Pick Your Nose Art
Your Weekly Lex, For Strength
Ohhh. Good.
By lex, on April 6th, 2006
Place this in the category of: “Probably too good to be true, but worth sharing nevertheless”
The correspondent who sent it my way said that it represents what it appears to: A HUD camera freeze from of an FA-18 of some flavor in a “position of advantage” over a USAF F-22 Raptor.
Little things. Like gunning an Air Force guy in his high tech gear. They just mean so much.
You have to understand this about fighter combat: Killing someone with a missile? Just business. Killing him with a gun? Now that’s personal. How can that be, you ask? Dead is dead, right?
Wrong. If you get shot with a missile, you got beat. You get gunned, you’ve been owned. A missile has a guidance loop, a processor, a logic board – it can be defeated. A 20mm round is brutally insensate, a mere bludgeon, with high explosive incendiary effects to go along with its kinetics. You cannot argue with it, you cannot decoy it, you cannot, once fairly beaten down, get out of its way.
Which somehow puts me in mind of as story from when I was stationed over in Japan. The USAF had a F-15 Eagle squadron in Kadena working “with” another USAF F-16 squadron in Korea. Now, much as there existed a good-natured rivalry between the FA-18 community in the US Navy, and their F-14 counterparts, so also did a rivalry exist between F-15 pilots and F-16 jocks. Except you could probably leave out the “good natured” part. Because in the Navy, anyway, after a moment or two’s reflection, one brand of pilot would actually cross the street to piss on the other, if in fact he was on fire.
Because of the service.
Less so in the USAF, was my strong impression. It all came from the hauteur with which the Eagle drivers, accustomed to raining long-range death from way high above viewed the mud-moving Viper pilots, no use at all in a stand-up fight, but given to pretensions. The F-16 guys on the other hand, were all too accustomed to seeing beat-down F-15s in the HUD cameras with the gun pipper on them to give much more than the back of their hand to the self-regard demonstrated by “Ego” pilots. They went at each other hammer and tongs. And that was just in the O’Club.
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Ferry Flight Pic Of The Day
I have hundreds of pictures of glaciers in Greenland, and this is one of them. There, that was easy. Now I can go back to watching it snow, yes it’s snowing again today, in May. This is how glaciers get started isn’t it?
Are You Freaking KIDDING Me?
On Wednesday last week we had six inches of snow on the runway and hopes of jumping on the weekend looked grim. Then the sun came out, melting the snow and making it possible to finally start skydiving. We were a month late in opening but at least we were finally up and running. Or so we thought.
That, my friends, is fifteen inches of snow. It’s May 2nd. Global warming my ass.
Well Done Boys!
Stu and Brad have just delivered the Beech 1900 to Yellowknife Canada wrapping up the flying for season 2 of “Dangerous Flights” They flew over 10,000 miles and from what I’ve heard had one hell of an adventure! Season 2 is going to blow season 1 away.
My Next Aircraft?
An aircraft that’s big, fast and has two engines is what I look for in a plane that I’m going to use to go places. Get there fast with a lot of stuff, safely. But when I want to just fly for fun I want something that I can either do mad aerobatics in or something I can fly very low and slow, and I mean LOW. A few years ago I bought a powered para-glider. Flying it was incredibly fun and seeing that if you lost the engine you were already in a parachute, the safest aircraft in he world. The only drawback was it was a pain in the ass to set up and launch, as two broken props will attest to. It looks like the AirCam looks like exactly what I’ve been looking foe. Great low speed handling characteristics, good short field performance and two engines. The last feature is the most important one to have when flying low because if you lose an engine you just keep flying. I think I’m going to have to start looking one……. just don’t tell my wife.
“That felt good.”
At 10 years old the girl in the video is a better pilot than a lot of guys I’ve flown with over the years. Not as good as Super Girl though, she rocks it in the cockpit!
Progress
Took pseudo student (PS) up for a flight yesterday and I think we might actually be making some progress. We started the flight with a take off, what else? and apart from him taking FOREVER to get the mighty Cessna 150 up to full power he got us in the air like a pro. At which point he let the airspeed get low, not good, and drifted to the left. I managed to coach him back to the proper “not about to die” airspeed and decided that we would start the days lesson with departure stalls. A departure stall is what happens when a pilot points the nose of his aircraft at the sky light he’s flying an F-15 when in fact he’s flying something that has let’s say, less power. A plane goes up only when it has sufficient airspeed, then it goes down. If the pilot has enough altitude to recover from the stall and keep flying great, if not…well.
After PS had the departure stalls down pat I looked for something else to teach him and as luck would have it we had a broken cloud layer at three thousand feet that would do nicely. I had PS climb up to the cloud layer and used the clouds to simulate rising terrain and what to do when confronted with such a situation. We pretended that we had flown into a box canyon and didn’t have enough power to clear the mountains on either side. I showed PS how to orbit inside the valley while climbing to gain enough altitude to clear the terrain. I also showed him how to do a hammerhead turn if you there wasn’t enough room to circle.
After that we went back to the airport where his landings were much improved over our last flight. I only thought we were going to crash once.
Your Weekly Lex, For Strength
T.I.A.D.
By lex, on July 15th, 2006
A couple of years ago, I had the idea that I’d post stories from “times I almost died.” T.I.A.D., in short.
I didn’t have that many, as it turns out – you don’t get that many chances to “almost die” before completing the act, and then someone else gets to tell stories about you. So the thread didn’t last very long. But it wasn’t an entire waste of time. And it is the weekend, and the world’s on fire and I’m not up to getting my noggin wrapped around it right now.
A new series, for Sunday evenings: “Times I Almost Died.”There are no lessons here. No larger truths. This will not change your world view.
But I have a rather large store of aviation tales, stories wherein things could have gone very wrong, that will take the pressure off Sunday evenings for a while. A month of Sundays, at least.
Date: April, 1987
Place: Fallon, Nevada – B-17 range complex
Environment: Close Air Support (CAS) training missionClose air support is a “high risk” mission. It’s typically flown at low altitude, where no self-respecting strike fighter pilot would choose to find himself, if he could at all avoid it. Down low, any gomer lying on his back with an AK-47 could put a 7.62 round somewhere important, just by sheer, dumb luck. And you’d never see it coming.
But when the folks on the ground call for CAS, it’s because they need it. Their own artillery isn’t answering the ordered bell. People are dying. Our people.
So they call fixed-wing CAS in, because a strike fighter or two with four 2000 pound bombs can make quite an impression on the enemy, if mortars, howitzers and 105′s aren’t doing the job. To put things in perspective, you, gentle reader, could pick up a 105 round, although you’d probably struggle a bit.
You couldn’t part the hair on a 2000 pounder.
And the bigger bombs get (by mass) the greater the proportion of explosive power.
CAS is hard to get just right. By definition you’re in close proximity to friendlies when you release. Getting it wrong could make things much worse, rather than better. You have to be absolutely certain. In Vietnam, over half of all CAS missions went through the target “dry” on their first look. The guys couldn’t be sure. Which sucks for the guys on the ground, because the really, really need your help.
But dropping your ordnance on the wrong side of the line doesn’t help them at all.