Good Morning.

I was watching some Friday Night Plane Porn last night as I often do.


There is a thread for this on Bluesky, of course. #Planeporn exists, but I am the owner/operator of the original #FridayNightPlanePorn feed out there.

Anyway, I digress.

I was watching an in-cockpit video of the United States Navy Flight Display Team, and watching the background to see if I could recognize the city. (It appeared to be Seattle).

But somewhere in there, I had a thought that I have perhaps already seen my last airshow in-person.

There's a number of reasons behind it. First and foremost - the US Military has abandoned New England. In our six-state region, there is no regular presence. No Army, No Navy, No Air Force, No Marines. Something to consider hard, given that both the Army (Lexington and Concord) and the Navy (Salem and Marblehead) were born here.

Political punishments have a long memory. Here is an electoral college map from that long-ago election of 1972.



See that lone bit of blue up in the Northeast? Yes, Massachusetts was the only state that did not vote for Richard Nixon.

It was not very long after that that the vaunted and historic Charlestown Navy Yard was abruptly shut down and operations moved elsewhere. Allegedly due to "economics", but we all knew it was retaliation. Since then, most of our military facilities have been shut down, re-purposed, or left to nature.

Consider this, in our post 9-11 world. There are a handful of Air National Guard units operating in New England, but in a true crisis - where is the closest airbase to Boston with actual front-line fighter jets? (Answer in a bonus click.)

So that takes me back to my original thought about those airshows. There's no places for them to go. Weymouth, Otis, Pease, Brunswick - all of those bases are gone. Westover remains in Western, MA. But it's Air Mobility Command (Military Airlift) and the last airshow on that field was decades ago. Hanscom remains near me, but that's primarily research and testing. The last airshow there was almost 30 years ago.

But that's not why I think I might never sit on a hot airfield sucking jet fumes again.

Like everything good and true about These United States, the First Felon and his followers are sure to ruin it. In addition to flying things, airshows remain a bastion of over-the-top, white, conservative, masculinity. As they always have been.

In the before-time, it was always there, but remained on the lower end of the spectrum. It was easy to look the other way and let it slide, because here comes that P-51 we all came to see!

But I don't think I can associate with that kind of person anymore. I remain enamored of my beloved flying things....but I'm pretty sure I don't want to attend an airborne Nuremburg Rally at a local airfield anytime soon.

Here is the video from last night.