So said a mom to a small child, watching (and feeling) four of the Blue Angels take off from Boeing Field/Museum of Flight for this morning’s practice. For those not interested in the BAs, we’ll jump the rest to another page …What we tend to forget about the Thursday practice is that it’s casual and semi-fragmented. Blue Angels 1-4 go up first, and the pilots don’t do the “walkdown” — just show up, pop in the planes, and off they go. Those four arrived in two of the Seafair convertible Corvettes and parked them right against the main fence.
Something we’ve never seen before — the crew member who prepped BA #3 (and represented it in the intricate hand-signal pageantry just before they taxi out for takeoff) is female. Wasn’t sure if this was an accurate assessment at first, since they all dress in the same blue jumpsuits, and her feminine features weren’t exactly, how can we say it, Pam Anderson-style obvious. But she had a ponytail, not exactly something you see on a military man. We think this is the woman in question. Something for the female fans to cheer about, anyway, besides the hunky pilots themselves. The fence-lining crowd is usually pretty well gender-integrated; next to us this morning, a nice lady approaching senior citizenhood confessed she’d ducked out of work at a nearby Boeing building to come cheer the Blues.
After about an hour, the first four came down, and the two soloists (#5 and #6) went up. (No Fat Albert sighting on the first practice day; too bad, that’s a crowd favorite.) We went into the MOF to kill part of the time between takeoffs. Unfortunately, the “members express line” moved like slugs on a salt flat. We know the MOF relies heavily on volunteers, but you’d think they’d beef up the front desk help on Blue Angels days.
Tomorrow, we’ll be watching the show from Lake Washington; Saturday and Sunday, it’s back to the fence. After that, we gotta get a life …
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