A day at the Air Show

Quzol1

Spent the day, sunday at a local air show. Here are a few of the shot's. Thanks for looking C&C welcome.



Can some help me out with this? Is this actually a F-18 breaking the sound barrier, or some other phenomenon? I don't remember a sonic boom, but I wasn't really paying attention to it with all the other noise the jet made.



2 P-51's and a T-28


This one I just liked the colors

Darren Troy C

The first one rocks!...and to answer your question...YEP! You got that ever elusive split-second-timing of the jet breaking the sound barrier! Fantastic image.

mercphoto

Quzol1 wrote:

Spent the day, sunday at a local air show. Here are a few of the shot's. Thanks for looking C&C welcome.



2 P-51's and a T-28

Nice shot, but your shutter speed is too high. The prop's are frozen. Go down to about 1/125 a second to get some prop blur going. Planes look odd while in the air with the props not turning.

DJ-S1

Nice shots!

I have to disagree though. There's no way a pilot would break the sound barrier at an airshow without severe consequences.

Fast moving jets can squeeze the moisture out of the air and form fleeting clouds in some circumstances. Generally you see this effect over the wings during tight high-speed turns. To get your shot, I would guess that the pilot was fairly low to the ground (dense air) and it was somewhat humid (lots of moisture around) and the jet was cruising very fast - not supersonic but maybe 600mph. All of this combined to create that fantastic cloud effect for a very brief time.
Congrats of catching it and making a great image!

Blaze Z Blaze

Quzol1 wrote:

Can some help me out with this? Is this actually a F-18 breaking the sound barrier, or some other phenomenon? I don't remember a sonic boom, but I wasn't really paying attention to it with all the other noise the jet made.

Regarding the speed, all of the performers are restricted to below 600 MPH. While there are pictures of aircraft (supposedly) breaking the sound barrier and causing the condensation cloud to form, it is common to see it at much lower speeds. My guess is that it relates to how low the pressure gets over the wing. A high angle of attack at high speed could cause a very low pressure which triggers the condensation. I see it all the time with average aircraft just taking off or landing. I suspect temperature & dewpoint figure into it as well.

pyry

Blaze Z Blaze wrote:

Regarding the speed, all of the performers are restricted to below 600 MPH. While there are pictures of aircraft (supposedly) breaking the sound barrier and causing the condensation cloud to form, it is common to see it at much lower speeds. My guess is that it relates to how low the pressure gets over the wing. A high angle of attack at high speed could cause a very low pressure which triggers the condensation. I see it all the time with average aircraft just taking off or landing. I suspect temperature & dewpoint figure into it as well.

Low speed, high AOA situations cause condensation just above the wing. That Hornet is causing condensation in a cone around the aircraft, which means it is at least going very near to the sound barrier - the shock wave is beginning to form. The cone is pretty wide though so the speed isn't very very high either.

Awais Yaqub

Wonderful !

Rhuarc

If anyone is actually interested in this, here is a website I dug up that has a ton of links and info and pics about this effect.

http://wilk4.com/misc/soundbreak.htm#mcramer_info

Hope someone finds this as interesting as I do!

jeffmeyers

Let me add to the praise: #1 is something else! Good photographic work!

Red Bull

Great airshow photos! I went to the air show last year and got a few decent shots, but you captured the cone much better than I did.

Quzol1

thanks everyone. The hornet was CLOSE to the ground, this was just after the 500 ft ceiling burned off. So I imagine their was a high moisture content in the air. The interesting thing was is the hornet actually made 2 of these formations in the same pass.

mercphoto I will keep the shutter speed in mind next time, thanks.

Just for the heck of it this is the other shot I got of the Hornet.

Tee Why

I do like the first shot the most. I detect a tint of magenta though.

Howard Barlow

mercphoto wrote:

Nice shot, but your shutter speed is too high. The prop's are frozen. Go down to about 1/125 a second to get some prop blur going. Planes look odd while in the air with the props not turning.

Maybe it's a static aerial display. :ivar

DJ-S1

Don, that second shot from under the jet is really sweet too! That's really great timing to get 2 shots like that -

cmpdesignz2010

Hello Everyone-

New B here. Wanted to chime in on the whole "sound barrier" image. I took a similar one at the Jones Beach Air Show in 2009. I was told by the pilot he was about 200mph below the sound barrier and if he was to have broken it the sonic boom would have shattered all the windows with in a 20 mile radius. Not to mention he would have been kicked out of the military.

Feel free to view the images and blog I wrote for Reuters with regard to the whole event. http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2009/06/01/from-top-gun-to-top-shot/

Thanks,
CP

David_S85

cmpdesignz2010 wrote: »

Hello Everyone-

New B here. Wanted to chime in on the whole "sound barrier" image. I took a similar one at the Jones Beach Air Show in 2009. I was told by the pilot he was about 200mph below the sound barrier and if he was to have broken it the sonic boom would have shattered all the windows with in a 20 mile radius.

Mythbusters has already busted that one. It took a mach 1 plus flyover of an F15, and at under 200 feet to (barely) break one window directly under it. And it took several attempts.

cmpdesignz2010

David_S85 wrote: »

Mythbusters has already busted that one. It took a mach 1 plus flyover of an F15, and at under 200 feet to (barely) break one window directly under it. And it took several attempts.

Hey, I'm just repeating what I was told.

squirl033

"I was told by the pilot he was about 200mph below the sound barrier and if he was to have broken it the sonic boom would have shattered all the windows with in a 20 mile radius."

sonic booms are loud, but rarely enough to shatter windows, and certainly not for a 20 mile radius. if that were the case, every SR-71 flight in history would've left a trail of broken glass in its wake. pilots are notorious for exaggerating such things.

Rhuarc

Yea, we kind of have a bad habit of doing that! =P

You are correct about the vapor you see forming at speeds below the sound barrier. It is created by the same reason that you see contrails, and sometimes vapor above the wings on takeoff in airliners. The much lower pressure air can't hold as much moisture and it becomes visible, while the same moisture content in higher pressure air does not.

Shades of Hyperion

Nice capture on the first one, regardless of the speed of the aircraft. The prop planes do need prop blur (I made the same mistake at my first air show) otherwise they look like model airplanes hanging from a string.