[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dr2ZB36p9Y&feature=player_embedded] Screw that Hollywood shit. Here are ten real life crazy drop it low flybys. Number 3 in particular is some pant wetting, balls shrinking stuff.
Viewing entries in
Airplanes
Engrossing article in Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine on Nick Popovich, the repo man of airplanes of the $150 million jumbo jets and presidential variety.
A U.S. financier had hired Popovich to snatch a Boeing 720 from a tour operator in Haiti who was in default. Though the aircraft had a book value of only $600,000, an airport manager refused to release it unless a million dollars was deposited in a Swiss bank account. Having made arrangements with an entrepreneurial Port-au-Prince airport employee, Nick showed up around midnight with an air starter (720s lack an onboard auxiliary power unit to start engines). The field had been closed for hours when the team fired up the big turbofans. As he began adding power, Popovich says, “I saw the first tracer rounds streak over the top of the airplane.”
Coming to a theater near you in 2011 starring Nicholas Cage.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with the SR-71 which is why I was so stoked to see these scanned pages of the actual flight manual for this imposing and lightening fast jet plane. Now if someone can just find the manual to Firefox. [Via]
Back in 1959 there were no modern air flight restrictions and this provided an opportunity for military pilots training at Nellis Air Force Base to fly through the nearby Grand Canyon, sometimes flying so low that the river water sprayed up as they buzzed by overhead. Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine posted on their website an amazing video recording from the cockpit from one such trip. The plane dips so low that at times it looks like the pilot is just a couple feet above the canyon river.
To Gear's James May gets a ride to the outer limits of our planet in the backseat of a U2 airplane. The view is quite spectacular . [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6cZLfK4Zjk&fmt=18]