We USED to get regularly buzzed here on the farm by military jets (mostly Navy but a few other services as well) but that's significantly slowed over the last ten years or so... I guess cutbacks or something. 20 years ago we'd get at least a couple jets come over a week, couple hundred feet altitude, high subsonic.
Now lemme tell you, balancing on top of a cotton picker basket roof made of smooth slick sheet steel at a 30 degree angle, 15 feet off the ground, hanging on to the edge of the cleaning grates with your fingertips with one hand while leaning WAY out with the other hand using the spray gun to shoot paint on the roof of the machine, and having an F-4 Phantom fly over at high-subsonic speed at 150 feet or so, and not being able to hear a single sound from it until you get the blast from both engines when it's virtually directly overhead, THAT will get your blood pumping (and pumping out on the ground if you fall!). We'd regularly see Phantoms, F-5's, F-16's, even an A-6 or two back in the OLD days...
The coolest thing I ever saw though, was this. I was in the field one day plowing or hipping or disking or something-- it was heavy tillage. When I did heavy tillage I could tell exactly what speed the tractor engine was running in RPM's without even looking, and could tell how deep the tool was and how hard the tractor was pulling strictly by the sound of the engine and transmission. Those old Ford 6600's had straight-teeth gears in the transmissions; you car-types should know what I'm talking about-- straight teeth gears whine VERY loudly under load (that's why virtually all cars and trucks have had helical-cut teeth gears for the last 50 years or so, at least-- they run almost silently by comparison). SO, I'm toodling along through the field, daydreaming and listening to the steady thrum of the engine and slow staccato whine of the transmission as we hit harder and looser spots in the field and the load varies, when suddenly I'm snapped out of my reverie by a different sound-- I was so attuned to the sounds of the machinery I could tell if I had a broken blade or a bearing about to quit by the sounds of the machinery. This was something different though-- the transmission whine was getting louder, and LOUDER, and
LOUDER!!!! I rapidly scanned all my guages and looked for spewing oil, smoke, or other signs of a machine in it's final moments, and nothing seemed amiss, but the whine is going completely off the charts, so I quickly stomp down the clutch and stop as I scan for the source, and it instantly becomes apparent that it's OVERHEAD... I glance up just in time to see TWO A-10 Warthogs, flying a couple hundred feet directly over the field, almost overhead. One is almost directly in front of the other, but flying at a slight angle. At that precise moment, he chopped power and heeled over, nose up and rudders kicked hard over and did a beautiful side slip tip stall type manuever; the A-10 looked like it just slammed on the brakes and virtually hovered as it dropped about 50 feet or so in altitude, forcing the second A-10 to throttle up a bit and do a little 'sidestep' around him, dodging right a bit and then returning to course back to the left, overshooting him almost instantly. The first A-10 then shoved his throttles forward, turbofans whining and roaring, as he surged forward onto the second one's tail, and they continued on off to the north...
Now that's not something you see every day-- those high-speed jets, I've seen them in a sharp turn over the farm at high subsonic, and some of them would take 50 miles to complete a turn-- these low-speed A-10's looked like they could do a ballet dance in a barnlength-- just amazing manueverability.
With the airshow over and my transmission not about to explode like the Enterprise's Warp Core, I went on back to work...
Later! OL JR
