A B-2 Stealth Bomber performing a flyover as seen from two unusual points of view. Way cool!
On Jan. 2, 2017, B-2 Spirit “Spirit of Kitty Hawk” with 509th Bomb Wing from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, opened the 103rd Rose Bowl Game game, between the Big Ten Conference Champion Penn State Nittany Lions and the Pac-12 Conference Champions the University of Washington Huskies, at the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, California with the traditional flyover.
The top air-to-air image showing the Stealth Bomber during the flyover (from above) was taken by Mark Holtzman, a photographer and pilot, founder of West Coast Aerial Photography, a company specialising in aerial photography based in Los Angeles.
Mark has been able to take some fantastic shots of the Rose Bowl flyovers from a plane: here are 2011 Rose Bowl flyover performed by U.S. Navy F/A-18s out of Lemoore; here’s 2009 Rose Bowl flyover by another B-2 and here you can see the 2016 flyover.
This year was much more difficult because of the clouds.
“If the B-2 had been 5 minutes earlier we would’ve been able to get it over the stadium, but the clouds came in right before,” Holtzman explained The Aviationist in an email.
Even though this year’s shot is not as crazy as those taken in the previous flyovers, it is still a cool photograph as you don’t happen to see a B-2 from above while flying over a city in L.A. county too often.
Here below you can watch the awesome footage filmed by Shorealone Films photographer Matt Hartman as the stealth bomber, serial 93-1086, radio callsign “Reaper 11” approached the Rose Bowl stadium through a pretty cloudy sky.
What makes the clip stunning, is that the flyover occurs at just about eye level (2,300 – 2,500 feet.)
By the way, it’s the same spot just off a small hiking trail in the hills above Pasadena, some 1.13 miles from the Rose Bowl, from where Matt took some incredible shots of the B-2 doing the 2015 Rose Bowl Game’s flyover we posted two years ago.
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