Flying High and Having Fun

This past weekend, I joined my friend Ally and her roommate to watch the 52nd Annual Air and Water Show at North Ave Beach. The show is the largest free one of its kind in the U.S. and something I was excited to experience.

We got to the vicinity of the beach around 11 a.m., just in time to see Vince Vaughn parachute from the skies (he performed a tandem jump with the U.S. Army Golden Knights). Once we got to the actual lake, we managed to find a patch of sand to call home for the day and unloaded our supplies. We brought all the necessities to last the near six hours we would be there, including chicken drumsticks and wings, vodka-soaked watermelon and “rummy” bears. You know, the important stuff.

We lounged back and watched as planes performed loop-de-loop tricks with their loud engines, leaving smoke patterns in their wake; Army and Navy aircrafts putting on shows that demonstrated how fast their planes could go and shamelessly plugging recruitment. It was the scary but exhilarating to watch the planes free-fall from the sky. There was even a helicopter that performed loops and dives and falls!

While there were many great highlights of the day (not including the sunburn I got despite lathering 55 SPF sunscreen on my pale Irish skin), here are a couple of the best people watching (and listening) moments:

• You’d think there were only about three songs ever written about flying. “Learn to Fly” (Foo Fighters), “My Hero” (Foo Fighters) and “Danger Zone” (Kenny Loggins) were played on repeat, and if I never heard these songs until the next Air and Water Show, I would be perfectly okay. Now, if they had played Kenny’s "Hangin’ With the Boys," seeing we were on a beach with volleyball nets, that would have been awesome.


• Friendly competition between military organizations. Some of the men narrating the demonstrations had quite the sense of humor, especially the Navy. At the end of the Navy’s flight demonstration, the narrator closed with this: “And remember: real pilots land planes on boats.” What made it even funnier was that it preceded a demonstration by the Army.


• We had our own personal—and very enthusiastic— commentator who stood behind us for the last few hours yelling things like: “Here they come!”and “What a beautiful aircraft!” We figured he was some sort of an idiot savant (not in a mean way), because he seemed to know a lot about the planes before the announcer even described them to the audience.

I managed to take a few videos with my camera and uploaded them to my YouTube account. There are four videos in total: one of the Blue Angels, one of a Navy Seal parachuting from the sky while holding an American Flag, one with four planes doing tricks and one with a single plane performing tricks. Click here to view them.