Paris Air Show ( At last. . .)

After being waylaid by small red cars and colorful murals, I finally was able to shake myself loose and get into the grounds of the 100th Anniversary Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airport, just north of Paris and south of CDG Airport. It seemed a little quieter to me than in some previous years, smaller crowds and not much really new on display, but it's always enjoyable if you are a bit of a romantic about flying machines to see what's happening there. This old Air France DC-3 is just the sort of plane to get my heart thumping, from another age. Can you imagine climbing into one of these and heading out across the Atlantic ?
.




















There was another DC-3 parked near the A380; highlighting the generation gap. It never ceases to amaze me how far mankind's technological prowess has led in the domain of aviation. Before questions like global warming took center stage. . . and rightly so.
.



















Don't know if this photo succeeds in conveying just how huge the A380 really is. . . that it can get off the ground at all is astonishing.
.







































And finally a nose view of a meaner sort of beast, an F35 ; something you don't want to see in your rearview mirror. . . It saddens me that almost from the beginning of aviation, when it really started to take off, so to speak, about a hundred years ago, people were looking for military applications. And now a hundred years on, vast sums are still being spent on finding ways to make killing machines like this one go just a little faster, a little higher, a little stealthier . . . while half the planet starves to death.
.


































.
.