HISTORY MAKING, 1ST EVER
Night time aerial acrobatics
TICO Air Show; Titusville, FL

This 4-plane formation thrilled the large crowd as they performed as part of the first-ever night airshow at this popular annual event near NASA's Cape Kennedy facility.

The dark smudge in the lower center of the top photo was smoke from a large grass fire that local departments fought most of the day including the use of a helicopter doing air dumps of water in an effort to control the blaze.

During a helicopter segment in the afternoon the fire fighting helicopter was invited by radio to join the other helicopters passing in review and added the bonus of a close peek at his airborne dumping rig.

In the picture (right) the three lower lights are runway lighting and gave the breath-taking impression the diving aircraft needed to do a quick recovery from their flight's course in order to avoid catastrophe.

Two, WWII B-25 bombers--the type of aircraft used in Jimmy Dolittle's raid on Tokyo in April 1942--passed in review to celebrate that memorable event which happened just a little over 4 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

The USA was both stunned and militarily crippled in that attack while the Japanese continued their assault across the South Pacific.  The Dolittle raid bolstered morale in the US and was a turning point in the war.

The Japanese suddenly realized their homeland was in danger and had to deploy forces in its defense thus weakening their aggression.

In that raid 16 B-25s were launched from two US Navy aircraft carriers--the first time ever that was accomplished with multi-engine bombers.  All crash landed after their bombing runs because they had insufficient range to return to the carriers.

We suffered the loss of 3 pilots in those crashes and 8 others who were captured by the Japanese and were executed or died as prisoners of war.  Most others survived by crash landing in China.  Nationalist Chinese were our allies in WWII; later losing their own war to the Communist Chinese in 1949.

Doolittle's co-pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Cole, one of the two living survivors of the raid, was actively greeting TICO airshow visitors during the afternoon and we had the very random honor of being seated at a table next to his party at a local restaurant that evening with his very near-by presence stimulating our awareness of his place in US history.

Another highlight of the show was the amazing performance of an F-16 Fighting Falcon, introduced in 1994 and, as of 2015, remaining the second most common currently operational military aircraft in the world.

Imagine the excitement of that warbird doing a low pass in front of the crowd at 9/10 the speed of sound.  It is capable of flying Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) at altitude in clean configuration (no exterior armament).

I'm still tingling from the sight of it doing close formation aerobatics with a P-51 Mustang, a propeller driven, key player in WWII aerial combat and my idea of the most classic airplane design--ever!