Air & Sea Show Sends Out Class of 2007 With One Last Beach Weekend

For the second day in a row, A1A north of Las Olas Boulevard belonged to the Air & Sea Show. The 13th annual McDonald's-sponsored event closed Sunday afternoon with a final Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration, capping a weekend that drew hundreds of thousands of attendees to Fort Lauderdale Beach and gave Broward County one more shared public spectacle on the spring calendar.

Sunday's flying program followed the same general pattern as Saturday: an opening Coast Guard search-and-rescue demonstration in the morning, Army Golden Knights parachute drops, fighter and heavy-lift flyovers through the early afternoon, a heritage flight pairing modern jets with World War II-era aircraft, and the Thunderbirds' six-jet closer. Static aircraft displays at War Memorial Auditorium stayed open through the late afternoon for families who wanted to walk past the planes up close before heading home.

The weekend also closed out the senior-year community calendar for Broward's class of 2007. Graduation ceremonies at Piper High School in Sunrise, along with ceremonies at Plantation, South Plantation, Western, Cooper City, Nova, McArthur and the rest of the county's public high schools, are scheduled for late May and early June. AP exams begin this week. Prom dates fall through the next two weekends. The Air & Sea Show is the last large-scale event on the regional calendar before all of that takes over.

For west Broward families, the day moves on a familiar rhythm: the early drive east on Sunrise Boulevard or Oakland Park Boulevard, the long walk in from a parking deck west of Federal Highway, sunscreen layered on twice, then back home in slow A1A traffic by late afternoon. The flyovers themselves can be heard from inland neighborhoods miles from the beach, and several Sunday afternoons in early May have, over the years, been measured locally by the timing of the closing demonstration.

Organizers said attendance for the weekend was again in the hundreds of thousands and pointed to a 2008 return date already on the calendar. For the high school seniors who spent Sunday on the sand, the next big shared event is graduation. After that, the calendar belongs to summer.