Swiss Jet Team Accidentally Flies Over Wrong Festival!
It’s just too good to be true… plus, was it really a mistake?
In the "too good to be true" file goes this one. The Swiss jet demonstration team, Le Patrouille Suisse, accidentally flew over the wrong festival, and what kind of festival it was and what the team's explanation for the "mistake" was has us wondering just how accidental it was.
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The planned destination was a tribute to the 100th anniversary of some guy named Oskar Bider---okay, he was a big deal admittedly, the first person to fly over the Alps, which he did in a Bleriot monoplane in 1913! The anniversary part was apparently the beginning of air tour service, which he pioneered in 1919 in Switzerland. He also died that year, after an impromptu aerobatics demonstration gone terribly wrong. So jets were totally appropriate for that shindig.
Not so much for the one they actually performed over, though. That festival was a nearby yodeling gathering! And if you're thinking, well, the roar of a gaggle of F-5 fighter jets was surely a big improvement over the sound of yodeling, we'd have to say that's a totally insensitive thing to even think, never mind put into a story. So we are not saying that. But yeah, the sound of fighter jets is awesome.
The Swiss team is saying that the error was due to outmoded navigation hardware in their jets. Maybe. Regardless, we thank them for their service.
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