- - - 8/22/2004 - - -

Yokota Air Force Base

Filed under: — Andy @ 11:55 pm

On Sunday I went with my friend to the US Air Force base in Yokota for a Friendship festival and air show. It was not much of an air show, which was probably why they called it a Friendship festival instead. Still, thousands of Japanese people came and awed at the American flying machines, paid extremely high prices for American foods, and waited in huge lines for everything. The only real air show aspects were some fly-bys from some F/A-18s and F-16s, and a helicopter demonstration.


If you didn’t know, these are F/A-18s


Ryoichi infront of an A-10


Eiji infront of a …. I forgot. It’s not one of the cool planes.


The line to get on the plane was 10 times what you see here

Comments

  1. The …plane should be a C-130. Lockheed built a large number of these 4 engine turboprops. The next one down looks like a C-141, a 4 engine jet military cargo version of the Boeing 707.

    Comment by louis — 8/27/2004 @ 6:02 pm

  2. That idiot who left the previous message does not know what he is talking about. Both the C-130 and the C-141 are high wing aircraft, and it looks like both of these planes are low wing aircraft. Perhaps the first one is a P3 (Lockheed Electra) and the second one is just a commercial airliner like a B707 freighter used by the military. Both of these are likely to be at least 30 years old.

    Comment by louis — 8/28/2004 @ 12:11 pm

  3. the first one is definitely a P3 Orion. My Aero instructor is a P3 pilot. He does 16 hour missions looking for subs and whatnot. But he and his crew get to eat microwaved dinners. The Navy will be replacing the P3 with Boeing 707s. From one point of view, this could hurt the Navy as it might recruit guys who just want to get out as quickly as possible so they can go fly commercial, since it would be an excellent platform to transition into the civilian world. wait. it actually is a civilian airframe.

    Comment by けん — 8/29/2004 @ 12:19 am

  4. After taking the original picture of the plane on the bottom and zooming in on the sign in the middle of the picture, the plane seems to be a "KC-135R”.

    Ken: "It’s an Airforce plane, so designator KC means refueling tanker”

    There you go.

    Comment by Andy — 8/29/2004 @ 12:49 am

  5. The first one is a P3 Orion submarine searcher, but it will be replaced by the Boeing 737 and not the 707. Boeing sold the Navy the much smaller 737 on the grounds that there is large numbers of commercial planes so repair and maintenance is cheaper.

    The KC-135 is the military tanker version of the Boeing 707. The more modern air tanker is the KC-10 which is derived from the Douglas DC-10.passenger plane.

    Comment by louis — 9/22/2004 @ 11:44 am

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