Each year, usually with the arrival of cool fall weather, the planes start filling the skies of Clear Lake. For me, it’s a holiday almost as exciting as Christmas. Robert and I, along with most of the neighbors, would head for Sylvan Rodriguez Park at the edge of Ellington Field. We brought lawn chairs, an igloo full of drinks, picnic lunch, and most of all cameras. The boys grew up expecting to spend the day looking skyward as the air show progressed, running for the omnipresent ice cream truck as he made his rounds, listening to the music the neighbors provided from their campsite, and learning to identify the planes. Sometimes a neighboring NASA rocket scientist would show up and gladly share his knowledge. Maybe this annual experience had something to do with the fact that Matt is a pilot for SWA today.

The show always begins with “Tora, Tora, Tora”, a reenactment of a WWII air fight, with the small P51 mustangs buzzing the Jap Zeros, followed by the enormous B17 bomber. The Confederate Air Force, based in Dallas now, provides the spectacular historical display of fire power of the day. You can hear the rat-a-tat of the machine gun fire, and watch the smoke coming from the tail of an aircraft that simulates “taking a hit”. This performance continues for almost an hour, then the sky becomes quiet as if in preparation for the upcoming “second act”. The kids run to play in the Clear Lake “stonehenge”. As a connection to prehistoric astronomers, the stone portals viewed from the plaza’s center mark the points where the sun appears on the winter and summer solstices. A spiral labyrinth in the plaza represents the order of the cosmos, and around it are 13 trees, representing the 13 lunar cycles per year. Folks come from all parts of the state to experience the event, as evidenced by travel trailers set up for the weekend. Such an amazing place to raise kids.

At the end of the intermission, in a quiet still moment, someone in the crowd yelled “behind you”. Just in time, we looked upward to see an amazing aircraft with a wing span that appeared to be as wide as a football field, but the body of the plane was small and slender. It was the B52 Stratofortress, and surprisingly quiet for such an enormous plane. It actually snuck up on us. The greatest surprise was yet to come, though. With earth-shaking, ear-splitting, heart-stopping vibrations the bat-winged F35 made a surprise appearance. I had to send Matt a pic to determine what this was, as every car alarm in the parking lot went off. It shook me to the core as it passed overhead, displaying an incredible maneuverability. In the end, just for comparison, it flew along an olde-timer Tigercat. That picture is worth a thousand words about how far our aeronautical technology has come.

Finally the air became quiet once again. My fishing buddy, Randy, had never seen the airshow before in spite of living in the Clear Lake area upwards of twenty years. I insisted that he come and see what he had been missing all these years, as it was hard for me to imagine living near Ellington Field and missing the show. As the quiet persisted, he started complaining that this was the last day before the cold front and the fish would be jumping into his boat. I told him to “chill”, the best was yet to come. Needless to say, I wasn’t wrong. Again the ground shook as they fired up on the other side of the field. We heard them long before we saw them. The Thunderbirds never disappoint with their amazing precision performance. They are simply F16’s on steroids. Painted show white with navy blue birds on their underbelly, and touches of red stripes along their sides, they are every bit as beautiful as they are fast. Randy stopped talking about fishing after that:) The only disappointment for me was that it would another year before I experience our beautiful air power once again. So proud to be American!