Singapore Air Force Open Day

Yesterday the Singapore Air Force held it's annual open day, an event which was celebrated with more than the usual glee as it is the institutions 40th anniversary.

There's nothing like a collection of high powered weaponry to kick off your birthday celebrations so the event was, as Niels declared, "AWESOME!!!!!".

Having visted more than my fair share of military museums and displays since we've lived here - the State loves to promote its mighty defences and show the locals exactly what they're spending their billioins on - I bowed out of this one and allowed hubby to take the kids along. Ready for a big day, they set off early because if there's one thing you learn from living on a small island with 4.6 million other people, it's that getting to things early means you avoid most of the crushing crowds that turn up later on. Singaporeans are not keen on getting out of bed early on Sundays, probably because they work so damn hard for the rest of the week plus because the shops don't open until 10:30am every day.

So what was the boys favourite part? Well, after hearing all about how amazing it was, I'd say it would be a close tie between sitting in the cockpit of an F16 jet fighter, pulling the trigger on a HUGE machine gun mounted on an Apache attack helicopter (just look at Niels face in the photo on the left!), or playing with the flight simulators - surely the world's most expensive video games.

As if that wasn't enough they got to crawl inside helicopters and sit in the cockpit of a training plane. Plus of course there was hardware parked or flying everywhere, from huge transport planes to Chinook helicopters thump-thump-thump-thumping overhead.

Hubby's favourite part was probably either successfully navigating through the show without losing either child, or managing to extract them both from the flight simulators without either throwing a major hissy fit and announcing they would rather actually live there than return home.

Mind you, even Daddy couldn't resist the toy stand and Niels came back with a collection of cardboard model jet fighters to assemble, while Carl had chosen a transporter plane. Finally, hot, sweaty, and running dangerously low on peanut butter sandwiches, the three intrepid adverturors returned home.

The kids were given enough tattoos of planes to keep their skin decorated for a month, plus post-it note style pads emblazoned with the logo of the Singapore Air Force: Generate and Sustain. Hang on, I thought their job was to hunt things down and blow shit up?? That logo sounds more appropriate for a vegetable farm.