Avalon - Reboot

After having gone to the Avalon Airshow in 2017 and 2019, of course the next show would happen in 2021, right? 2022? Well, I guess we'll have to settle for 2023. And you know what? The rest of the country decided that they'd settle for that too. So it took three hours to drive the 55km from Melbourne to Avalon.

So what did they learn after 4 years? Well, probably not much. They still fly a Spitfire that to anyone who's still alive, has always been "an old plane". And the F35 Lightning is still the best thing since sliced bread (or so the show spared no opportunity to inform you of). Luckily they also still fly lots of fun, smoke-blowing, acrobatic planes, with a simply unbeatable beauty of falling in and out of formations like it was the most natural thing in the world.

While the F35 may have been the poster child of the show though, the F22 was the one that got the commentators the most passionate. And with good reason. The plane may have heard of the concept of gravity, but it decided that it wanted nothing to do with it. And as such, with the help of some thrustvectoring, and an engine with enough spite, it flowed through the air like it was caught in its own universe. Which provided a nice contrast to the glider that immediately followed and was all about being forced to play nice with the laws of physics.

They also came up with a revolutionary new way of increasing passenger numbers for a plane. Instead of trying to cram them all inside the plane, they could put them on the plane. Except the people that were demonstrating this revolutionary new solution were from Scandinavia? Where it's … kind of cold for a good chunk of the year? Maybe this is their solution to the Australian problem of the general populous perpetually overheating.

What didn't change though was an enthusiasm for rattling everybody's tooth fillings loose. Be it by causing causing the ground to shake from the sheer noise of the jet engines, or by setting off explosions that created enough black smoke to hide a small village. And boy did they take every opportunity to deliver. Every aircraft that was sufficiently equiped, performed as much of their routine as possible with the afterburner running. Including when performing a "go around". The commercial jetliners that used the runway between parts of the airshow sounded like mice in comparison.

All in all, a successful show. And as a bonus, I get the excuse of spending the next day in Melbourne to help justify the long trip down here. My travel companions and I have already gone to Autralia's best Ramen shop, as certified by me on many a previous trip, and I immediately ate myself sick. Turns out greedily munching down a bowl of Ramen for dinner, because you haven't eaten anything else that day, was not the cleverest idea. But it was certainly a tasty one.