Fleet Week 2023
Started: 2024-10-11 23:10:45
Submitted: 2024-10-12 01:08:57
Visibility: World-readable
Watching impressive feats of aerial acrobatics over San Francisco Bay
By the time I write this it's been a year since Fleet Week in October 2023. The pictures shown here spent the better part of a year sitting in my todo directory, silently judging me, waiting for me to make the time to go through the more than 200 pictures to find the ones I wanted to publish. Fleet Week is upon us again, and if I want to go this year I feel like I need to post my pictures from last year so here they are.
I took Calvin and Julian to the Embarcadero to see the Fleet Week air show on Saturday the 7th of October 2023. We found a place to sit at Pier 43 1/2, in the shadow of a building housing a seafood restaurant and a tourist shop perched at the edge of the bay.
From where we sat we could see most of the middle of the bay, including a good view of Alcatraz and Angel islands, which gave the opportunity to catch low passes over the bay right in front of the islands.
We watched the air show next to the dock where the Red and White ferry fleet picks up tourists to take them around the bay. The air show program, which I found archived by the Wayback Machine (which may or may not come back after the apparent attack this week) identifies the planes flying information in the picture below, above the Red and White Fleet passenger ferries, only as "Memorial Squadron".
Just about every seaworthy boat anywhere in the bay seemed to be out and about on the water, cruising back and forth in the middle of the bay, avoiding what looked like an exclusion zone running west-to-east along the middle of the bay, patrolled by Coast Guard and San Francisco Police boats.
The main attraction at the air show was the powered aircraft, but the Avian Air Force put up several demonstration flights of brown pelicans, flying in a tight formation over the bay.
The program identifies this flight as "NAS Corpus Christi - T-6 x 4 Fly Bys".
The middle of the air show featured an F-35B, piloted by Major Michael Frazer, which Wikipedia tells me is the variant used by the Marine Corps built for short take-off and vertical landing.
The F-35B showed off its high thrust-to-weight ratio with several vertical climbs over the bay.
The F-35B also showed off what looked like its vectored thrust mode by flying low over the bay while pitched in a nose-high attitude. What's not clear from this picture is that the plane is flying horizontally without climbing, even though the nose is pitched at a high angle of attack.
And finally, the F-35B showed off its STOVL (short take-off, vertical landing) mode, flying with gear extended and the fairing around its lift fan raised to expose the large vertical fan pointing downwards. This allows the plane to fly below the stall speed of its wings, gaining additional lift from its own internal turbine.
The whole display was an impressive demonstration of a fantastically-expensive aircraft.
The penultimate entry in the air show was United Airlines flying a 777-300, the largest aircraft in their fleet and the largest aircraft in the entire show (but smaller than the 747-400 I saw them flying in 2016.)
The 777 flew in a figure-8 pattern across the bay, performing low passes west-to-east along the bay, in front of the viewing stands set up at Marina Green, then climbed, banked to the left, and dove towards Marina Green, climbing at the last moment over the Marina District before banking to the right, looping around the Golden Gate, to repeat the cycle.
As a warmup to the Navy's Blue Angels as the show's finale, we watched "Fat Albert", a C-130 used to carry the demonstration team's maintenance and support equipment, flying back and forth across the bay, performing various acrobatic stunts appropriate for a large turboprop cargo aircraft.
Then the Blue Angels appeared, flying in a tight four-ship diamond formation with the two bonus chase aircraft swinging around the side.
The Blue Angels flew back and forth across the bay in a variety of formations, usually with four aircraft together in a tight formation and the last two aircraft performing some other coordinating stunt.
This was an impressive display of aerial acrobatics, and a clear display of American military power, with a clear subtext of nationalism.
After the show we walked down the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building, then waited in a long line for ice cream. We ate on a bench looking over the bay, then headed the rest of the way home.
I took a bunch of pictures of the Fleet Week air show; they're all at Photos on 2023-10-07.
