Just call me Solo 7… Haha… I noticed the TFR for a flight we did today to Baltimore…for an airshow. As we are trundling up the Chesapeake Bay I here the cool voice of Blue Angel One come on the frequency. He tells our controller (Potomac Approach) his plan (“flight of six”) to entrr the TFR to start their show. I’m guessing this was for the Naval Academy graduation at Annapolis maybe?
Anyhow, Potomac Approach vectors us around right on the fringes of the TFR to pick up the visual to 33R at BWI and then I spot their smoke trails. It was really cool seeing them from the air. They pulled up over the top and turned smoke off in the diamond as they neared the TFR boundary. Very cool. You can just make out the smoke from one of their passes here…, Had to fake HDR it to pull the smoke out of the haze…apologies…crappy iPhone 4 camera…
Bet it was a cool show down there…
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Did you feel the urge to join up with them? 
I was on the barber pole in the King Air and I was still only going half their speed probably…lol…and to get my engines to smoke I have to do unspeakable things to them…
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Apparently it was a rehearsal today:
My favorite quote of the video: “They’re amazing…I mean, they’re pretty talented…”
Pretty talented. Indeed.
When they are rtb from the warning area out at Pcola they will often turn the smoke on and just let it ride until they enter the pattern, not entirely sure why, but did see em do it a couple of times while I was shooting the ils in a t-6
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Heck yeah…best TCAS system I’ve ever seen!
I had an experience similar to this. I’d had my PPL for a few months and was the finest pilot in the sky in my own mind. I was taking my cousin and his wife down to half moon bay, just south of San Francisco. On the way back up the coast I wasn’t in contact with Norcal approach since I was under the bravo shelf, but I was monitoring it. As we were crossing the mouth of the bay about 10miles off the coast, I heard the calls “blue angel one, flight of four, entering the show box”. “Roger blue angel one, cleared into the show box”. Just then I noticed the sheen from the blue paint as they banked over the Golden Gate Bridge about 100ft below to my right. My cousin was loving every minute. It was a different story for me. I hadn’t checked the notams and forgot it was fleet week and was sure I had busted the TFR, especially on the way in. Rookie mistake. In the end the dreaded ticket ending call never came. When I came clean to one of the instructors, he mentioned that Norcal has spotty coverage that low over the coast and may have saved my bacon. A real eye opener for sure.
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Gotta love TFRs. Glad you squeaked through OK… 
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