Some things get into your blood when you're young and never leave.
For me, it was the Air & Water Show. Every August, my parents would bring me down to our favorite lakefront to watch the sky fill with jets and smoke trails and impossibly precise formations, and I would stand there with my neck craned back, absolutely certain that one day I'd be up there too... I wanted to be a fighter pilot more than I wanted almost anything. Boy's Life magazines and posters with F-15s and SR-71s in my room...
At twelve years old, an eye exam took care of that dream.
But the love of the show never left, and neither did the instinct to look up.
The Chicago Air & Water Show has been a lakefront tradition since 1959, held each year on the shores of Lake Michigan with the city skyline as its backdrop. It's free, it's loud, it's one of the most purely joyful public spectacles in the country. On a clear August weekend, you can see it from almost anywhere along the water and in 2025, I made sure I had my Nikon in my hands when it happened.
This gallery captures several of the show's signature acts but a couple of favorites indeed: the U.S. Army Golden Knights, the Army's elite parachute demonstration team, and the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, the precision jet formation team that headlines the show. Watching them move, the stillness of freefall, the controlled chaos of six jets in perfect sync, I understood again why a 12-year-old once thought the sky was the only place worth being.
I never made it up there. But I got close in my mind. {Right into the DANGER ZOOOOOOOONE} Sorry...had to...
