Airplane Flying Under the Mackinac Bridge

[Rob]

That was really unhinged! That fool really waited too long to make altitude to get under. I hope he pays.

I think with the foreshortening effect you get with photography at a distance and the size of the plane next to the bridge, there's an illusion that he was much closer to the bridge than he may actually have been when he got down to the altitude required in order to pass under the bridge.

[garbear]

Didn't Richard Bong fly a P-38 through the Ariel Bridge in 1945?

Doesn't sound like it.

http://zenithcity.com/archive/legendary ... 20Building.

[Guest]

Remember when I was a kid an Air Force pilot flew a B-47 underneath the center span. Makes me ask-Where did the years go?

From reading some reprints of the Detroit Free Press online it sounds like the navigator did not agree with the idea and reported the unauthorized maneuver that cost the pilot his flying career. As a member of the Strategic Air Command, the navigator did the right thing and given the same set of circumstances I would have done the same thing.

[Ray]

Didn't Richard Bong fly a P-38 through the Ariel Bridge in 1945?

[Guest]

I remember back in the early 1990s someone flew a plane under the Blue Water Bridge connecting Port Huron and Sarnia. There were pictures of it printed in the Times Herald Newspaper but I don't recall if there was anything happened further. On a side note, I was sitting at the public parking lot next to the boat launch in Marysville a few years later and saw a twin engine Beechcraft go down the middle of the St. Clair River at a very low altitude at very high rate of speed and then pull up into a sharp climb about a 1/4 mile north of the Shell Fuel Dock to about 1,500 feet before leveling off. He was so low that I thought for a split second the plane was a fast moving boat against the background of Stag Island. I say he was not much more that 20-30 feet from the surface of the water. This was in the height of summer and there was several recreational boaters on the river but I didn't get the registration numbers so there was not much I could do in regards to reporting it.

[Paul A]

That was really unhinged! That fool really waited too long to make altitude to get under. I hope he pays.

[garbear]

Remember when I was a kid an Air Force pilot flew a B-47 underneath the center span. Makes me ask-Where did the years go?

[Mr Link]

PS when I first saw this it was on the Free Press home page as shown below. I totally ignored the colon and the capitalized P and read it is if a Michigan State Police (MSP) pilot had done the stunt! My error. The MSP are however looking for whoever did it.

[Mr Link]

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/ ... 607117002/

[garbear]

Just saw on the news crawler here in Duluth a headline that an airplane flew under the bridge span in June. Anyone know anything about it?