Frank B. Baiamonte: Centennial of Naval Aviation - San Diego

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Centennial of Naval Aviation - San Diego - Feb 12, 2011

The US Navy put on quite a show this afternoon as part of their celebration of 100 years of naval aviation. The highlight was a Parade of Flight, with almost 200 planes flying over San Diego Bay. A group of us from the San Diego DSLR Photography Group got together to watch this from Shelter Island. At the same time other members of the Group were on Coronado and other parts of San Diego Bay.

The air show opened with a fly-over by the Blue Angels. They didn't do their whole show, just a quick trip out from their practice area in Yuma, AZ, over the Coronado Bridge, up over the Bay, and back home. Here they come . . .

. . . and there they go.

The B-17 was impressive. They had quite a few WWII vintage aircraft in the air.

The Navy Leap Frogs dropped in.

There was a demonstration of helicopter aerial refueling.

There were lots of people on the shorelines, lots of boats on the Bay, and lots of helicopters in the air.

From our vantage point on Shelter Island we had a nice view of the downtown San Diego skyline as well as of Naval Air Station North Island on Coronado. We also had a great view of the rising moon, and occasionally a few planes passing in front of it.

The aircraft just kept on coming, there was said to be close to 200 in all.

The last flight of the afternoon was the air wing from the carrier Stennis flying in from the west. It's a little tough to see in this picture, and that is not all of it. The formation was almost a mile long.

The Parade of Flight was a great demonstration of naval aviation over the years, with aircraft dating back to well before WWII flying overhead. We knew it would be crowded so we went down to Shelter Island early, arriving at 9:30AM even though the fly-over didn't start until 1:00PM. As it was, we got some of the last parking spots around. After parking down by the water we walked a few blocks to Red Sails Inn and had breakfast, then back to the water to wait. Afterwards the traffic looked so bad that we decided to walk over to Point Loma Seafoods for a late lunch/early dinner rather than sit in a long line of cars. We got back to the water at about 5:00PM, the traffic leaving Shelter Island was still moving very slowly. The sunset was looking nice, so we set up our tripods and took a few more shots.