The competitors:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whEVftJWBjA&feature=related
The best:
Impressive, but all those pilots from all nations are impressive.
Absolutely!
Perhaps I should have said: The best of the best!
Incidently, the Red Arrows now have a female member:
First female pilot for Red Arrows
Flight Lieutenant Kirsty Moore joins the Red Arrows next year
The Red Arrows display team is to get its first woman pilot, the Royal Air Force has announced.
Flt Lt Kirsty Moore will join the team from 2010 until 2012, when it is likely she will fly over the London Olympics.
The 31-year-old pilot currently serves with a Tornado squadron based at RAF Marham in Norfolk.
The RAF said Red Arrow team members were picked from “some of the very finest fast-jet pilots”, but up until now no woman had made the grade.
Every year about 30 fast-jet pilots apply to the Red Arrows, based at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, but only the very best are successful.
Flight Lieutenant Moore is not the first woman to apply for a place, although she was the first to make the short list and now be selected to join.
Finest pilots
Successful applicants must have scored better than average marks in their flying career, have flown for a minimum of 1,500 hours and have completed at least one front line tour as a fast-jet pilot.
The RAF said applicants who meet the criteria are considered “purely on merit”.
Flt Lt Ben Plank, 30, who is based at Cottesmore in Leicestershire, will also be joining the display team from next year.
But both he and Flight Lieutenant Moore will start training with the Red Arrows in September.
Team leader of the Red Arrows, Wing Cdr Jas Hawker, said: "The short list of candidates to join the Red Arrows represents some of the very finest fast-jet pilots in the Royal Air Force.
The Red Arrows team is famous for its formation aerobatics
“Their skills, experience, dedication and enthusiasm are second to none. We are equally proud to be welcoming both pilots to the team and are looking forward to their arrival in September 2009.”
It is likely Flight Lieutenant Moore will fly at events such as the British Formula 1 Grand Prix, Great North Run in Newcastle and, in her final year with the team, at the London Olympics.
After joining the RAF in 1998, Ms Moore, who is originally from Lincolnshire, trained new pilots on the Hawk aircraft at RAF Valley in North Wales.
Flight Lieutenant Plank, from Worcestershire, joined the RAF in 2000.
He has also served as an instructor at RAF Valley and is currently on an operational tour with a Harrier squadron.
The USAF team had Major Samantha Weekes in the first video as lead solo.
I’m tempted to make some clever chauvanistic comment trying to be what I think is funny, but Maj Weekes is about fifty times better than me and any blokes I know so, for a change, I’ll shut up.
I’ve always thought that anything to do with driving is an area where women should be able to do as well as men as they’re as capable as men of operating machines and that activity doesn’t pit them directly against men as in contests such as football etc where men’s greater strength etc usually wins.
We had a few bloody good women race car drivers here a few decades ago and they deserved to go on to bigger and better things, but I suspect that they got nobbled by the boys as they disappeared.
Which I expect could be the problem for women pilots in the extra-macho areas of the armed services, so they have to be better than the blokes to get a look in.
Yet women pilots were a critical part of Allied ferry and other non-combat services in WWII and flew just about every Allied aircraft ever built, while Soviet female pilots did as well as any men in combat, so there is no reason why women should be excluded from those areas.
As long as they’re not captured by an enemy of unrefined sensibilities.
Very wise, chauvanism might be self-defeating when remarking about a woman like her.
I’ve always thought that anything to do with driving is an area where women should be able to do as well as men as they’re as capable as men of operating machines and that activity doesn’t pit them directly against men as in contests such as football etc where men’s greater strength etc usually wins.
We had a few bloody good women race car drivers here a few decades ago and they deserved to go on to bigger and better things, but I suspect that they got nobbled by the boys as they disappeared.
At the turn of the 20th Century, women played football and universally took more at the gate than any male team. So much so, that the F.A. banned them from playing at any of their venues, which pretty much put an end to female soccer on that scale.
Yet women pilots were a critical part of Allied ferry and other non-combat services in WWII and flew just about every Allied aircraft ever built, while Soviet female pilots did as well as any men in combat, so there is no reason why women should be excluded from those areas.
As long as they’re not captured by an enemy of unrefined sensibilities.
Those women were very much a part of the unsung heroes.
That is all news to me, coming as I do from a nation where football is played mostly with the hands.
Could you expand on it, or provide links?
I saw a TV history docu about this about 20 years ago, but here’s something:
One women’s soccer match drew a crowd of 53,000, which sparked the hurt egos of the men-driven Football Association, banning women’s soccer from their pitches (and since most of the pitches in England were under the FA’s watch at that time, this basically meant Hasta la vista to women’s soccer).
http://www.soccer-fans-info.com/history-of-women-soccer.html