"Pete" wrote in message
...

"Kevin Brooks" wrote

I lived in the Deer Park Aprtments by Casey Chevy. It was quiet there.

Well, with Jefferson Avenue on one side of you and Rt. 17 on the other,
your
ambient range was likely a bit different from mine (Groome Rd, about
halfway
between Jefferson and Harpersville Rd). Believe me--we never heard
the
KC's unless they were flying overhead, but we could indeed pick up the
sound
of the high speed tunnel cutting loose when the conditions were right.

You would have been pretty close to the old Bomarc site, or at least to
the
back side of it. I used to go squirrel hunting in that area; got turned
around once and ended up hiking a fair distance out of my way to get
back
out. Now there is a big Omni Hotel on that site, Jefferson Avenue has
six
lanes is developed all the way up past the airport (no more Yoder's
Dairey--it is the site of a huge shopping mall). Not a bad place to grow
up,
but I sure would not want to live there now.


It's not so bad, even now. Evidently different from when you were there,
but
where is that not the case?
The intersection of 17 and Jefferson is pretty much the outer edge of the
Langley traffic pattern. -15's turning into final twice a day.

When conditions are right, we can hear the cars at the Langley Raceway on
Friday and Saturday nights. Jet Blue jets leaving PatrickHenry Intl.

LOL! Yeah, I can recall hearing those race cars off in the distance. I had
no idea that track still existed. IIRC, there used to be some industrial
site/vacant lot right next to it and some guy had an old truck with a
hydraulic lift he used get up above the fence level so he and his buddies
could watch the races without having to pay admission.


And of course the springtime C-130 mosquito dustings.

In my early years they were flown by C-123's. I mentioned this before a year
or so ago, but they were the highlight of my youth, listening to and
watching them lumber back and forth overhead (my Dad was not so enamored
with them, because it forced him to close up our beehives each time they did
their thing). At the first sound of those big radials throbbing overhead in
the morning I'd be dashing out of the house in my underpants (hey, I was
only four or five years old), shouting gleefully, "The sprayplane! The
sprayplane!" Kind of wondered if some Hollywood yahoo did not hear of it and
came up with the later infamous, "Da plane, da plane!" line from "Fantasy
island"...

Another regular I used to enjoy was that FAA DC-3/C-47 (don't know which)
with the international orange wingtips and tail that used to fly the
periodic approach calibration flights.

Brooks


Pete