Quinte Airshow 2016
Good news, bad news, the Quinte Airshow has returned after a 10 year absence.
I’ll start by saying, all-in-all, it was good news.
The airshow itself was great and the static displays were fantastic, as shown here below.
After a few flypasts, they landed and were put on static display:
The B25 Mitchell bomber on the left and the Avro Lancaster bomber, on the right.
The Mitchell is quite small… I was surprised at how small a “medium” bomber was. Then again, a little later (images to follow), I completely missed the B52 Stratofortress bomber. Parked next to it was a CF CC-177 Globemaster cargo plane, and it was *huge*.
B52 Stratofortress
The bad news side was the security travisty? Can I use stronger words for the security screening procedure which left 10000 people on the hot airport tarmac in the hot sun for an hour and 45 minutes? I wanted to seek out the organizers and put them at the back of that line.. Maybe that would instill some reality into their fantasy world.
As an exercise in military planning for very large missions, it was a failure in this respect. Was anyone from the last show stick on staff?
Simple arithmetic modelling would show you that your screening setup would be a major issue.
arrg!
Lineups for food and drink were 45-60 minutes. We anticipated that part and brought out own. However, after wandering through crowds of people for 10 minutes, we could find no water, no information and no program sales tents. An hour later we did find the program sales tent… still no water or other information.
Back to the good news… It was great to see a lot of air cadets onsite, as well as lots and lots and lots of people in general. Parking arrangements were not bad.. we headed off the 401 at 33 and had no traffic all the way into Trenton to the parking field. Buses got us to the base within 15 minutes.
The way back was a little dicier as we took the time after the airshow to visit the static displays on the way back across the base, and had not clue as to when the last shuttlebus was going to run back to the parkade. I think we caught one of the last ones, as we were certainly one of the last 50 vehicles still there.