San Francisco is My Home

04
Oct

Fleet Week

Author: kris, Category: Events, News

Tourists visiting this weekend might notice a battalion of fighter jets swooping over the city. Fear not, friends: it’s just SF’s annual Fleet Week, showcasing the Navy’s Blue Angels, a squadron of crack pilots with mad skills and, you’ll notice, very loud engines.

For the most part, SF is anti-war. A 2004 bumper sticker census* revealed that the Bay Area has a larger per capita percentage of stickers saying “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” than anywhere else in the nation. We worry about high defense spending in this part of the world, and generally we are agin’ it.

But the Blue Angels are just cool. They swoop overhead in nifty formations, they do barrel rolls, they make that sonic boom noise. Sometimes they make smoke trails in patterns. When Fleet Week comes around, rooftops decks that haven’t been used since foggy Fourth of July parties are suddenly covered with San Franciscans swilling local microbrews and squinting at the sky.

So come on out this weekend — which promises to be warm and sunny, as Fleet Week always is, which just proves that the Armed Forces have secret devices they use to control the weather — and support our high-flying troops.

*Note: I made this census up.