Having Connections

My dad is retired Air Force and this weekend Luke AFB had their biannual Luke Days Air Show.  He suggested my husband and I go with him and his wife.  My husband was planning on going anyway so I said sure.  As we sat in traffic on a single lane road miles from the public parking lot, he basically said "screw this" and headed towards the Glendale Air Park thinking we could take a shuttle from there.  We were driving towards a different parking lot and spied a sign "Base housing use Kachina, Military ID required".  Holy crap why didn't this occur to us before - my dad and his wife have base privileges and military IDs.  So simple, no parking fees, no large crowds, no having to sit on school buses.  We were able it catch the base housing shuttle and were dropped off right in front of the flight line.

We wandered around and looked at some of the plans they had on display.  They had the new F-22 doing a flying demonstrations - man that is an awesome plane. It almost seemed to hover at time and then would go super fast over us.  There were some other flying demos, stunt planes and a group of 4 planes flying together, one from WWII, Korea, Vietnam and current.  The WWII plane was probable going as fast as it could and the F-4 was going as slow as it could, but they all stayed in formation.

My dad and his wife stood in line to go into the C-5 and got to see inside th cock pit.  It took them like an hour.  My husband and I met up with a couple of his friends and looked at the B-52. About 3:20 the Thunderbirds http://thunderbirds.airforce.com/ took off for their show.  All I can say about them is OMG talk about flying skills.


When we left, we just had to walk about a mile to where the car was parked (the shuttle was full and we figured it would be faster to walk). Coming over the bridge where the car was parked was an MP asking for military IDs from everyone - just doing their job.

When Luke Days comes again in 2013, I am going to see if my dad will take my son, he always wanted to go.  We would just start earlier in the day so we can see all the shows.