Typhoid

toss it from my desk you mean....... you USAF guys aren't all bad. After all, you pay me...... I think the best stunt, of all the trade schools, was the painting of the USAF Academy Phantom in Blue Angel colors!

I was going to use more descriptive, and accurate, terminology - but you've captured the, uh, essense.......

might be tough for you to ship me a bottle through the mail! I suppose (on the remote and unlikely chance that I might have to fess up) that I could drink it first...... -------------- "Imagine the face of my dad (navy) when i told him i would join the air force " I did that in reverse! And now, imagine the scene in my abode when my daughter brought a (gasp) AF Academy cadet home to meet the family!!! Made the last couple of service academy games quite interesting with Navy, AF and USMC all represented at the same BBQ (of course - we had real southern cooking - steaks, tacos and burritos!) :fans:

the only ship worthy of being named USS William Jefferson Clinton would be a - never mind - I'll get banned for a week........................ :yes:

what would you care to loose?

in US service. A lot were sold to many, many nations and a lot of them were upgraded by their new owners with various sorts of things like, 40mm Bofors, Exocets (the 2 Argentine FRAM DD's escorting their cruiser on its last sortie were equipped with Exocets) and other local mods. The Taiwan FRAM's were reportedly equipped with a local SAM and SSM loadout. The Turkish FRAMs were also loaded with Exocets. The Gearing FRAM's were, for their time, one of the best DD's built and many of those served long in second navy service. The last of them were only recently retired a few years ago.

some people will complain about the quality of the rope that hangs them!

good point! I was about to go buy some external HD's. think I will re-think that plan........

sad reminder. I tried out a program called System Mechanic to automate some of the routine maintenance. It trashed my computer and I needed a tech to restore it without loosing too much. It still isn't back up to speed. Most of my stuff is on a second drive so protected from the hard-drive system crash. My daughter's computer was not so lucky. Still haven't recovered her files. Point 1, backup! Point 2, don't get System Mechanic!!

not that much to tell really. That was after his active flying period when he was Commander Fighter Airborne Early Warning Wing Pacific (COMFITAEWWINGPAC) at NAS Miramar when I was there as an E-2 instructor. So he was a couple of echelons above my paygrade. During that time we had Top Gun there which is when I was controlling them and flew with VF-126 in the same role. He was our Glorious Leader for all of us on the station. I met him a couple of times but didn't work directly with or for him. My skipper did though and he set the tone for the station with the full fighter mentality and integration of fighters and hummers. Fun times. I do recall one time when the new Commander Naval Base San Diego (Senior Officer Present and 11 Naval District Commander) and a (puke puke) black-shoe sailor put out a new policy letter that no one in the San Diego area would wear their leather flight jackets through the gate on pain of confiscation and we would all wear Service Dress Blues (Class A) as the regular uniform of the day unless directly and immediately involved in flight operations. Needless to say that did not go over real well at Fighter-Hummer Town. RADM Gilcrest immediately jumped into his car "I'll take care of this!!" and headed downtown. He came back without his flight jacket and in Service Dress Blues............

a classic oops. of course its simply having the story all ready to go and just waiting for the go button - and accidently hitting it. I recall something similar from an unnamed AFB doing an unnamed exercise using a code name that woke EVERYBODY up (was supposed to be an internal exercise but was accidently sent). We later filed that as the "inadvertant exercise of higher authority......!

he was an interesting gentleman to work for.

"Speaking of Bears and fun, It looks like I'll have to straighten out my F-4N and F-4S files out for those north pacific Bear intercepts and escorts off the Coral Sea and Midway in the early 80s. " those were very fun intercepts. need a good E-2B way out front to control them..........

another couple of minor points. In order to keep the speed under control and still have visibility, I've found that on most planes you need a combination of the speed brakes out and use power to control glideslope. Not exactly as the real world but it does work. Also, the wind over the deck in the sim does not come down the angle as it should, but comes down the main deck. In other words the ship turns directly into the wind rather than turning to control the WOD. this results in a right to left crosswind component which you can compensate for by aiming for the notch between the angle and the bow and crab into the landing. Again, not quite realistic but it works. I haven't had time yet to try this with the new patch.

once or twice...................

hear hear! gotta keep a sense of humor and go for decaf once in awhile!

yup. Tu-142 is what we call the Bear F. will it have the Indian Navy skin for it when it comes out?

Nice shot sent to me by a friend http://www.airliners.net/photo/USA---Navy/...king/1347962/L/

sorry FYDP = Future Years Defense Plan. "and where would you deploy them to relatively safely operate (they are a HAV IIRC) and still have the range to reach their targets and return." with enough tankers they can be anywhere! oh yea - tanker contracts........

its quite true, on target one could say, that the F-117 capabilities do not approach that of the F-22 or F-35. The F-35 does not compare favorably to the F-22 either for that matter. The F-35 is the "low end" of the High-low mix concept that enables us to actually field a reasonable force level. The key question from a force level planning aspect is just how many stealth strike platforms are available at any given time over the FYDP? The F-35 is barely past view-graph engineering and a long, long way from operational deployment. The F-22 fleet, having been gutted by gutless and short-sighted politicians, will never reach the force levels needed to be able to provide the strike platforms needed for years to come yet, if ever. So on a spreadsheet with the years down the right side and varying numbers of F-117's, F-22's, F-35's and B-2's in the columns to the right - how many targets can be covered by stealth strike platforms over the FYDP? (by the way, there's a "gotcha" in that question - lets see who catches it!) That is the operational justification for keeping or not keeping the F-117 in operation over the FYDP and in which years it should be phased out. My two cents (a day's pay after taxes and inflation) is that we are retiring the F-117 just a tad too early. But that's just one man's opinion and that one hasn't counted for much over the years wrt to force planning.

I'm guessing you are real close to what passed as "research" by those idiots.........

just shows yet again the intellectual bankruptcy of reporters.

"The sad fact is Boeing is the ONLY all-US contractor lead " What is Northrup Grumman? the fact is that both teams were heavily international. The fact that one is a US plane and the other is the Airbus overlooks that international teaming arrangement that is on the Boeing team. the real sad fact is that this whole competition was hosed up from the start and now has to be done over, yet again.

we had an earlier topic on the U2 operating from carriers. Now to be clear, I never doubted that they did. Just some pleasant discussion of the details on approach speeds and such. one of my former shipmates and a pilot who I rode behind for many, many hours and traps sent me the below email which was sent to him by someone else. I do not know who the original author was. --------------------------------------------------- Sent by an old Phantom driver. Wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it! I was on this cruise. This was in late 62 or early 63. After the U2 carrier quals, we departed Oakland with 2 U2's and about 6 F4's. aboard the Ranger (CVA61), We had 7or 8 crews, some maint guys, and 3 Airforce (or Maybe CIA) U2 pilots. Our OinC was John Young (later Astronaut) . We were gone about 3 weeks. Never found out where we went except that we crossed the equator and had a big shellback ceremony. After about a week the U2's flew several 6 or 7 hour missions and then we turned for home. We flew several times during the cruise just for proficiency but just in the landing pattern. No tacan locks and no radar returns (and no bingo fields!) so we were way out in the middle of nowhere. http://www.creativefission.com/Frame_MOV_Carrier320x240.html