Air Fest 2010 [picture heavy!]

As I said in my previous post, this past weekend Matt, his youngest brother, J, and I went to Lackland AFB for their annual Air Fest. Matt and J have a huge passion for any flying object, especially fighter jets. Ever since I've been dating him, my vocabulary for such aircraft has drastically increased, and I can now proudly say I can differentiate between F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, F-22s, and F-35s (thank you very much). 

Anyway, Texas has 3 big air shows in the fall. We chose the one at Lackland because not only were the Thunderbirds headlining, but the F-22 Raptor demo team (AKA Matt's favorite plane ever) would also be there. So, we took the weekend off from school, and we went!

This is J & Matt on the shuttle heading to the base around 8:30...

Then we stood in line to go through security, passed through the detectors, and we're in! They had various performances throughout the day, starting around 10 AM. We got there so early though, so we could walk around and see the planes that were on display. Here is a brief tour of that [don't worry, I'll spare you most of the pictures]:

Sikorsky Black Hawks

The Predator

A C-5

And inside the C-5, in case you ever wondered

He looked cool haha

The NATO E-3A, used for "air battle management," as their sign says

Inside said plane, well, a part of it

 I wanted to figure out how to work on this NATO plane. You see, they are stationed out of Germany and ever since I went I've been trying to contrive of ways to get Matt & I to live there. But alas, since they have no direct 'apply here' and instead it is a complicated 'join the military and maybe you'll get placed here,' I gave up.

But I digress. We also saw the Army Golden Knights-- their parachuting team. Without further delay, here are some pictures from that:

In this series, one of the jumpers had a string of 6 canisters of the air writing 'stuff.' He started spinning...

And spinning...

Yeah, it was pretty cool!

So of course what we came for was the F-22 Raptor demo & the Thunderbirds. Here are my favorite pictures from them:
 

Disclaimer: The F-22 demo was extremely cool, but extremely fast. One small plane + really fast = super hard to take pictures... sorry they look so sad, but it was quite amazing!!

Bomb bay!

And the Thunderbirds!

My favoritest picture ever....

 And so there you have it-- hope you didn't mind a non-wedding related post. This is for all the guy readers I'm sure I have (*rolls eyes*). In very related wedding news, this weekend I'm going home to:

• Have a make up & hair trial!
• Go to my first fitting for my wedding dress!

Basically- I'm pretty pumped! And now one last picture, because it makes me happy: