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Thursday Thunder – A Viper Kind of Day

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It’s surprising how quiet an F-16 is when it pulls up alongside you in the air. Granted, the inside of a Cessna is a pretty loud place, and everyone is wearing noise cancelling headsets, but still, for how loud a Viper is on the ground, it’s impressive how much quieter everything is in the air.

Here’s a pretty good video from last year that shows the kind of thing we were doing. Those F-16s seem a lot closer when you’re in the cockpit though!

I can only imagine how much of a “brown trouser” moment it would be for a pilot just haplessly bopping along, without tuning a radio to GUARD, and who didn’t check his NOTAMS that day to see a TFR zone in his flight path, when an armed fighter crosses directly across his flight path in what’s called a Headbutt maneuver.

Okay, now for the kind of jet noise most of us are more familiar with.

https://youtu.be/ogxv1P9Xdp0
Sorry for the music on this one, but if I’m doing an F-16 theme, then I really wanted a video of the airframe they should have gone into production with, but didn’t. Good quality video is rather difficult to find, which I suppose is to be expected given that the test program for the F-16XL ran from 1982-1984.
Not a local video, but I do so love it when I get the chance to watch our local guys (and gals) do this kind of thing.