i thought that the Blue Angel stlye was a lot more aggressive, raw, and in your face. they fly closer, lower and a hell of a lot faster! the teams do a lot of simialiar maneuvers but the Blues did head on passing maneuvers a lot closer! a good portion of the T-Bird performance seemed repetitive, a lot of the same stuff over and over. besides going vertical in AB, they didn't really seem to stress the abilities of the aircraft wheras the Blues did everything from full AB vertical, to very slow flight followed by acceleration, to full dirty formation rolls. when a solo does the standard high-G, tight turn, allowing a plane to sneak up on the crowd in afterburner, (Blue Angels was a solo, T-Bird was a pair) The T-birds were up at about 500 to 700, and the blue couldn't have been more than 200, it was really low. F-16's weren't half as loud as that single Hornet that flew overhead, the shrieking noise it made was undescribable. The T-Birds did the "bomb split" when the formation goes vertical, splits into different ditections and them comes down at center field criss-crossing, T-Birds did it with five ships. Blue Angles: all six. T-Birds use music, Blues don't need it. T-Birds had a lot of lag time in-between passes, Blue's had virtually none. I also wanted to see the in-line loop, where all planes line up even and loop. I've seen pictures of the T-Birds doing it and expected it as the conditions were so good but they didn't. The Blues did it at Dover and it looked perfect. I thought the Blues seemed to be more into the razor sharp, stunt flying aspect of performance wheras the T-birds focus more on looking graceful and smooth. T-birds land in a line with a short spread, Blues land in a six ship diamond. Another thing, the T-Bird narrator told you exactly what was going to happen on every single pass, it was still cool to watch, but on about half the Blue Angel passes the narrator didn't say a word leaving you to wonder what was about to happen, and when they passed, you were like: Holy sh*t!!
And don't forget Fat Albert!
