[TowerTalk] planes and towers

[Courtney Judd]

Looking at the W9ZUC incident and the clip below it about the 
duster/tower made me think back about several incidents with mine. I 
live directly in a MOA (military operating area) and 20 or so years ago 
maybe more a F4 blew over my tower while I was working at the top 
exceeding the speed of sound. He put a sonic boom on me which i would 
have jumped off if i had not been securely fastened to the tower. 
Normally it is illegal to create a sonic boom over the continental US 
but they had a waiver in order to re-certify the F4's before giving them 
to the national guard.  this turned out to be pretty regular for the 
next several months. Another time I was up at daylight standing on my 
porch looking at my 140' tower which was hidden in fog from about 50 ft 
and up when i could hear helicopters coming my way. I could tell that 
they were heading right at my tower. They were flying right at the 
bottom edge of the fog. They came into my view a couple of hundred ft 
from the tower. One broke left; the other went right. I thought  was 
going to witness a big one for a minute!  Scary! 73's Cort K4WI