By Dave Ashton
Wandering around the Internet as usual for muscle car-related stories, I came across a tasty bit of information on Dodge Chargers being used at an Air Force Base. Essentially, two Dodge Chargers were meant to be used at Beale Air Force Base and RAF Fairford, UK, to follow a U-2 ‘Dragon Lady’ aircraft taking off and landing. However, after watching the video below a few times, the two cars in question just didn’t seem to look very Charger-like.
The original story came from hotcars.com, then reiterated on musclecarsandtrucks.com. We presumed both websites would be able to spot a Dodge Charger on Pluto from the Earth. However, the problem with the footage is that it is shot from a distance, and the focus of the footage is very much on the airplane. Thus, we only have brief glimpses of the vehicles in question.
Normally, we don’t need to go into train spotting mode to sight a certain muscle car. But this one just kept eating away, as both vehicles just didn’t look right. At 1.05 in the video, the aircraft is presumably pulling out of Beale Air Force Base( presumably, as there is no way the UK could have such sunny weather…). At this point, the rear end of the vehicle has separate taillights, instead of the all-in-one cluster running the width of the car, found on the Charger. when you look at the footage in the video at 2.39, the rear of that vehicle also has separate rear headlight clusters as in the image below.
Also, if you check out 2.23 of the video, the front of the vehicle has an all-in-one radiator grille, which also features the number plate and what looks like a silver logo. From the screenshots, the vehicle at least in the 2nd half of the video looks more like an Audi.
The other thing that seemed to stand out was the side design of the car. In the footage at the same point as above, the side of the car has very straight lines, while the Dodge Charger has scoops.
Nerdy investigations
Obviously, being a muscle car website, we had to do further sniffing online to see if our assumptions were correct. An article from the air force times.com from 2019 doesn’t specifically say two Dodge Chargers but does show them in the images. But, the article does state that both vehicles had problems with the certification getting them shipped.
You can also see from the screenshot below, that the rear of this Charger looks different than the ones in the video. Also, the video was released in 2016, which means the story in 2019 about the Chargers being used is a future event. Maybe, the Dodge Chargers were used by 2019, but not in the video footage in 2016.
Conclusion
So, it looks like Dodge Chargers were used at some point, as the image above seems to have been shot at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, March 15 2019. But more than probable, the vehicles in the earlier video are of a different kind.
We admit we are not the best at picking out the tiniest minutiae of each muscle car from a distance. It would be helpful if some of the readers here could take a second look at the video and see what they thought.
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