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Happy Super Hornet Day :)

I dubbed Friday March 26, Super Hornet Day in honour of the arrival of the first five F/A-18F Super Hornets to Australia. To celebrate I made biscuits of course. 😀 As per usual I used Sugar Cookies Recipe #2 from Simply Recipes, I used orange essence instead of the almond extract but I don’t think I used enough for it to be noticeable.

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Super Hornet Biscuits, 250/365

I had a big Thursday night making these biscuits; I didn’t end up going to bed till sometime after 1am and was up a few hours later to make the packaging. I was quite lucky that two of the girls at work helped with the wrapping and stapling the tags on. I ended up with 52 planes as two were sent to the scrap yard due to faulty wings…. I don’t advocate icing biscuits past midnight, technique is never as good as it is at say you know 4 in the afternoon! I was tired and that resulted in not always keeping a nice even pressure on the icing bag which resulted in some clumpy icing. That is my criticism and one I am sure that most non-baking people would not notice anyway.

Super Hornet Biscuits

I walked round work with a box of biscuits Friday morning, handing them out and wishing people Happy Super Hornet Day, some people thought that the RAAF had supplied them for us, others wanted to know which bakery they were from, some people said “oh Helen, you are a bit of a nerd aren’t you” to which I of course replied “Why yes I am”, other people were just happy to get a pretty biscuit.

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Super Hornet Biscuits, 251/365

Though the real purpose of the day was not to come for another few hours. I swear the time between about 12:00 and 12:45ish when I went down to the river went ever so slowly. There were five of us from work outside Customs House. If you look at this hi-res image on the Defence website, you can spot the five of us on the board walk in front of the steps to Customs House, pretty cool! I had my 16-35mm lens on my camera as I thought that they would fly at a “nice low” height over the river. I should have had my 70-200mm on, they were high in the sky. It also meant that the flyover was quite quiet as well… 🙁 🙁

The Super Hornets Arrive

It was very cool to see the Super Hornets with the F1-11s and the BAE Hawk escort but oh I do wish they had flown lower and louder 😀 I think my biscuits were more impressive than the flyover.

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RAAF Base Amberley Air Show 2008

It was pretty hard not to know that the Air Show was on, there was posters on just about every empty surface at work, there were posters at the train station, there were ads on the radio and TV, people on the net were talking about it.

In the couple of days leading up to the show I was umming and ahhing about going and I didn’t end up deciding till Saturday morning after I had gone to the markets and cleaned the flat. When I decided that I was going to go, I could tell the day was going to be a scorcher so I made a trip back to my parents to pick up some sunscreen and then just missed the next Ipswich train, I decided that I would start to drive towards Ipswich and when the traffic jam started I would stop and catch the train. I had a good run on the freeway till Gailes so I popped off the freeway and parked at Goodna and caught a train to Ipswich and then the shuttle bus out to the Base. Quick easy and it made the trip home a lot quicker 😀

It was total chaos lining up to get a ticket but when I had a ticket and was inside it was a whole lot better. There was so much that I didn’t get a chance to see. I had a brief wander round the various stalls, said hello to the people from work who were working and then wrangled myself a spot on the fence where I could park myself with my 70-200 for a day in the sun taking plane photos. My biggest bummer of the day was the fact the C-17 that I so dearly wanted to see fly didn’t get up in the air on Saturday. One of the ladies I work with went on Sunday and it did get up in the air and she showed me a video on her mobile phone of it flying and I proceeded to have a little tanty right there in the office ….. 🙁 alll in fun though. So I didn’t see her fly but I saw lots of others fly and I have photos, photos which I am pretty proud of. The two highlights for me were without a doubt the Roulette display and the F-111 dump and burns as unless something drastic happens we won’t be seeing any more dump and burns over our skies due to the upcoming retirement of the F-111. sigh. It was also great to see a lot of the planes fly in person and just see the amount of people out for a day watching planes in the sky.

Here are a few pictures but the easiest thing would be to check out the slideshow below

The Roulettes arrive!!
The Roulettes arrive from the West (by HelenPalsson)

They break formation
Roulettes

F-111 in flight (dump and burn pics are in the slideshow)
F-111