Do you like gorgeous slender airplanes, beautiful mountains and great camera views? Well then this video is right up your alley! But you might wanna turn the music down if you don't like a rock music background. It's well worth watching even if you've never paid attention to soaring before.

 I was so fortunate to be raised around soaring back in the 70's due to my dad's love for it, and that included getting to solo a Schweizer 2-33 on my 14th birthday! Later that year I was flying a high performance Schweizer 1-35 that my dad had bought to go along with the Citabria (tow plane) that we also had. Those were the days - 14 years old and flying such an amazingly beautiful airplane!

 But getting into (and staying into) soaring takes a little more effort than many forms of flying. I certainly experienced this as it's been a long time since I've flown a sailplane. The need for a good location for either thermals or ridge lift along with the fact that you usually need a community of people to make everything work out well means that soaring operations are typically pretty far in between. But they are out there, and modern aerodynamics have pushed the performance higher than ever before as well.

 I'm hoping to emerge far enough from my financial crisis of these last three years to finally get current in powered aircraft this summer... and if things go really well, I'm gonna be looking for an opportunity to get current in a sailplane as well. I hope seeing a video like this might spark the same desire in you to go flying on silent wings! : )

Me on my 14th birthday (1975) right after my first solo in a glider/sailplane!

Still age 14 preparing to go fly the Schweizer 1-35 high performance sailplane

Note the N numbers with my initials on our Citabria and Schweizer 1-35 in 1975!

GAME OVER - correctly ID'd by John Conway as a Lockheed U-2

 I'm amazed how often this game doesn't even make it to 30 minutes. John Conway got the correct answer in about 15 minutes. This sweet U-2 is at the Air Force Museum... it's a pic I took on Sunday January 29, 2012 at the AirPigz Air Force Museum MeetUp. Congrats John for winning a bacon sandwhich at OSH12!

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 It's time for another Name The Plane challenge... all you gotta do is ID both MAKE and MODEL to win a bacon sandwhich prize at OSH12 - so, if you've got sharp aircraft ID skills, be the first person to ID both MAKE and MODEL of this aircraft to be the winner!

 Your answers must go in the 'comments' area in this post, and as always, please don't use the shotgun approach to answers - only put up truly educated guesses that you've arrived at via really thinking it thru.

 And I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but to win, you have to give me both the MAKE and MODEL! : )

(both videos are selectable to 720p HD)

 This first video is only 21 seconds long but wow, what an impressive 21 seconds! It's a slow motion capture of an Eagle Owl in the final stages of landing right in front of the camera.  In my opinion, the advanced aerodynamics on display will never be matched by us mere mortals... God is truly the Master of the Skies! I hope you're like me and you watch this video over and over picking out more details of both the unimaginably complex variable geometry wings, and the menacing killer landing gear! Wow!

Video screenshot of the awesome Eagle Owl and its killer landing gear!
 

The video below is a little longer at 52 seconds and has some stunning footage of Bald Eagles putting that killer landing gear to work. The slow motion capture reveals details that are otherwise missed with these stunning birds.

 All I can say is I'm really glad these birds don't ever get big enough to pick mankind as their prey!

 With the Super Bowl now over, the next logical thing to do is to take an avgeek moment and come up with a funny caption for the pic above! The best part is that the winner will snag a bacon sandwich at OSH12!

 I saw this old WWII era pic posted on facebook over the weekend and decided we should be able to have some fun with that. I guess we'll see : )

 So, you've got til Wednesday evening at 9pm EST to submit your clever/funny/cool captions. Then, I’ll pick the best 5 and put ’em in a poll for everyone to vote on for all day Thursday and Friday so we can find the winner. 

 The Rules: 

1) Max of 3 submissions per person

2) Submissions go in the 'comments' area 

3) Game ends Wednesday at 9pm EST 

4) Keep it clean!

 Then, anyone can cast their vote starting Thursday morning and running thru til 9pm EST Friday. The winner will be posted Saturday morning 2-11-12. Tails up!

 With football's biggest day now in our lap, and the start of Super Bowl XLVI (that's 46 for the non-Romans among us) just hours away inside Indy's awesome Lucas Oil Stadium, I figure this is a good time to re-share two aerial pictures I was blessed to be able to capture of downtown Indianapolis in the last two years. The first one above is the most recent, taken in August 2011 from the Farmers Airship, the modern and amazing Zeppelin NT. For more pix and the full post, please check out: I Rode The Zeppelin! - The Farmers Airship In Indy! (Short Post). I'm still planning to put up the long post on this ride which will include some video, but too much work to do and not enough time means I haven't got that done yet.

 The second pic (below) was taken from the B-17 named Yankee Lady back in June 2010. It was an incredible flight I was able to go on during the 2010 Indy Air Show that had us flying over downtown for 30 minutes or so and then making a pass right over Victory Field ballpark that's located very near Lucas Oil Stadium. For more info on that ride-of-a-lifetime with more fabulous pix of Indy from the B-17, please check out: 2010 Indy Air Show Pic Stream #3 - B-17 'Yankee Lady' Ride! I'm noticing that I also planned to expand that ride into a more detailed post... I guess I've got some work to do!

 Anyway, these pictures of downtown Indianapolis and Lucas Oil Stadium were really just byproducts of two simply stunning rides that I was able to participate in. And I'm glad that Super Bowl Sunday has come along to give me the reason to share them with you once again... which has also given me the chance to re-live two perfect rides in a couple of very different and fascinating flying machines : )

Lucas Oil Stadium and Victory Field in downtown Indianapolis taken from a B-17!

 In mid January, the youtube account for GoPro cameras posted this short and awesome video of Billy and David Werth demonstrating their well-practiced 'tail grab' where Billy flies his Pitts inverted low enough for David (a very experienced extreme motorcycle rider) to reach out and touch the rudder! It's definitely the kind of thing that we like to say: Don't Try This At Home!

 I figured today is a great time to post the video since the Super Bowl is this Sunday In Indianapolis, and Indy is where Billy operates out of. And if you don't know, Billy spends a large portion of everyday in the air as he's a regional airline pilot; a KC-135 tanker driver in the Air Force Reserve; an aerobatic instructor, performer and thrill rider giver with his Grayout Aerosports operation; AND he's half of the Red Eagle Airsports Team! Whew.. makes me tired just thinking about all that flying! In addition to his Pitts S2C, he's also recently added a Christen Eagle to his hangar, so he'll fit in a little better at Red Eagle this year : )

 I'm planning to get some time with Billy in the Pitts this spring to give me both a chance to get the cobwebs cleaned out of my taildragger skills and to do some real aerobatic flying. I learned to fly in a Citabria when I was just 13 but never really did any aerobatics other than just the basic spins and loops. Some very-unusual-atitudes time in the Pitts will open up a whole new world for me. I can't wait!

 Lastly, if you are a little freaked out about how low the Pitts is in the video above, I'll point you over to the post (with video) I put up back in September showing the tail touch. I put up a long and detailed comment to the concerns shared by a reader... hopefully it'll give you some important background info. Also, I talked with Billy today and he mentioned that GoPro had loads of video from which to choose their short clip, and while none of the other passes had him anywhere near this low to the ground, the one they chose did.

 I can definitely tell you that Billy is not a reckless thrill-seeker, but of course there are some very real risks involved with these kind of extreme displays. In the end, we may not see anymore of the inverted tail grab... so I say watch the video and simply enjoy an excellent, extreme display of flying and motorcycle riding by the wild Werth brothers!

Screenshot from the GoPro HD video - This Is Extreme!

 I've seen the pic below for several years now but I didn't know the story behind til I watched this recent video put together by AVweb. What a fascinating story - especially when you realize it was repaired and put back into service! Even more amazing to me, this exact aircraft is on display at the Air Force Museum, which I just spent three days at last weekend, but I didn't even realize it until just now as I was putting this post together!

 Hmpf. I guess I'll have to go back to the Air Force Museum again! : )

The F-106 after it landed in a field in Montana... without the pilot!

 OK, these sweet RC 'flying people' aren't patterned after Superman, Iron Man and the Rocketeer, but I say they should have been! Regardless (or as the uninformed say: irregardless), they do look pretty cool with New York City as a backdrop. Especially when the Statue of Liberty is in the frame. It's a really well produced video even if it leans a bit hard on artsy over substance. It's also pretty popular as it's already over 1 million views and it appears to have been uploaded just yesterday. 

 It looks to me like these New York flying people are based on the one from RcSuperHero.com but it's hard to say for sure. Anyway, it's a cool video of some sweet electric RC flying machines... and I still wanna try to build a flying AirPigz 'flying pig' for OSH12 : )

(7 pix)

 A total of 12 people made it to the 2nd annual AirPigz Air Force Museum Meetup over this last Fri - Sat - Sun, and it was a fabulous time of avgeek hangar flying and historic aviation overload. Can't wait to do it again next year! (more on that later)

 In addition to spending time in the massive Air Force Museum facilities, many of us also gathered for several meals off site. Like the pic above from the final breakfast on Sunday shows, nothing sparks great avgeek hangar flying like tasty strips of bacon!

 I'll have a detailed post (or several) in the coming months about many of the fantastic aircraft seen during the MeetUp, but for now I wanted to share some sweet teasers with you. If looking at these Research & Development Hangar pix below makes you all tingly inside, then I suggest you get yourself over to the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio sometime very soon!

Cool NASA meatball logo on the right side of the North American X-15

Beware Of Blast: one of the left side nose reaction control rockets on the X-15

 Not a lot of info in this post, I just wanted to share a bit from Saturday January 28, 2012 at the Air Force Museum MeetUp. Most of the day was spent over at the R & D hangar across the field from the main museum buildings. The R & D area, (which is connected to the Presidential aircraft display area) is my favorite part of the entire AFM experience. There's so much stunning aviation/aerospace history in that building! The dominating figure in the hangar is the XB-70 Valkyrie, the Mach 3+ high-altitude bomber from the early 60's. It takes my breath away every time I see it. I paid particular attention to its landing gear this time, and the image above gives you a ground level view of one of the main gear legs. There'll be a dedicated post on the gear in the future... so we can talk about that funky little wheel between the axles : )

 The addition pix here are of two other very unique aircraft gear legs, and I'll have more detail on them in the future as well. The R & D hangar is a great place to see some highly unusual experimental aircraft concepts and configurations. It seemed everyone at the MeetUp was reeeeeally enjoying their time there! The final pic is most of the group from Saturday just after we returned into the main museum.

(click pic to enlarge)  The very unusual XF-91 and its very unusual main gear legs