it lack of airframes too? Or have I answered my own question 😂?
That’s a great question, it will never hurt to have an extra brain and an extra set of eyes in a jet that powerful. The F-15QA became the F-15EX for the Air Force. I know they kept the EX as two seaters because it would have cost more to redesign into a single seat jet. Not sure if that was the reasoning for the QA. As far as I’m concerned an extra seat just adds capability. Lots of information is being fed to pilots and WSOs these days.
You think the F-35 is ugly? I'm thinking that you would prefer the look of the F-35's competitor, the X-32, be lucky the F-35 got chosen to be put into service and not the 32
Anyone with experience in video knows this footage is garbage and i can tell you from our own professional video that those vertical tails do not vibrate like that, welcome to your world of trash cell phone footage
It shows you just how well McDonnell Douglas did designing that airframe. Add a few modern touches like fly-by-wire and more advanced software and you suddenly have an Eagle with Super Hornet levels of nose authority in addition to everything that already made it a great platform.
The flutter/buffeting/resonance of the vertical tails is quite extreme during the hard pitch up maneuvers. I've never seen an airframe so visibly stressed during a performance.
Well the QA flew last weekend in St. Louis at the Sprit of St. Louis Air Show (6/8-6/9 2024) Not sure when this was filmed but I wonder whether if this was the first public demo or if the Hometown got the first demo? Boeing builds them at their St. Louis facility at Lambert International.
I was there. They’re saying this was a “one time look” at the QA for North America, not just the first public demo. They flew two of them. The first one near the beginning of the show didn’t have any weapons on it. It’s supposed to be shown in the UK later this year.
If you want to get super specific, it’s at The Spirit of St. Louis Airshow in St. Louis. There were two practice demos on Friday (clean and with missiles). One demo with missiles on Saturday and then two demos on Sunday. There were technically five demos the weekend of the airshow.
My brother was a Boeing avionics tech who was responsible for building the entire cockpit of these planes. They put his ashes in one of the fuel tanks when they did a test flight after he passed. RIP bro, I miss you, I wish we could've fixed everything 😢
