Strafed by an airplane

I was on the USS Constellation (CV-64) on a Tiger Cruise many decades ago.
My brother was a signalman, and I went along on the cruise from San Diego to Hawaii.
The Tiger Cruise is when the sailors can bring a family member or friend on the ship with them for a little trip.

They gave us an air show.
You got the sound exactly right, but text can not do justice to the actual volume of sound those guns make.
You can actually feel the percussion through the air.

Rather like no one can appreciate the WHOOOOSH BANG! when a plane is launched from a carrier when your bunk is just a few decks directly below. That shakes things a bit as well.

 

Can't say any pilot has done the North by Northwest thing over my truck before.

 

In the early 80's pilot's training at the Tonopah range got in trouble for strafing trucks in the middle of the night. Scare the hell out of you when your detector would light up screaming and see the afterburner shooting up to the sky. They would talk to you on the CB and tell you if it was a gun, bomb or missile. Those of us that ran it daily/weekly would joke about it but eventually someone complained.

 

Wasn't that called "barnstorming"? I have a story about that without a happy ending. A guy I knew, was a bigshot at American Family Ins. and scheduled a fishing trip with some of his corporate buddies, contracted a small seaplane to fly them into Canada, another group was to follow in another plane. Apparently, a young punk showed up, took off, when they got to the cabin, he began barnstorming the cabin, was too low, sheared the landing tanks off and crashed in the lake. When the 2nd plane landed on the lake, all they saw was the tail of the 1st plane, all were dead.

 

Charlie Varrick was even better....

 

I consider myself lucky. It could have been a jet playing games.

 

DID YOU
GET THE
N-NUMBER ON THE
SIDE OF THE AIRPLANE???

 

No, I was too busy driving.

 

I was running west on I-10 in Texas, just before the 10-20 split and got buzzed by a B-1 doing low altitude terrain following drills. Fast and loud once it passed over. Never heard it coming.

 

He's probably Russian pilot , it's common things there