Fighter jet that buzzed Berkeley was “personal air show” from one bro to another

Truly?

Mine is informed from a lifetime of such stories. Sorry you feel left out, but I can imagine why you might be.

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That would imply we were doing something wrong!

Ah yes! These are fun also!

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N=1 (your personal experience) is not a meaningful sample size.

See also: David Brooks

Dammit, I paid good money to see that. $5 or $6 was a lot of money to an adolescent in 1986.

heck, some folks just find em laying around.

well, at least in my case driving one of these on muddy hills at night was testament to perhaps some needed gene pool chlorine. not my brightest moment :smile:

Which one?

Count me in too.

What’s better when you grow old, remembering the fun you had, or the fun you didn’t have?

Gotta be devil’s advocate here:

It’s fun to use weapons of war to do things that scare the shit out of regular civvies who are going about their business?

Free chance to ogle a low-flying fighter? Waaaaaaaant!

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You can watch literally hundreds of hours of fighter jets being used to blow up tanks and convoys and artillery in real life on Youtube for free. High def walkthroughs of the cockpits and presentations on actual operations done with these machines.

It just seems jingoistic to me to get all excited by what amounts to a government over expenditure flying around a densely populated civilian city during what is legally peacetime but in practice wartime. We have Army bases and Air bases up here in Washington, but I can’t remember the last time someone decided it was a good idea to buzz the Space Needle on the way back to base from training exercises.

Save all the low flying and afterburners for fleet week or Seafair is all I’m saying. At least then people know to expect that kind of stuff rather than having to worry about why the hell there’s a military jet tearing ass around the place.

The armed forces’ job is to fight wars far away from where we live, preferably on another continent where it’ll be someone else’s problem. Not practicing psychological warfare on the domestic population.

During that war a few years back between Israel and Palestine, there was a widely used tactic of Israeli jets going supersonic at low altitudes over populated areas once to a few times an hour for days straight. That’s cruel if you ask me.

In real life or on Youtube? (Kind of like the “sex or porn” choice…)

Doesn’t exactly compare with a non-supersonic occasional low flight, the sonic boom makes a lot of difference. Otherwise you’re right.

You can see what happened in real life over and over, in high definition, with automatically translated subtitles, and links to related videos, on Youtube.

Re: sex vs porn, I don’t think too many of the berkeleyites were consenting participants :wink:

Cannot find. :frowning: Texts mention afterburner sound, but no sonic boom (which is rather difficult to miss).

Stumbled over this response, however, reportedly copied from a post on a CBS site:

Jet fighter flies over Berkeley on a training flight, and gets lower than expected.

Unintended consequences:

The entire campus now claims to have been affected by PTSD and understand the horrors of war.

12 Master’s projects and 17 Doctoral theses are created about this event.

Pot smoking goes up 67%.

Feng Shui and crystal healing masters are called in by the dozens to fix the place and repair the wound in the fabric of the universe and restore the Total Love required under penal code 13.3.

36 female and 3 male students claim rape on a sonic basis.

Fights break out at five coffee houses as students argue whether the jet fighter is more properly the representation of male patriarchy in a socio-economic aspect or a micro-aggression against feminists in a transferal complex,

One (1) student looks up and thinks it looks a lot cooler than debating Neitzsche (sic).

Perhaps not PTSD inducing. But this kind of buzzing can definitely be extremely stressful when unexpected.

I actually had one of those experiences up on Mount Rainier. We were snow camping at Camp Muir, and out of nowhere an F-16 flew over about 50m up with the afterburners on.

It was very startling, I literally had to change my underpants, and the adrenaline rush wrecked me, but I was healthy and out in nature, and it was before 9/11. I thought it was kind of cool. But I can see how that happening over a densely populated city, unexpectedly during war time could actually have a deathcount from old folks having heart attacks and such. Although perhaps they’d be the least at risk what with age related hearing loss.

Point being, it seems like an inappropriate way to use military assets, and should be relegated to fleet week or Seafair or whatever kinds of military-industrial complex sponsored air show or event your area typically has. Not that there’s no place for seeing this stuff in real life. Just that it’s pretty rude and feels wasteful to do it randomly.

That changed what, except media hysteria? The casualty stats did not show any significant anomaly before or after, and plebes whipped into a terrorist-under-every-bed hysteria do not make the infinitesimally low risks any higher.

…but I have to admit I grew up under the threat of a global thermonuclear war and the wimpy replacement of The Big Danger they instead came up with just doesn’t quite cut it.

What war time?

War on that ephemeral idea that people are out to scare us.

You mean the government’s been drone striking a lot of convoys and wedding processions and torturing a bunch of extraordinary renditioned prisoners and bombing all those Islamic radicalists in Syria and Iraq without going to war?

/Sarc

Yes, but that kind of fear is opt-in, and voluntarily undertaken. (And for some odd reason entirely too happily, for some.)

Ahhh, one of those weird wars in distant lands that never seem to cease, where my own govt is sending handfuls of volunteers (so technically I could be considered being in war too) and then there are media orgies of grief when one or two actually receive the ugly end of their risk (while similarly dead/wounded firefighters go without any notice, meh). Too distant for a real fear.

(Entirely not too distant for those in said weddings, but that is a context for a somewhat related but different discussion.)

What a total asshole. I was in my UC-Berkeley office when he did that. I seriously thought it was a commercial flight about to crash.

Neither is your opinion, friend.

See Also: you ass, safer for the last 70+ years thanks to egotistical carrier pilots who pull shenanigans.

Enjoy the freedom, my 'nilla!