Airshow 2011

Scariest feeling of an airshow held in Bangalore once in 2 years is the traffic jam it brings along. I was here to experience the same again. It took almost 2hours to reach the venue and then another 30min to walk from the parking lot to the entry gate. Huge crowd is all that I can say and I assume it would a big challenge for any organising committee to handle such huge crowd. We all know about the terror threat we have, but then I feel sad for the security people to frisk every individual entering the venue especially when its in lakhs. As expected it was pretty ordinary checking and had a feeling one could carry anything inside.

Some of the worlds best metal birds were here for display. Quite a few celebrities had free joy rides on these machines. Some of the fighters I could identify were indigenous LCA, Sukhoi, F-16, F-18, Euro Fighter, Grippen etc. The sheer sound of these machines are a huge crowd puller. Looking at some of the stunts these pilots could do, was thinking about the mindset one should have to rule the sky and how they would feel once they land back and start driving a car.

Even after trying a lot, didn't have tickets for the show until the last day. With help of my friend Harsha got 2 tickets at the last minute. Enjoyed the stalls set up by Israel, US and Russia the most. It was funny to see many people taking pictures with US soldiers. I was also surprised to learn that the Red bull acrobat team was lead by a 60 year old woman.

Just like most of my blogs narrow down here as well it was a sad scene to see so many people throwing out the trash and littering the place badly. Enough warnings were given out saying garbage would attract birds which might lead to bird hit. After looking at the mess created, I could only say most of the people visited were literates and not educated enough to understand the seriousness of the warning.

Finished with the finest performance and started heading back to parking lot at around 5. Started back to home at 6, was misguided by a policeman to take a different route in order to beat the traffic jam which lead me to explore a different part of Bangalore which I had never been to before.