Blue Angels mark 60 years of aerial theatrics

‘Top Gun’ made naval aviation cool
The team’s popularity spiked again with the release of the Tom Cruise movie “Top Gun” in 1986. The next year, Van Halen featured a montage of Blue Angel flying in the video for the song “Dreams.”

“With ’Top Gun’ — what a great movie, not in content with the story line, but because it really showed naval aviation. It was terrific in bringing people to air shows,” Rud said.

The Blue Angels inspire fierce loyalty from some civilians. When Mario and Peggy DeLuca retired to Pensacola, they chose to live beneath the team’s flight path so they could watch the planes from their yard.

“Some of the neighbors complain about the noise, but that is the reason we bought our home,” said Peggy DeLuca, 55.

Their devotion has spanned decades. When the two were high school sweethearts, Mario, now 56, showed Peggy he was serious by giving her a model Blue Angels airplane.

Fans span generations
He enlisted in the Navy after high school and became an electronics specialist, and the couple took their seven children to air shows whenever the team performed at bases where Mario was stationed.

When Mario was stationed in San Diego, the couple drove an hour every Saturday to watch the team perform at their winter practice base in El Centro, Calif., and Peggy made ham sandwiches for the pilots to eat during their post-practice debriefings.

A former Blue Angel is godfather to their daughter, and their oldest son, a Philadelphia police officer, has his own collection of hundreds of signed Blue Angels photographs and programs.

Marine Maj. Matthew Shortal, a member of this year’s squadron, recalled seeing the Blue Angels fly for the first time as a child at a Chicago air show in the late 1970s.

“They sat me in a jet and took a photograph, and my mom wrote on the back ’Matty didn’t want to leave’,” he said.

While the planes and pilots have changed over the last six decades, the Blue Angels’ mission hasn’t, he said.

“Our mission is to enhance the Navy and Marine Corps recruiting. That worked on me and it worked on the rest of these guys,” Shortal said, standing next to his No. 4 jet after a recent practice.

“We were left with some pretty big shoes to fill. Hopefully we will do the same.”

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