Futemna Flight Festival

The Futemna Flight Festival was originally scheduled for a few weeks prior - but Hurricane Guchol managed to mess with the planning and the events were rescheduled for this weekend.  The Marine camp at Futemna is open to the public for two days and an impressive collection of military equipment, planes, ground vehicles and other fun stuff is laid out on the flight tarmac for everyone to get up close and personal.

The size of the blades on the rotor was impressive!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMH-361

Click here to learn more about the history of the Flying Tigers!

 Felt a little silly when I realized Okinawa is the home of the Flying Tigers!

This plane just looks fast-even sitting still on the ground!

This cargo plan is outfitted at a humanitarian rescue flyer - they had the plane set up to demonstrate how a patient and crew would be carried during flight - in 2011, more than 150 critical "life flights" were made to carry a patient to a facility capable of handling their needs and many hundreds of other less critical patients were transported as well.  Pretty impressive stuff!

This picture is for my firefighting people - you know who you are!  I spent quite a bit of time chatting with the crew and ended up spending my only American cash to buy raffle tickets....after they explained the money would be used to outfit their station with some basic necessities like paper towels and dish soap...apparently military funding only goes so far!  At least they get to play with a pretty nifty rescue vehicle.

 

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 I talked for quite some time to the crew chief for this scary looking helicopter..who coincidentally has parents that live in New River, AZ! The chopper is used to drop teams into hostile territory as well as pick up military personnel when necessary - the picture doesn't do justice to just how fearsome the thing looks!

 

Another chopper with extraordinary blades!

This is one of the humvees outfitted for use in Afghanistan and Iraq - inside it was incredible to see how thick the protective glass is!  I chatted with the crew and they all agreed, when you stop thinking about the fact that these vehicles are designed for war, they make for a heck of a lot of fun out playing in the field!

I ended the day talking with many of the military personnel with less glmaorous jobs - the fuelers, the communications teams and the mobile radar guys.  They were all happy to tell me about their jobs, their feeling about life in the military and how they liked being assigned to Okinawa.  In retrospect, I'm sorry I didn't think to take their pictures for every one of you to be able to see the "face" of our military forces.  Every one of them, regardless of their branch of service, Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine, was proud of what they do - even if it was chatting to a Redhead in Okinawa.