Military Aircraft Pictures & Stories

[777 Driver]

Originally Posted by Dearranged

Advise cancelling IFR.

Squawk 1200.

Cleared to leave center frequency.

Contact Giant Killer on 233.7

Take care,
Stu

[zipmart]

Originally Posted by FL420

That brings back some memories.......I took "training" flights 2 years in a row to Grissom AFB where we hopped out of our F-4 Phantom......

This thread has been quiet for awhile but was just resurrected. Re-reading this post brought back some memories. I took an A-4 into Grissom once for a fuel stop on a x-country. I remember the transient ramp being gigantic, since this was a SAC tanker base. The day I arrived, the ramp was absolutely empty, not an aircraft in sight. As I turned from the taxiway into the ramp at the entry point, diagonally across the ramp, almost 200 yards away, I spotted the civilian lineman with his arm raised, signalling where I was going to be parked. So I just taxied straight towards him, cutting diagonally across all of those yellow center lines. As I approached the lineman and got myself aligned on the yellow line of the designated parking space, he started signalling me small corrections left or right, first with hand signals, then as I got closer, with head nods left or right. I thought "This guy is very precise. I didn't think that I was that bad at staying on the yellow line." He gave me the stop signal, chocked me, and I shut down. As I climbed out, with a big grin on his face, he said, "I just love you Navy carrier guys coming in here. You follow taxi directions precisely. I was just messing with you to have some fun. You can't get the Air Force guys to leave that yellow line."

[Cooperhawk]

Originally Posted by 777 Driver

Squawk 1200.
Cleared to leave center frequency.
Contact Giant Killer on 233.7
Take care,
Stu

Flying out of Langley were you?
I recall Giant Killer calling on the hot line with twenty handoffs all wanting to get on the ground before happy hour ended.
Then of course there were those Navy and Marine Corp guys.

[Cooperhawk]

Back in the day the Patuxent River Naval Air Station had their very own restricted area. It went for I think 3500 to FL850. Well, anyway, someone was bouncing the F18s as they did their intercept practice in the area.
It looked like a Marine A6 but no one got a good look or tail number. They would yell at us at the Center asking who that was. We had no idea. Whoever they were they were non radar with transponders turned off.
So one day I peaked up the primary radar and got a hit. I tracked the target southbound until it went below radar coverage.
We all thought it was hilarious but the Navy was less amused.
It was my belief that that night a Marine Pilot at New River bought the drinks at the O club.

[FastEagle]

Our back yard Cooper's Hawk.

[Raider47]

I had dinner this evening with a ww2 vet who flew the hump over the Himalayas. I am very grateful to have met him and I was lucky enough that he told me a couple stories. It is pretty amazing what kind of flying they did back then.

[Indy Glenn]

Originally Posted by FL420

That brings back some memories.

Another pilot instructor, whose FIL was in charge of PR for the Indy 500, and I took "training" flights 2 years in a row to Grissom AFB where we hopped out of our F-4 Phantom, caught a ride to the Main Gate then hitch-hiked to the FIL's house in Indianapolis because no rental cars were available anywhere. The payoff was VIP free entry to the track, pit passes to Gasoline Alley, a free ride around the track in a Chevy Suburban, free admission to the Museum, etc.

Wow - talking about memories - I got into Army recruiting the mid 70s and again in the late 80s until retirement in 2000. My last assignment was in the Indianapolis area.

The Indianapolis Speedway & 500 mile race was and still is a big thing in May. They treat the military super - all active personnel and Guard & reserve members in uniform are VIPs, with access to all areas and if we were lucky - into a suite. I am happy to report, these traditions are still happening today.....

Grissom is now an Air Reserve Base of the USAFR with a KC-135 Stratotanker wing stationed there.. As a green suiter, I spent some time at Grissom doing our Bi-Annual physical fitness test. I was there when it was an active base then to reserve forces. I retired in 2000 with 30 years - not sure when it switched over to an air reserve base. Part of our PT test was a 2 mile run - the brain trust bussed us out 2 miles along the perimeter road and we ran back to basically where the front gate "was". Our trek took us past the edge of the runway where a traffic light stopped traffic for incoming aircraft - I asked what to do if the light turned red - "Stop" I was told. Ha - yeh right - then all the mickey mouse would start for a failed PT test. Something from my time in service I will not forget.

Today, I volunteer for the DoD and am a liaison between all branches of reserve forces and their employers. Being the buffer & friend when these reserve troops are mobilized frequently & try to maintain a civilian career.... I really enjoy it and keeps me in contact with the young troops. The USAFR will arrange for civilians employers to take a ride in a KC-135 once per year. The below picture is an A-10 getting a drink...

You would not recognize the place now, it did survive the BRACs that happened in the early 2000s - but Grissom is but a shell of what it was, even when it changed over to a reserve base. The front gate is now about 2 miles down the road from the original front gate. Some civilian activity but many buildings were either razed or sitting empty deteriorating.

Again - thanks for sparking a memory in this old ground pounder....

g

[Cooperhawk]

Originally Posted by FastEagle

Our back yard Cooper's Hawk.

Attachment 346980

We live in deep woods and have a pair that have nested here for many years. That's where I picked up the handle.

Course we are the Coopers.

[fbuckwalter]

Originally Posted by Raider47

I had dinner this evening with a ww2 vet who flew the hump over the Himalayas. I am very grateful to have met him and I was lucky enough that he told me a couple stories. It is pretty amazing what kind of flying they did back then.

A few years ago I was at McDill AFB for a show. Dick Cole, Doolittle's copilot was there selling his book! I got a picture with him and a signed copy of his book. Turns out he went from the Tokyo raid to flying the Hump. His book describes the danger of flying the Hump. 594 planes and 910 air crewman were lost. His book, Dick Cole's War is a great read.

Dick Cole was the last surviving Raider and passed in April 2019.

[FL420]

In the mid-70s I went to the Indy 500 several times. The first time was the infamous 1973 race which was plagued with many crashes claiming the lives of two drivers, one pitcrew member and causing injuries to about a dozen spectators just behind the wire fence about 40-50 yards from where my squadron mate and I were sitting.
I wasn't there when Art Pollard was killed in a fiery crash several weeks before the race while qualifying. We had probably the best seats at the track at the apex of Turn One on the starting lap on the first race day when Salt Walther's right rear wheel climbed up the left front wheel of the car next to the wall spinning Walther's car up into the heavy wire fence.
The initial contact occurred about 100 yards from us and if the fence hadn't spit him back onto the track into the field of cars and contained most of the spare parts coming straight at us we may have had a very bad day too. I vividly remember one of the half dozen or so mounted tires rolling and bouncing through the air had us boresighted as it was gaining altitude. Fortunately the curved part of the wire and cable fence caught it and spit it back onto the track in Turn One. We were also very lucky that the highly volatile fuel didn't get to us like it did to some of the people who were sitting lower and closer to the track than we were.
Walther's car slid upside down until it stopped almost directly in front of us. Since his 75 gallon fuel tanks ruptured in the initial crash the crash crew guys didn't have to fight a big fire to help him out of the car. He wasn't too seriously injured.
Art Pollard's car a few weeks earlier had also slid to a stop upside down but he had a full load of fuel which burst into flames when the car came to a stop. It took awhile for the crew to control the fire and get him out of the car so he was fatally injured. The video of that is pretty gruesome so I won't post it here but it's on YT.
The race was red flagged for rain a little later and resumed the next day. This time we had the second-best seats at the track at the apex of Turn Four. The race was going well until Swede Savage's car was accelerating out of Turn Four into the homestretch when it did an almost instantaneous 90° left turn leaving the track and colliding headon into a concrete wall. What was left of the car bounced back off the wall in flames onto the track. Swede did not survive.
To make the event even more tragic a mechanic in the pits ran across the pit road to get to the crash site and was hit by an ambulance driving down pit road in the opposite direction of the usual direction of traffic to get to the crash scene. Fortunately we did not see the man who was fatally injured get hit.
I would never have believed a car could make a 90° square turn at almost 200 mph without rolling until I saw it with my own eyes. I always assumed the 1000hp rear-engine car had broken a halfshaft but I saw an interview with a driver who said all the drivers were having traction problems due to excess oil on the track. It's possible that when he accelerated out of the turn his left rear tire lost traction in oil while his right rear tire had good traction.
The race was stopped for awhile due to a wet track but was resumed later. It was finally redflagged after enough laps were run to declare the race official for safety reasons due to the wet track. On a restart when the track wasn't completely dry cars were getting sideways and spinning going 2 digit speeds due to improper tires on damp pavement.
And I thought flying fighters off carriers was dangerous. It was good to get back into a cockpit with a zero-zero ejection seat again.

https://youtu.be/wHo8VnOYC_8
https://youtu.be/eodcGBlPtC4

Edit: Since the 1973 race was run over 2 days some 48 years ago with many redflags and restarts due to wrecks and rain my memory of exactly what happened when may not be 100% accurate. Close enough for government work though. I have trouble remembering all the aircraft mishaps I have witnessed over the years and the patients I have flown to hospitals when I flew fixed-wing air ambulance.

[Dearranged]

Was over on youtube watching

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9U9EmNwXu8&t=937s

Pretty good footage. Some of the phraseology was a little iffy, but maybe that was the Air Force controllers, probably made up for the footage. Pretty impressive stuff anyway.

[FL420]

Originally Posted by Dearranged

Was over on youtube watching

Pretty good footage. Some of the phraseology was a little iffy, but maybe that was the Air Force controllers, probably made up for the footage. Pretty impressive stuff anyway.

It was pretty "Hollywood" but was informative nonetheless. It's amazing how Red Flag has grown since I participated in Red Flag when they were just putting it together from scratch and hadn't been officially organized yet in 1975.
I went through Topgun in November of 1970 in their first year between my first and second combat cruises. I was the first pilot from my fleet squadron, VF-151, to be selected to attend. After my second cruise I went to the west coast F-4 RAG, VF-121, as an instructor. Being one of the few Topgun grads most of my flying was in the Advanced Tactics Phase teaching ACM.
Topgun was still a part of VF-121 and although the were building a good reputation the pace of the war made it difficult for some squadron skippers to turn over one of their better pilots, RIOs, groundcrew members and an F-4 aircraft for them to use to attend the 5 week course.
Meanwhile, some Air Force fighter folks were aware of the great improvement in Navy fighter crews as a result of the training we were receiving fighting against Instructors using Soviet tactics flying the A-4E Mongoose which made an excellent MiG-17 emulator as it was almost the same size and performance as the MiG with a big engine and all the unnecessary weight removed from it.
Some brave Air Force squadron and wing commanders quietly began to ask Topgun if they could come to their base for a few days or more and let their pilots be exposed to the kind of dissimilar aircraft training we were doing. By doing so they could be putting their careers in jeopardy as most of the senior AF officers were concerned about losing an aircraft which might jeopardize their careers during the much more aggressive training required to make pilots trained in the F-4 as interceptor pilots into real fighter pilots.
I was one of the few pilots in VF-121 who was checked out in Topgun's A-4Es and VF-126's TA-4F and Js. We were teaching the RAG students the same tactics as Topgun was teaching to fleet pilots and RIOs, but more of a nuts and bolts abbreviated version.
As the Topgun program began to ramp up they began to get spread a little too thin to cover the increasing number of requests from AF squadrons to come share our secrets and Mongooses(Mongeese?) with them. I started getting calls from Topgun asking if I could fly a mission for the Air Force in a Mongoose with one of their instructors. Well, hellyyeah! Who wouldn't want to go to Nellis AFB and fight the Air Force Fighter Weapons School instructors in their F-4s, the 555thFS(the famous Triple Nickel squadron) at Luke AFB in their brand new F-15s or even to George AFB to watch the F-105s streak by us at the speed of heat with no attempt at all to turn with us to learn other ways to deal with a low wing loaded but also low powered subsonic opponent.
Cubic Corporation of San Diego built the first Air Combat Maneuvering Range (ACMR) in the desert southeast of MCAS Yuma joint military/ civilian use airport. With a bunch of telemetry electronics packed into an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile instead of solid rocket fuel, a warhead, a seeker head and guidance system mounted on each participating aircraft and several electronic receiving stations on hilltops scattered around the operating area we had a tremendous training aid for showing all kinds of recorded information about who did what to whom and when available to all the participants in the dogfights at the debrief in an air conditioned trailer back at Miramar.
The displayed information on a huge screen was a little like what was shown in the video but the instructor could look at an engagement with a "God's eye view" from directly overhead the aircraft, a view from the side of the fight showing the vertical maneuvering of each aircraft or a view looking up from directly below the fight. One of the most useful views was the pilot's view through the gunsight and windscreen of each pilot where you could tell if he was in the right place in the operating envelope of the missile the pilot had selected when he pulled the trigger and called "Fox 1" over the radio if he fired a radar-guided Sparrow, "Fox 2" if he fired a heat-seeking Sidewinder missile or "Guns" if he was flying an aircraft equipped with a gun. The computer would calculate if the weapon fired was in the proper envelope for the weapon would have hit the target. That information was extremely useful for teaching pilots how to judge the proper angle, distance, speed, closure, G loading and attitude for a successful kill.
After Cubic built the ACMR for the Navy it built a similar system for the Air Force northwest of Las Vegas and called it the Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation(ACMI.) Once that was online the Air Force, which had been collecting any Soviet weapons systems, particularly SAM systems, they started thinking about ways to put the ACMI and the goodies they had been getting from our friends in the Middle East to good use. The result, 45 years later, is the Red Flag we see today.
We provided a lot of A-4s to the Israelis during the Yom Kippur war in 1973 as they were losing a lot to SA-7 Strella missiles. They discovered that the missiles were exploding under the horizontal tail and vertical stabilizer wiping out the hydraulic systems necessary to control the aircraft especially at high speeds. Their solution was to extend the engines tailpipe so the missle would guide and explode several feet behind the aircraft and have less of a chance of bringing down the aircraft.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-...king-sa-7-sam/
Here's a pic of one of the NFWS Mongoose A-4Es I used to fly. It was a real hoot to fly. Notice the gravity operated leading edge slats are bolted up. Only Topgun and the Blue Angels A-4s bolted up the slats to avoid asymetric extension during high G maneuvering which could ring your bell and spoil your gun aim when it happened.
https://images.app.goo.gl/Jq7zEZBzthSNVQT16
OBTW. Red Flag is going on at Nellis AFB right now.
https://www.nellis.af.mil/News/Artic...allied-forces/
[emoji40][emoji382][emoji382]... [emoji382][emoji40][emoji106]

[F4Gary]

Originally Posted by Dearranged

Was over on youtube watching

Pretty good footage. Some of the phraseology was a little iffy, but maybe that was the Air Force controllers, probably made up for the footage. Pretty impressive stuff anyway.

A lot of Hollywood hokiness with some nice airplane footage.

[zipmart]

FL420, that was excellent insight into the origins of TG & Red Flag for those who have never heard about how it all started. When TOP GUN (the movie) premiered, a bunch of us at VC-12 (TARS & SELRES alike) took our wives to see it as a group. The wives all remarked that they knew what we did daily, but didn't really understand what it was about until seeing the movie. We laughed and tried to explain what they saw was Hollywood's version and not the real version. There were some good aerial sequences though.