The Arrival of the Star Fighters

I live in Safety Harbor, Florida. My house is situated directly under the flight path of landing airplanes destined for the St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport. They are prohibited from take offs and landings during the night in order to minumize noise in this heavily residential area, however the planes start coming in at about 5:30 AM and continue late into the night.

Safety Harbor is a tiny little town embedded in the giant Tampa Bay metroplex about six miles north of the airport. In town, you feel like you are in Mayberry. There is a tiny hardware store, a seedy bar, a popular ice cream stand that makes chicken wings and has a back patio with nightly live entertainment, a gazebo, firehouse, and everything else you could imagine in a quaint little American town. There is a train track that runs throught the center of downtown, crossing main street, and every morning and every evening a giant train passes through, whistle blowing, wheels rumbling, and when it's the wee hours of the morning you can tell that the engineer is purposefully being gentle on the pull-string in respect of the sleeping population.

What's odd is that, when you go out into the giant Tampa Bay metroplex, there aren't any train tracks anywhere. Where does that train come from and where is it going? Creepy.

Anyway, a couple of years ago my schedule had me waking at 5:30 AM to wake up my high-school-aged son and perform routine maintenence on my file servers at the data center, remotely from my bedroom PC. I didn't need an alarm clock because at exactly 5:30 AM every morning, something would happen.

My bedroom was in the back of the house, and the head of my bed was pushed up against a window which faced into the fenced-in back yard. The back of my house faced the airport, six miles away, but like I said, we were directly in the flight path of landing jet liners.

For some reason, in the morning, they approached the airport at a very low altitude. They also seem to do this when it's overcast, which is pretty cool to watch. They fly so low that sometimes you'd swear that you can see the rivets in the fuselage.

At 5:30 AM every morning, I would awaken to the distant rumbling of the first approaching airliner, with it's low, sad howl of nearly idle engines resisting the will of the pilots to bleed away speed and altitude. I would open my eyes, roll to the edge of my side of the bed, and pull aside the blinds to look out into the blackness of my back yard. A few seconds later, the backyard would light up, ever so slightly at first, in faint pulses of light from the stobes on the jet. The sound would grow steadily louder, the pulsing light brighter, and then peak with a single bright flash as the airliner passed over my house, and then slowly faded away towards the distant runway.

Every morning I would think to myself, wow, that was pretty cool.

But then we moved to a larger house, which just happened to touch backyards with our old house, and from the new master bedroom you could not really perceive the arrival of the first jet in the morning, and also it was no longer necessary for me to arise at such an ungodly hour, so I didn't pay any more attention to the arriving jets except when they passed exceptionally low while I was out in the yard, and I would watch in awe as they went by. I love watching jets. They remind me of how cool human beings are, that we can get together and build such things.

So, flash forward a couple of years, and imagine me being in the bigger house within which you cannot really see or hear the jets passing overhead, on a mundane day, at a mundane hour, me and one of my little toddlers going about our mundane business, when this happens:

I forget exactly what I was doing, but it involved a combination of watching the year-and-a-half year-old and cleaning, and my mind was off in never-never-land, when suddenly there was a burst of noise overhead.

Normally, when planes pass by this way, you hear the distant quiet roar and for a full minute or two it builds and builds until finally the machine passes overhead, the tone shifts, the volume peaks, and the ship begins to dissappear on it's steady route to the runway on the other side of the four mile expanse of the bay that separates our little town from the airport. Sometimes this occurs at a much louder, yet consistently timed experience, when the planes are approaching at a significanltly lower altitude, for whatever the reason. I think it's because of visibility, but I don't know anything about that stuff.

This time, the arrival of the plane was instantaneous. With a pop and a roar that made me literally crouch down in my living room, something the likes of which I have never heard before blew through the sky directly over the roof of my house and just as rapidly vanished on the horizon in the direction of the distant runway.

It actually frightened me.

I ran out the front door, which, in my new house, was facing the direction of the airport, to see what it was that just passed overhead, but it was gone.

The neighborhood took to the streets, and it was no wonder. The thing that flew overhead was as loud as it was fast. For years, all kinds of aircraft have passed directly overhead this part of Safety Harbor; big, small, fast, slow, strange, cool, high, low. I knew the sound of every one of them, as I'm sure all of my neighbors did as well, but nothing had ever been as loud or as low or as fast as whatever this thing was, and it didn't sound like any jet engine I have ever heard in my life. For a flash of an instant I actually thought it was a rocket or a nuclear missile or something.

After guiding my toddler back into the house, I sort of background-processed the event for a few minutes while I attempted to resume my housework but before long my curiousity got the better of me and I called the local fire department, which is downtown just a few blocks from my house.

A woman named Tammy answered the phone who appeared to be completely bereft of telephone manners. I asked her if there were any scheduled events in which an aircraft might be flying low over the town and she didn't have any idea what I was talking about. I said, "do you have any idea what that thing was that just passed overhead? It was clipping the tree-tops and going like 2,000 miles an hour. I just wanted to know if it was something that was part of an event or something, otherwise I was gonna call the airport and complain because they can't be doing that!"

Tammy said something like "ugh" or "mulno" which is no-telephone-skills for "I don't know" so I politely said goodbye and punched up google to find the phone number of the airport.

Now, I'm not a crusty old fuddy duddy, I didn't really want to complain, I genuinely wanted to know what the heck that thing was that just about knocked me off of my feet inside my living room and caused every single person in the neighborhood to take the the streets in amazement.

I didn't have to call. The airport web site had an announcement right there in plain sight. It said that some time between 5 and 7 PM on this day, two F-104 StarFighter jets would be landing, and that it was going to be really fucking loud.

These jets are so heavy, that in order to stay in the air, they have to go really really really really fast. Because they have to go so fast, when they plan on landing, they have to hit the deck miles and miles before the runway, thus the clipping of the treetops.

A little more googling and I found out that this machine, the F-104 StarFighter, was built in the late 50's and looks like something straight out of a Buck Rogers movie. Imagine a giant silver dart with a rocket engine on the back. Do you recall when they show stock footage of air force jets in old 60's movies, or in shows like I Dream of Jeannie? That.

But you would have no idea from that old stock footage how fast and loud those suckers are.

I took a moment to reflect on how that was the coolest thing ever.

Then, after a few minutes of cleaning and toddler chasing, it occured to me that the airport website had mentioned TWO jets. I perked up and listened intently as I continued to clean. Then, exactly as I had expected, the ground began to rumble and the walls began to shake again. This time, I bolted for the front door and ran out into the front yard just in time to see the second StarFighter blast over my house, down the street, and over the trees. It was trailing a black streak of smoke. It was flying on kind of an angle, like the pilot was trying to turn it a little bit and needed to bank several degrees in order to make such a slight adjustment. In a fraction of a second it was gone, and the roar was deafening.

The ship was pointy and retro and totally Buck Rodgers and awesome.

It was the coolest thing I have ever seen in my life.

I called Tammy back and told her what it was, you know, in case someone else was curious. She didn't give a shit.