Star Road

While standing on the flight line waiting for the Thunderbirds to start, a piece of paper got loose in the wind near the F-16’s. Too amazed to raise my camera, I watched three soldiers chase this flying manuscript until one of them deftly trapped it between his boot and the ground, then bent over to pick it up. High-ranking soldiers in front of over $250 million worth of aircraft, and they’re getting baffled by parchment in a breeze. This was an excellent metaphor for this amazing shit-show of an event which itself was a great metaphor for the state of the USA.

The day’s misfortune started with our own misunderstanding. I was tagging along with my buddy Marcelo, who came to town primarily for this event (that’s him in the middle with the big Canon lens). I asked him if he wanted to show up early, but after a couple late nights in Vegas he said he wanted to sleep in a little. That was fine with me–he’s the plane nerd; I was just there for fun.

That’s why I didn’t even push back when he said he wanted to pick me up at 11 AM; I’d read the schedule and saw that the show started at 11. I live only about 15 minutes from the track, and these shows always start with a ceremony and less exciting performances, so I didn’t think much of it. Well, as soon as we got close to the base, we started seeing planes in the sky. It turns out that one of the reasons Marcelo wanted to pick me up at 11 was because he had apparently read an ad and heard on the radio that flying would start at 12.

So instead of showing up an hour before it started, we arrived when it was already well underway. And this was the scene that greeted us when we finally got out of our car. Not only did it take about half an hour just to get from the highway to the parking lot, but we then joined a queue that must have had a thousand or more people in it.

One small comfort is that an air show obviously takes place in the air, so it can be seen from far away; if you were this close to a race track or any other sporting event, you wouldn’t see any action. So at least we had this to comfort our multi-hour wait.

Yes, we were in this line for hours. We had finally parked by about noon, and after a five minute bus ride across the street, we arrived at Nellis AFB at 2:30 PM: we spent two and a half hours in line! Once we got to the tent you see above, it was obvious why: thousands of people needed to go through a security checkpoint, which included a bag search, but they only had three people working the tent. What taxpayer-funded moron decided that 200,000 spectators would be adequately served by three people??

The very first thing we saw once we finally arrived at the base made me laugh. I didn’t get to hear these guys play, so I am making no judgment on their musical skills or the performance they gave; it’s just funny to me that service members have to wear camouflage combat uniforms all the time, no matter what they’re doing.

They let us get pretty close to the planes, although from varying distances depending on the aircraft. These F-15’s did have barriers, but they were right under the planes.

On the other hand, this was as close as you could get to an F-35.

First things first: I needed food! I had been picked up at 11 and assumed we would get there around lunch time, so I didn’t think to pack snacks. By the time we got there at 2:30 after having stood in the sun since noon, I was absolutely famished. Our first major stroke of luck: we got to the front of the burger tent line, and they initially told us they were sold out. But wait–actually they had two burgers left. Just enough for Marcelo and myself! Yes!! Man, I wolfed down that burger. We were now on the base, so we were at least closer to the show. This F-35 and T-38 cruised around together, and it was pretty cool to see the size comparison.

Finally, it was time for us to watch the show. We searched around for a space to stand, but the area was packed. I was shooting with my 70-200mm, the telephoto I use for shooting motorsports, but it feels like a wide lens when you’re trying to shoot planes. This was shot at 200mm: that’s all the zoom I have.

Based on the gear I had, I was always going to have to get creative. I decided to try some slower pans; this was shot at 1/80. There is a ton of separation between the subject and background, so there isn’t much motion blur despite the slow shutter; but at least the propellor is nice and blurred.

I use a monopod when I’m shooting motorsports, but I was just free-handing the lens at this event. It definitely gets hard to hold up a heavy lens all day; that’s why I was pretty impressed by this guy who had a whole other removable lens camera mounted to his lens! And of course, the matching guns to keep it all aloft.

The view from the base is pretty rad; there are mountains all around, and a view straight into the city of Las Vegas.

After the P-51 show, we moved to get a slightly better vantage point for the “Red Bull Air Force” performance.

I tried slow shutter again, but ultimately it doesn’t seem like the results were worth it.

This was a totally lucky capture, but shows what shooting planes constantly feels like to me: you’re just shooting a tiny glaring light in the sky.

Then they brought out a couple stunt skydivers, and the plane did a loop around them. This was at 70mm, or full wide on the lens I was using.

The helicopter came out and they started to do some tandem moves.

I did appreciate the multi-level micro/macro view thing going on here; you could zoom way in and see the individual motions of the aircraft, or peel the view back and see the whole pattern.

When do you ever see a full-size helicopter go upside down? I thought that was one of the more interesting parts of the show.

Jets don’t really have any constantly moving visually significant parts; however, helicopters and prop planes certainly do. There’s nothing to blur in the background at all, but the 1/100 shutter speed at least got me some slightly blurred rotors here.

This was a trippy move; intentionally going into some sort of flat spin and basically just falling out of the sky. Pretty cool, but slightly unnerving.

I don’t think I’ve ever incorporated the moon into any type of automotive photography, but it was right there in front of us. I kept waiting for something to cross in front of it, and finally captured it.

And then, it was time for the main show: the Thunderbirds. We started walking, trying to find a good view of the flight line. We got ourselves somewhere to the right of this shot, when a soldier asked us to back away from the barriers. Argh!

Well, the reason he wanted us to move away from those barriers was our second, and biggest, stroke of luck for the day: they were unblocking an area right in front of the flight line! Since I was right there when it happened, I immediately rushed straight to the barrier. After arriving several hours late and not getting a good view of, well, anything so far, we suddenly had a perfect spot in the front row for the main show!

They started with some boring stuff–the previous photo was an induction ceremony for new Air Force recruits. But I didn’t care, because I had a perfect view of the six Thunderbirds! Wait…why are there only five F-16’s? Where’s #3? They did brag that they’ve never had to cancel a performance due to a mechanical failure, but they didn’t say anything about participation rate…

I have no idea who any of these people are, but I thought it was a fun capture.

They had a lengthy opening ceremony which I found incredibly cheesy. I’ve always found it deeply ironic that militaries perform serious show-of-power ceremonies with whimsical choreography (like goose stepping) that looks like it should be in a Broadway musical, not a battlefield. I don’t know who the target audience is for this part of the show, but it’s not me.

As a photographer, I’m always looking at other photographers and wondering what they’re up to. She gets to be so much closer, and look at that beefy Canon lens!

The amount of energy that comes out of these jets, even while idling, is just insane. All the way on the right side of the frame, you can still see the background heavily distorted from the heat haze of the engine.

Finally, after all the pomp and cheese and circumstance, they got moving. Of course one thing I didn’t realize, not being a pilot, is that they still had to perform pre-flight checks. So uh…there would be a bit more waiting.

Kapowie! I’m not a plane nerd but I’ll try to point out some of the interesting details I’ve noticed. This was their first fly-by, and you can see the landing gear in the process of being retracted.

Really cool to see the afterburner lit. I don’t know the name of the effect, but I love how the propulsion comes out in “rings” or “blobs” that you can see trailing the engine.

Of course as a car nerd, I was paying attention to the auxiliary vehicles as well. Check out this super short wheelbase F-350!

This air show was very much like a music festival: the opening acts might have their moments, and they have their fans, but it’s obvious why the headliner is the headliner: they just kick ass. The Thunderbirds have all kinds of different moves; from the type that are best appreciated from afar over a wide distance, like the one above…

…to ones like this, where they fly right over the crowd.

Whoa! You can clearly see the pilots in the cockpit. On that note, I wonder why the cockpits aren’t tinted. Perhaps that makes night flying too hard?

One of the main points for the existence of the Thunderbirds is to show off their precision. Some of the moves are so precise that they are almost scary to watch! The optical illusions of distance and angle help, but they fly genuinely close at pretty high speeds.

It took me a while to realize this, but the bottom of the plane is the Thunderbird logo! Neat.

I kept waiting for the Thunderbirds to fly past the moon. For whatever reason–sheer coincidence, surely–this was the only pattern they did that flew in front of it.

This was my first time actually attending a Thunderbirds show, but I’ve seen them practice a lot since their home base is right here in Las Vegas. This move, reminiscent of the infamous because I was inverted scene from Top Gun, is one of my favorites. There’s just something amusing to me about a plane flying upside-down.

There was an MC narrating the whole show and giving a bit of context; still, it was only a bit, and I really had no idea what was coming next. I decided to switch to a slow shutter speed (1/100) right before this move, which I would have never done if I had known what was coming. Thankfully though, I actually pulled off at least a couple captures. Three planes came in banked, stacked on top of each other; then, like playing cards being spread, they slowly fanned out. Aesthetically, this was probably the most impressive and interesting move of the show for me.

Embarrassingly, I never touched the polarizer after the Thunderbirds started. That’s one of the reasons why the sky in particular looks so wildly different in these shots. But another difference is their smoke machine; why does it look white and thin in some shots, but grey and thick in others?

They did this pass twice, probably because it just looks so damn scary. It’s probably the equivalent of two cars driving down a two-lane highway in opposite directions on opposite sides of a double-yellow line, but it looks like a near-miss every time.

I hardly shoot planes, so a lot of these snaps are just experimental. What happens if you take a shot like this at 1/100? Not much, apparently–they smoke doesn’t look appreciably different from a shot at 1/640.

They did the near-miss again (or is that a near-hit, as George Carlin said? “A collision is a near-miss. *BOOM!* Oh look, they nearly missed.”), and I went for the full zoom and 1/2500 shutter. The timing for this is very precise, and I didn’t quite nail it.

Some of the patterns were just immense, and this is where the smoke trails really help. Without the big smoke trails, this huge loop would be meaningless, and those planes would just be three little polygons in the sky.

It’s hilarious that 70mm can be the wide angle choice, but aviation photography is on a completely different scale from what I’m used to shooting.

I loved watching them come over this mountain. I put this one in black and white to hopefully emphasize those incredible shadows the planes cast on the mountain.

I knew that Marcelo was shooting with a Canon 100-500mm on a Canon R7, which has a crop factor (aka “focal length multiplier”) of 1.6x. That means that his “100mm” gives a field-of-view equivalent to a 160mm lens on my camera. Which is to say that he had significantly more zoom potential than I did with 70-200mm on a full frame. Knowing this, I leaned into the wider framing.

The previous two shots were at 200mm (fully zoomed), but this one was fully wide, at 70mm. Even though I never moved my position during the entire Thunderbirds show, I really tried to get a good variety of snaps.

For the uninformed such as myself, the lack of a sixth plane didn’t really seem to make any difference–until this formation. After all the precision close flying, this odd box-looking pattern didn’t seem that impressive. That’s because the “Four Card” formation, as they called it during this show, actually should be the “Five Card” formation: there is supposed to be another plane in the center.

In 1956, shortly after the formation of the Thunderbirds, they got a new plane: the F-100C Super Sabre, which had supersonic capabilities. Using these planes, and the subsequent F-4 Phantom, they performed a sonic boom at shows until the FAA outlawed supersonic flight over land in 1973. They still do some high speed passes directly over the crowd, but with the airbrakes out to keep them from going too fast.

Here you can see the smoke being different colors from different aircraft at the same time, so I don’t think it’s an optical illusion; probably just something slightly different with the mix in the smoke generator.

I know it’s pretty standard, but the precision of these moves across five planes is super impressive.

Along with all these maneuvers, there is a narrator hyping up the crowd and explaining what’s going on. I found that helpful and interesting, but the part that didn’t hit for me was the musical accompaniment. I suppose that gets the crowd hyped up, but to me it’s just cheesy and unnecessary.

Unfortunately, like most of the time in the desert, the skies above Las Vegas on this day were completely devoid of clouds. However, due to all the smoke generated by these five planes, they created their own little clouds that added a lot of texture.

I really wish I had tweaked the polarizer more, but to a large extent there is nothing you can about what the sky looks like: you just take what you get from the angle you’re shooting, because you can’t really go anywhere else. This is very different than motorsports photography; if you’re somewhere where the light is unfavorable, just go somewhere else!

Some of the patterns that seem relatively simple are actually my favorite: I loved this one, where they fly in close formation and then split up.

As I wrote earlier in this post, these formations are probably the equivalent of two cars driving opposite ways down a highway. Still, they are visually breathtaking. Shooting maneuvers like this give me a very strange feeling, like please don’t crash, but if so, I really hope I get the shot.

I had to give the slow pan one more shot. Well, slow in this case is 1/100 at 200mm: the longer the focal length, the harder it is to do slow shutters. Especially in this case where I didn’t have my monopod for stabilization.

I learned something new while writing this post: whenever they do a formation with an inverted plane, #5 is always the plane that’s inverted. So that’s why the identification number of #5 is upside-down.

How rad is that! It’s a tiny detail that spectators would never be able to see in motion, but it reveals itself under close post-examination. Now that is something that’s meant for me.

Fun ending to this one, well at least to me. I don’t know why, but seeing a plane flying upside down just feels comical.

And then…it was over just like that. No showy landings or fly-bys with the landing gear out, they just rolled on back. Of course, something rolling on the ground always makes me want to do a slow pan. For this one I went all the way down to 1/40, and I’m pretty stoked about how it came out, because 1/40 second at 200mm is a pretty hard shot to pull off without a monopod.

Faced with a gigantic line to board the bus to leave, we finally had time and a good excuse to peruse the static displays. This must have been the more sensitive lineup, because while you could walk right up to other planes, they were a bit more cagey about these. The F-35 and F-22 I can understand, but the A-10 has been around for over 50 years and in fact, the newest A-10 was built in 1984. The USAF was supposed to start retiring A-10’s in 2023, but from what I’ve read, I believe they’ve paused that phase-out; in 2025 you can still see A-10’s routinely flying out of Nellis.

The MQ-9 Reaper is such a trippy plane. First of all, it’s tiny! Well, it’s a drone, so it was never designed to have anyone ride aboard, but I was still surprised. This photo isn’t great, but I tried to get the soldiers included for scale.

It also has a trippy wing configuration and shape, plus it’s a turboprop, which I had never realized. Looking it up, I also didn’t realize these were first flown in 2001 and have been in service since 2007.

But speaking of long-lasting planes, how about the T-38 Talon? It’s still actively used for training purposes, like the “aggressor” liveried version seen here. But this plane’s first flight? All the way back in 1959!

I see this all the time for plane photography, and it always makes me laugh. That’s a short fence, why do you need to be eighteen inches higher? I often see people lined up on Las Vegas Blvd across the street from Nellis, standing in the bed of their truck while shooting planes overhead. Oh yeah, it’ll really help to get three feet closer to that plane flying a thousand feet over your head.

It was the end of the day, so I’ll cut this guy some slack, even though as a serious photographer (or at least serious gearhead) he should know better: don’t park your ass in front of show cars or planes! This guy could have booped out his text message or whatever in any shady spot on the base, but he chose to do it two feet away from this Osprey.

As far as I know, this is an Oshkosh M-ATV, which is an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle that’s supposed to replace the HMMWV (you know, the “Humvee” or “Hummer”). But, even though the Oshkosh M-ATV came out in 2009, there are still over 100,000 Hummers currently in service! Ah yes, another metaphor for this event: the US Armed Forces and the people they work with clearly do not understand the idea of “getting things accomplished efficiently”.

Now here is something I did not expect to see on this day of jingoism: the world’s first working airplane! Well, this wasn’t the actual Wright Flyer that made the world’s first sustained flight by a manned heavier-than-air powered and controlled aircraft back in 1903, but a replica. The actual Wright Flyer was only flown four times, and on its fourth and longest flight (which was 852 feet), it was damaged upon landing and never flew again.

This reminds me of going to vintage races and seeing classic race cars with modern safety gear like bucket seats and seatbelts, which certainly did not exist back in 1903 when the Wright Brothers were doing their thing. In fact, the Wright Flyer didn’t have any seats at all–the pilot laid on his belly on the bottom wing!

In contrast to most other planes, they just had F-16’s chilling out in the open with no barriers whatsoever. I suppose the F-16 has been in service so long (first flight: 1974) and by so many countries (over a dozen by my count) that I guess there’s really nothing left to be secretive about.

Or what about this tank, which you could climb all over! I thought it was cute how this dad was getting a snap of his daughter on the gun. There are so many wide-ranging problems with regard to these machines of war, so it’s refreshing to just relax a bit and appreciate the technology in a light-hearted way.

And in closing, here’s the bunghole of an F-35. After this, we waited in a 2000 foot long line to board the bus to get back across the street to the parking lot at LVMS.

As the article title says, I felt this event was quite a metaphor for the USA and the US Armed Forces. We’ve created some of the most advanced technology of all time, especially when it comes to warfare. By total wealth, the USA destroys the rest of the world, having 30.8% of the world’s total wealth within its borders (China is second place with 18%; all of Europe combined accounts for 23%) ; we also have by far the world’s largest GDP, clocking in at approximately $27 trillion, which beats out second place China by a solid $10 trillion.

And yet, the USA features nowhere on the lists of other measures of “richness”: on the top 10’s of National Happiness, Human Development Index, and Social Progress Index, the USA doesn’t feature at all.

So it’s not really that surprising that when our government puts on a free event that’s supposed to show off our power, it’s a complete logistical shit-show that seemingly forgot why it was even put on. The show is for the people, but we struggled to get in and they ran out of food before everyone had even arrived on the premises.

As we waited in line for those two-and-a-half hours on Saturday, we murmured about trying our luck on Sunday. This was not really an option because we had a Sunday brunch planned with friends, but I’m glad we didn’t even try. I drove past the Speedway exit on my way to brunch on Sunday at around 10:30 (a bit earlier than we had arrived on Saturday), and the exit was already backed up an additional half-mile. So, quite obviously, even if they had realized the scale of their logistical problems on Saturday, they didn’t even try to rectify them for Sunday.

We are the wealthiest nation with the strongest military. The United States Department of Defense is the largest employer in the country, with almost three million people overseeing our armed forces. And yet, they can’t even figure out how to put on a free show for the public. What a metaphor for the United States of America: ostensibly the most powerful nation to ever exist, on the international stage we look like a monkey fucking a football. How embarrassing.