In this post I included a few of my favorite aircraft. This time they were not the giants such as the Boeing 747 or the B-52.
They were the McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II and the Lockheed P-3 Orion.
The F-4 is only aircraft flown by both the Navy’s Blue Angels and the Air Force’s Thunderbirds. One of the museum’s F-4s is painted in the Thunderbird red, white, and blue livery and is No. 7.
This P-3 looks like it just came from the Boneyard and is now in the museum’s maintenance area waiting restoration work.
I have sketched and written about the Hunter: P-3 Orion. This was the airplane of my youth and I knew it by site and sound.
I was glad that the museum had a few of these wonderful aircrafts on display.
I found a bit of shade a sketch two versions of the Orion: the EP-3E Aries II and the P-3 awaiting restoration. I rendered the planes in a continuous-line sketch (featured sketch).
I returned to the Pacific Coast Air Museum in northern Santa Rosa to sketch one of my favorite airplanes: the F-4 Phantom II.
Throughout my life I have been fascinated by things with wings: birds and airplanes. Growing up in Sunnyvale, California, my bedroom window looked out towards the flight path on final approach to Moffett Field, US Navy base.
During my childhood, the most common aircraft that flew by my window was the submarine hunter P-3 Orion. The patrol aircraft were stationed at Moffett.
Every summer, we headed up to the roof during the annual air show to watch the Blue Angels. At the time they flew A-4 Skyhawks but in the year of my birth they, and the Air Force performance team the Thunderbirds, flew the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II.
This airplane is a beast. At the time it was one of the most powerful fighters in the air reaching speed just over Mach 2. It had earned the nickname the “Flying Brick”.
A docent at the museum who was stationed on an aircraft carrier said you new when you were in the mess when an F-4 took off because you coffee cup shook with power of the fighter’s thrust.
A pre-museum sketch of an aerial beast.
A childhood hobby was building scale model airplanes and my favorite was an F-4 hand painted camo livery.
Looking head on at the F-4C.
I was now going to Santa Rosa to sketch a full scale fighter with a similar camo paint scheme.
The iconic vertical and angled horizontal stabilizers of the F-4. This jet is an absolute beast. A continuous line sketch of four planes at the museum. The plane on the left, F/A 18 Hornet is what the Blue Angels currently fly. The camouflaged F-4 is on the right.
Corvid Sketcher 