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 7 different chapters or “albums” (the black bar 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 AIRSHOWS that we visited in the mid- and late Sixties as well as in more recent years. We have split the Airshows-album in three categories/eras holding respective galleries.
A seperate album is on PRESERVED AIRCRAFT: preserved in museums all over Europe, the USA and the rest of the world, but we also present a gallery on “exhibits“: airframes used in traveling exhibitions, roadshows and whatsoever. Also included in this album Preserved Aircraft is “Wrecks & Relics“: monuments, gate-guards and so on. And the fourth is the category “Warbirds“, dealing with civil registered aircraft painted as military aircraft (what in most cases they once were).
The fifth album is called SPOTTING and holds two categories . One focuses on us as aircraft spotters, being not certain if there would be any flying-activities; and the other one is an aircraft-spotters category with galeries consisting of pictures taken by us during special events.
KLu & BAF is an album under long-term construction; in 5 categories we will deal with the different types of aircraft that we have seen in service with the Royal Netherlands Air Force (KLu) and the Belgian Air Force (BAF).
The album BASE VISITS holds reports of visits that we made to various active air bases during normal operational flying days and NATO exercises.
Enjoy! Please note that we try to update our site with new material regularly. The most recent updates are shown in the upper tile on the homepage.
Hans Engels / Frank Klaassen / Gijs Hiltermann
