Our website is dedicated to what we refer to as our “Golden Years of Spotting”: the period between 1960 and 1980, when lots of time, effort and money was spent to see as many military aircraft as possible. Our main station at the time was Eindhoven, an airbase of the Royal Netherlands Air Force that hosted a number of Thunderstreak – and later of NF-5 squadrons. No need to say that it was the Thunderstreak that inspired us to give the chosen name to this site.
Thunderstreaks.com is divided into 5 different chapters or “albums” (the black lettering on top). Each album is divided in a number of sub-chapters (“categories”) in which we go in more detail.
In the F-84F album we present a number of galleries, each dealing with the various users of this airplane.
A second album is about the RF-84F Thunderflash, the reconnaissance variant of the Thunderstreak. This aircraft served with many NATO air forces; we have a category for each one of them.
The third album is dedicated to pictorial reviews of MORE GREAT PLANES that we spotted in the mid- and late sixties, seventies and eighties. We have split them in several categories.
Next is a chapter dedicated to what we call our golden years of spotting; here you can find reports on basevisits, exercises, airshows that took place in again the sixties to nineties. This chapter also hold the galleries airshow arrivals and good luck spotting (=just wait at the fence to see what’s coming in).
A seperate album is on PRESERVED AIRCRAFT: preserved in museums all over Europe, the USA and the rest of the world. Also included in this album Preserved Aircraft is “Wrecks & Relics“: monuments, gate-guards and so on. And the third is the category “Warbirds“, dealing with civil registered aircraft painted as military aircraft (what in most cases they once were).
And finally, the “About Us” chapter, which is … about us!?
Enjoy! Please note that we try to update our site with new material regularly.
Hans Engels / Frank Klaassen / Gijs Hiltermann