walking the dog today, a sourceless growling in the sky made me think I had missed a military flight, and lo, a minute later two more military jets came over, low and loud, headed west.
They were Navy or Air Force grey, but I was puzzled by something. the jets were small, not transports. They had the paper-airplane profile and loud growl of contemporary fighters.
however, at least one of the planes had a high tailplane configuration, something which does not appear in the current US lineup of one and two seater jets. So I have no idea what I watched fly by this afternoon.
UPDATE: the plane with the high tailplane was certainly an F-101. There are two on record at Evergreen and McChord aviation museums. I have not yet heard of one kept in flying trim, but there are many in various aviation museums.
the planes were headed west by southwest, heading west along the line of 115th street and angling down south a bit once they got over Lake Washington. they were at about 700 feet.
Couldn’t be either of those. McChord’s is a static outdoor display and Evergreen’s is currently under resto.
argh, dunno why this was held for review. Sorry jk.
So a couple days later I heard a Lockheed bigwig died on this day (or the day before) and that the Starfighter was that guy’s first big leadership project, so I posted speculation here that it was on its way to an appointment with a memorial flyby back east.
Several months ago, about the same time in the afternoon, I also saw a low-and-slow flyover by a different rare bird, a Zero or possibly a Kate, in any case certainly a Japanese WWII plane. Calls to local flight-heritage organizations led nowhere, so I could not figure out whose it might be.
However, at the Museum of Flight a couple weeks ago, my buddy Cliff told me that Paul Allen’s Flying Heritage collection has recently added a Zero to the fleet, and that it has. ot yet seen rollout. So my hypothesis is that the airborne Zero I spotted was on a demo shakeout.
Granted that chain of hypotheses, perhaps the same is true for this F101?