I can verify, driving on I 94 in Montana, and coming down one of those long dips in those gullies, in eastern Montana, and have a B 52 come flying about 50 feet over your head at about 400 to 500 knots, will surely make you wet or soil your BVDs...
especially when you see the A/C is below the level ground on the bluffs..
also have seen F 4s and F100s flying at high speed about 25 feet or less off the ground.
Those sneak passes at Fleet Week never broke any windows, nor will they ever. That would be the end of the annual Fleet Week, and probably of the Blue Angels.
I'll have to search but I used to have a video of a flyby at a college game that got the pilot's wings taken away. He literally was below the tops of the sides of the stadium.
Here it is. I remember reading the pilot got in serious hot water. On the second shot of it you can see the guys in the press box looking down at the plane.
I can verify, driving on I 94 in Montana, and coming down one of those long dips in those gullies, in eastern Montana, and have a B 52 come flying about 50 feet over your head at about 400 to 500 knots, will surely make you wet or soil your BVDs...
especially when you see the A/C is below the level ground on the bluffs..
also have seen F 4s and F100s flying at high speed about 25 feet or less off the ground.
I was out with my dad hunting pheasants in southern Saskatchewan in the late 60's. We were travelling south on a gravel road at about 50 mph, crested a hill, and met a B52 flying north at about 400 mph. Scared the bejabbers outta us!
Apparently SAC used to do those low-level exercises all the time down that way.
When I first moved to Wyoming SAC used to run low level flights out here with B-52, B1B and F16. Had the schitt startled out of me several times. Could never prove it but sometimes I swore they did it on purpose when we were out working. Laughed about it after we cleaned out our shorts....hell I enjoyed seeing those birds!
Probably not, elk76. There's just no way to see a guy on a tractor (or whatever) at that speed and altitude in time to intentionally buzz him. Or see him as you pass over, for that matter. When flying like that you have to focus hard on the horizon, because your plane goes where your eyes go - and if you look at the ground just ahead of you ...
I was shooting rifles with a friend a couple years ago and we had this dude do a fly by. A grass 1,500'(?) grass runway is right below him. To my (the weirdo with his arms in the air) left is a shooting house that we shoot out of. We saw this big C130 (?) coming at us from the west, we jumped out of the SH and watched him fly by at a very low altitude. I believe he saw us, them swung around to the south and came up by us at maybe 50' off the deck, hit the end of the runway and them banked hard to his right, heading east again. Never to be see again......
I asked a few people if he could have landed on that grass strip and they said sure, but wouldn't be able to take off afterward.
I have another shot of him going by a second after this picture and you can read his tail numbers....I don't think I'll post that one!
It's only a still, but this is how I flew many of my 300 combat missions ...
You flew 300 combat missions in THAT!? Seriously? Unreal.
(just went to your bio page. Wow! I'll be buying / reading your books once I finish my current Baldacci)
You will enjoy every minute of them too. He is the quintessential BTDT guy. I can verify from his second book he really musta went on a Huey mission, described some of the stuff we did to a tee.
Yes I did, crockett. Most of them over Cambodia in that little gray plane, no national markings, in civvie clothes, no ID, and my right-seater was a NORTH Vietnamese captain. We got the REAL "Mission Impossible" speech about being disavowed. And that is no chit.
Golden BB? Nope, or I wouldn't be here. Holes yes. Several. The O-2 had exactly one square foot of Kevlar armor - in the pilot's seat pan. I came home with a bullet in that plate one time, right under the dangly bits.
Oh, and that photo helps folks understand how when I say I came home with an arrow in my wing once. Another one of us brought home the top few feet of a palm tree.
You really don't want to know how many holes you can bring back from one mission to a hot LZ in a Huey! OR how badly you can beat up the rotors and still fly even though is feels like you are in a vibratory tumbler.
I seen them little birds you flew come back damn near in pieces and the L-19/O-1 Bird Dog's with BIG pieces missing.
Best fly by I've seen was when an Aero Union P3 just about blew the shingles off of my house. His nose was right up the azz of the lead plane when he blew over the treetops out of the drainage, and the plane's four engines were like music.
Great thing to see and hear when it's raining ash and you're charging hose lines and tightening up your gear.
Dad saw lots of flyby's by ME109's intent on making it a very bad day for him, but luckily lived to tell about it. Of all the Axis planes he saw over there he most feared the Stuka-those dive whistles were very scary he said. We have a tail light beacon off a Stuka that fell to small arms fire in his area. 'Never knew for sure who hit it, but he said everything in the area that could shoot was trained on that plane.
Seriously, the world was on fire below us and we were jumping up and down all pissed off that we didn't have our video cameras out. That would have been a GREAT film.
The only fly over I've seen was of a surplus Military Beech that flew over my home at the west end of the Jefferson County International Airport. He was about a 100' to 150' off the ground when he cleared the fir trees on my property and he dropped below tree level after he cleared the firs he came over my place landing gear up and those two unmuffled Patt and Whitney's at full throttle. He buzzed the airport and came around and landed.
It earned him the honor of explaining his actions to the FAA about three days later as the incident was on a holiday weekend.
You really don't want to know how many holes you can bring back from one mission to a hot LZ in a Huey! OR how badly you can beat up the rotors and still fly even though is feels like you are in a vibratory tumbler.
I seen them little birds you flew come back damn near in pieces and the L-19/O-1 Bird Dog's with BIG pieces missing.
Flew one back one day from the A Shau with 176 inbound holes. No body got hit, we had no radios, I had no instrument panel to speak of. They salvaged the undamaged parts and junked it.
I was deer hunting on Dad's old place one time, walking down a big hill into a creek bottom, when a BUFF came over real low. He was doing the "nap of the earth" thing, trying to sneak into Bucklin MO, I guess....... I never heard him until it went by, of course. I know SOMEONE on the aircraft saw me, I was in orange, and not very far away from them at all................600 yards, tops. Them BUFFS are sneaky things, just like A-10s, which often snuck up on us at Ft. Bragg. Northern Missouri just isn't very far from Omaha in air miles.
You really don't want to know how many holes you can bring back from one mission to a hot LZ in a Huey! OR how badly you can beat up the rotors and still fly even though is feels like you are in a vibratory tumbler.
I seen them little birds you flew come back damn near in pieces and the L-19/O-1 Bird Dog's with BIG pieces missing.
Flew one back one day from the A Shau with 176 inbound holes. No body got hit, we had no radios, I had no instrument panel to speak of. They salvaged the undamaged parts and junked it.
I was deer hunting on Dad's old place one time, walking down a big hill into a creek bottom, when a BUFF came over real low. He was doing the "nap of the earth" thing, trying to sneak into Bucklin MO, I guess....... I never heard him until it went by, of course. I know SOMEONE on the aircraft saw me, I was in orange, and not very far away from them at all................600 yards, tops. Them BUFFS are sneaky things, just like A-10s, which often snuck up on us at Ft. Bragg. Northern Missouri just isn't very far from Omaha in air miles.
Flying so low they are frying chickens in the coop!
You really don't want to know how many holes you can bring back from one mission to a hot LZ in a Huey! OR how badly you can beat up the rotors and still fly even though is feels like you are in a vibratory tumbler.
I seen them little birds you flew come back damn near in pieces and the L-19/O-1 Bird Dog's with BIG pieces missing.
Flew one back one day from the A Shau with 176 inbound holes. No body got hit, we had no radios, I had no instrument panel to speak of. They salvaged the undamaged parts and junked it.
Hueys chop tree just fine.
Taking that kind of incoming fire is the ultimate "Pucker Factor".Had an AK round hit the bulkhead right where I was standing one night 18" or so away from my neck.. may not be typing today if it had my name on it....
The dumbest fighter pilot stunt that I ever saw was a German pilot who flew an F-104 UNDER a bridge somewhere near Wurzburg durng REFORGER82. It was a high bridge, but even so, it seemed like a dangerous stunt to me.
Taking that kind of incoming fire is the ultimate "Pucker Factor".Had an AK round hit the bulkhead right where I was standing one night 18" or so away from my neck.. may not be typing today if it had my name on it....
You guys haven't got it worked out yet: you just need to own the bullet with your name on it...
260remguy, this story sounds too nutso to be believed, but near the end of 1971, I started seeing tread tracks on the ground and changes to some wooden bridges in Cambodia just west of Ban Me Thuot, SVN. I told that to an intel weenie - who promptly pooh-poohed the whole thing. Said that the NVA were maybe using bulldozers to repair the Ho Chi Minh Trail is all. And those bridges were nothing but flimsy wood.
The next day, I brought him a photo of steel girders underneath one of those wooden bridges. I took that photo with a hand-held camera - from below. While flying the plane.
A little over a year later, after they'd closed down the mission we flew out of there, the NVA rolled through Ban Me Thuot - in tanks. You can look it up.
Of all the close to the ground runs I've witnessed, the Bone (B-1B) seems to instill the greatest stomach turning as it screams past at a few clicks short of Mach 1.
In the early 90's I was headed to the deer lease, driving through Abilene, TX. There were two of the B1's doing touch and goes one day. I started to stop to get out & take pictures of the gorgeous planes, but considered the guns in the truck, and the nukes on the base, and decided they would not be amused if I parked at the end of the runway
Loved the Spit vid. The following ones on YouTube were great, too. Especially liked the Skeeters and Spits. Has there EVER been ANYTHING, ANYWHERE, ANYTIME in the history of mechanical things that sounds better than a Merlin blowing by?!
Coolest 'fly-by' for me was being able to see live fire exercises in person as a kid at a Civil Air Patrol camp. Got to see and hear the Hogs light up those 30's (and some old A-7's with the 20 mils). That GAU-8 is the cat's ass!
Loved the Spit vid. The following ones on YouTube were great, too. Especially liked the Skeeters and Spits. Has there EVER been ANYTHING, ANYWHERE, ANYTIME in the history of mechanical things that sounds better than a Merlin blowing by?!
Great thread, but greater still is being able to read here about some of the stuff brave American men have done for their country, risking the whole banana in performance of duty and honor. Thanks to each and every one of you men who have shared. Very humbling.
They wouldn't be allowed to do it today, but back in 1959, experienced military pilots would sometimes buzz the Grand Canyon when flying out of nearby Nellis AFB. At the time, RAF pilot Ron Dick was an exchange officer with the US Air Force, training students in a Lockheed T-33. Fellow instructor Bud Pratt recalls that during these Canyon flights, the pilots would fly low enough that water would spray up from the river.
Ron Dick rose to the rank of Air Vice Marshal and later became a fellow of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and a popular writer and lecturer on military history. He died in 2008.
Any idea where that was filmed? Looking at the hills in the background, I'm convinced it was in the UK somewhere, probably Wales or possibly the Lake District..
We have an Eagle Squadron stationed at the American base at RAF Lakenheath...
Edited to add I've just looked at the full video on You-tube and it is in fact Wales and the Eagles are out of Lakenheath!
I absolutely know the valley they are flying down, (its one of several they use in Snowdonia) and I have been "buzzed" by RAF Janugars back in the early 1980's while driving down the road that goes along the valley floor. At one point, the road runs along the rock face (about half way up) opposite to where this was filmed from, and the Jaguars were passing me at eye level!
![[Linked Image]](http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c170/RockyRaab/EOR2.jpg)
![[Linked Image]](http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p301/lscott_06/FlyBy.jpg)
