Thunderbirds flying into Daytona for the race tommorrow

What an awesome event...Daytona Beach is going crazy right now before the Daytona 500.

The Air Force Thunderbirds come in two days early to practice flying around the track, then showtime tomorrow when they roar over as the Star Spangled Banner finishes before the race.

Their practice flights take them right over our house, and then again as they fly off on race day.

Just able to snap off a quick shot this morning....hope to get more tomorrow.

Count 'em! 22 Hawker Hunters formation loop.

Special guest attending the Daytona 500...flew right over my house.

Thunderbird was about 1000ft altitude. AF1 was about 800ft.

Canon EOS w/400mm telephoto. Simple camera with a fat lens (and a steady hand). My wife was on car lookout while I stood in the middle of the street to get a clearer view.

no watch snapshots from the race drivers?

Flyovers are the best. I used to live in the flight path for Lambeau Field, a block and a half from the stadium. We'd get gameday flyovers and occasionally practice runs so low they'd shake the house. I'll never forget the B-2 Spirit flyover when I was a kid. For a stealth plane you sure could hear and feel it from that height. My dad said it felt so low it was like he could have thrown a baseball and hit it.

Beautiful photo to open this thread; the F-16 is still a favorite of mine.

My lucky/chance encounter with a B-2 was on an American Airlines flight heading to Chicago. A B-2 out of Whiteman AFB in Missouri was seemingly in mutual agreement with our AA pilot for a close encounter and gave a nice show off the port side. Indeed a very sci-fi looking airplane to this day even though Jack Northrop conceived the Flying Wing some 80 years ago!

Your close encounter just reminded me of one I had last year May. A bit off-topic but hopefully you'll find it interesting.

I was staying out in South Dakota with some friends while working on a project on rural life. We were in the middle of nowhere, truly. And by middle of nowhere, I mean this is one of the more remote places in the lower 48, with 2.5 hours in all cardinal directions to a hospital, going 70mph. A few days earlier someone had mentioned how they once had a crew filming on their property but the audio kept getting ruined by jet planes overhead. I hadn't ever seen one in the sky but I looked up and sure enough, you could see contrails occasionally way off in the distance. They remarked offhand it was nothing like the when the planes came through from Ellsworth Air Force Base.

Earlier that day I was driving past a grain bin and noticed a big burn pit going next to some kind of industrial gas tank, like propane or something, and thought "man that would be bad if the wind drifted the wrong way." I went back to the house I was staying at, played some cribbage, and settled in to edit photos from the night, looking out the window toward town about 3 miles in the distance. Out of nowhere - BOOM! - the house shook. I looked toward the grain silos in the otherwise dark night but there was no big fireball.

It took me a few seconds to piece it together, but it could only be one thing. It was a B-1 Lancer out from the 28th Bomb Wing going supersonic as it flew low above the draws of the otherwise flat section of the Great Plains. The next day it was the talk of the town for about all 300 people that live there. Apparently it happens a lot less nowadays than it used to, but people swore to have seen them in the past, weaving through the dried up riverbeds practicing their bombing runs at insane speeds, viewed from nearly eye-level up on nearby hills.

Since it was dark I didn't see the Lancer myself and I never saw one fly over the rest of the time I was there, but I'll always remember that BOOM.

The U.S. sure knows how to make some impressive warbirds.

I thought the Red Arrows used the Folland Gnat.