Via email from a reader:
I’m sitting in Lincoln Hall on the West Point campus while writing this, looking out over the Hudson River. A few minutes ago, I heard a loud noise – almost sounded like a chopper. Those are common enough around here, right?
But it was damn close and damn loud. I looked out the window….cruising by us at window level (~300 feet above the Hudson River) and about a football field away was an MV-22 Osprey with rotors at half-tilt. It wasn’t really scooting, just doing around 150 mph and banking into a left turn, so I got a good look at it. Weird thing was that unlike all of the pictures of Ospreys I’ve seen, where they are grey or light blue, this bird was more of a light green.
Plus, this is an Army campus. What’s the deal?
He emailed a few minutes later with the likely answer:
Aha! I figured it out. This week is Air Force week at USMA – Army plays Air Force this weekend. It turns out that the Air Force just got its hands on a few ‘special operations’ Ospreys; I’m thinking that this one is gonna be doing a flyby at the game.
When I lived in Colorado Springs I used to help out the USAF NCO Association before AFA sporting events and saw a number of flyovers before Falcon football games. The coolest, I think, was a B-24 Liberator. At the time it was the only one flying, though I believe at least one more has been restored back into the wild blue yonder since then.
I also saw F-22s fly over the Indianapolis 500 this spring, but the pictures didn’t turn out. Must have been the special stealth coating.
