Aircraft Pic & Vid Thread

tous · August 23, 2018

55 minutes ago, F14Scott said:

A couple of thoughts, in no particular order:

Thank you very much, amigo.

If my questions become bothersome, just ignore me, but you have knowledge and experiences not many have had and we all enjoy sucking it out of you.

:worthy:

:biggrin:

F14Scott · August 23, 2018

Thank you very much, amigo.
If my questions become bothersome, just ignore me, but you have knowledge and experiences not many have had and we all enjoy sucking it out of you.

[emoji3]

As you may have noticed, it doesn't take much coaxing to get me to dial the yap up to eleven. [emoji16]

Sent from my phone using Tapatalk

gwalchmai · August 23, 2018

41 minutes ago, tous said:

Thank you very much, amigo.

If my questions become bothersome, just ignore me, but you have knowledge and experiences not many have had and we all enjoy sucking it out of you.

Oh, come on! Couldn't we say "...and we enjoy hearing you relate them"?

**Rabbi** · August 23, 2018

2 hours ago, F14Scott said:

A couple of thoughts, in no particular order:

1. The Hornet is way easier to fly. I flew a ton in the simulators for both, and I flew the Hornet B on two adversary hops where I was the passenger and my pilot let me drive. I also flew the T-34C and the T-2, and I rode in the Tomcat for almost 1000 hours in all stages of flight. The old girl was all bell cranks and push rods (later mods added digital flight controls to the horizontal stabs, greatly enhancing slow-speed handling), and moving one thing meant all three axises were off to the races, coupled this and Dutch that. If you've ever driven a newer Corvette, it is a very Tomcat-like experience: the nose kind of mushes around up there, and the whole thing slushes hard into turns; it has great traction and power, but if you don't know what you're doing, she'll get away from you. Tomcat pilots were all really, really good sticks.

The Hornet, by comparison, was just like my GTI: small, nimble, and precise. Point the sick, and the jet snapped to that roll angle or pitch elevation and stayed there. The auto-trim was amazing, that way. You could, quite literally, lift off the runway, point the nose 10 degrees up and set 90% on the motors, put your hands in your lap, and you'd climb straight and level until the air got too thin to climb any more, and then you'd level out on heading until you ran out of gas. Flying the ball in it was more of a series of little angles you'd cut coming down the chute, whereas the Tomcat was this ungainly mess of repeatedly blobbing past your intended path and then blobbing back to it. The good pilots made it look easy, but it was never pretty. Hornets were pretty, on the ball.

Also, from a systems standpoint, the Hornet was also much easier. I don't know how many circuit breakers a Hornet pilot could access (or ever needed to), but I had six huge panels in back and the pilot had two in the front. We used a lot of the CBs as switches to control the equipment inside. The Hornet did most of it's own diagnostics and troubleshooting, while almost all of ours was manual. I carried several little books of computer codes I could type in to see faults, and then routines of CBs and switches to toggle to try to make things work or at least give the maintenance guys a heads up. The Hornet just recorded it all on a tape drive for download.

The radars, the whole point of the jets, were sooo different. With the Hornet, you just turned it on and told it where to look. It would tell you it was working, and you had two possibilities: something was there and you'd see it, or nothing was there and you'd see nothing.

The AWG-9 was a mysterious, analog, crystal ball. It would be powered on, but you had no idea if it were working right or not until you played around with it for a bit, turning gain knobs and applying filters and tweaking its settings. Even then, there were *4* possibilities: there and seen, there and not seen, not there and not seen, and not there and (impossibly) seen. It was my job to do the black magic interpretation and communicate what I saw to my pilot and wingmen. It took everything I had to do it, sometimes. There were many weapon (bombing, reconnaissance, and pod) and radar controls that I, alone, could operate, while I don't think that is the case in Hornets.

So, bottom line, to fly the Turkey, we NEEDED two guys. To fly a Hornet, you just need one. That fact always made me feel pretty good about my job; sure, I wasn't driving, but the jet's design called for two people, separately trained, to make the thing work. In Hornet D and F models (which have many more dual controls in both the front and back seat), I often wonder if WSOs have the same feeling I had, or if they are relegated to "overflow managers." Knowing how some pilots have their single-seat mentalities, I wonder if they say, "OK, WSO, I've got everything. If I need you, I'll tell you." and "OK, I'm pretty busy. Watch the gas for me."

2. Doing missions was something else entirely. The fact is, when you show up to your squadron, you're an FNG and you barely know anything. You have to start working within the squadron, getting quals and experience before you are useful. For Tomcat crews, the new pilots would fly with the seasoned RIOs and the new RIOs would fly with the old pilots. In the middle were the two-year JOs who were OK to fly with each other. Thus, any Tomcat flying around the boat would be a fully capable Tomcat. With the Hornets, the FNGs would start out as designated wingmen. They had to do all their learning airborne. So, it often took more than one Hornet to do the job of one Hornet. Fortunately, since 99% of what we do is train, this paradigm is OK. In a combat situation, both squadrons would just roll the FNGs to the lightest rolls and fill the seats with the experienced guys. But, that gets your seasoned pilots tired out pretty fast and brings up

3. Manpower. Tomcat squadron: 12 jets, 200 guys, 24 pilots and RIOs. Hornet squadron: 12 jets, 160 guys, 12 pilots. Both squadrons need a CO, XO, 4 department heads, and two dozen other real and SLJ jobs ranging from a maintenance branch officer to the squadron dental readiness officer. In my squadron as a JO, I had three jobs. The Hornet JOs had five or six. They were always very busy, and I suspect a lot of stuff got dropped.

4. Single seat vs. crew coordination. We all know that flying around in your own private little jet is awesome. The Hornet drivers were masters of their own destiny, for better or worse, and they, of course, claimed they liked it that way. I see the great appeal of not having to listen to the trunk monkey and share the decision making (although, the Hornet guys usually had a wingman, who functioned as a wing monkey, for all intents and purposes). As a RIO, I never had a choice; for me it was play as a team or don't play. But, I have to admit, my personality type was and is OK with being part of a pair. I know, for a fact, I made two decisions that each time saved a jet, decisions my pilots did not make, as well as several others that prevented very hazardous situations. I also remember at least two times when I had big brain farts that, had I been alone, would have put me in similarly very hazardous situations. But, with two brain housing groups inside the cockpit, we all managed to unfuck each other and land safely.

I know of many Hornet drivers that were not so lucky. From simple GCEs (gross conceptual errors, like holding on the 180 radial vice holding heading 180 on the 360 radial) that made for entertaining stories of buffoonery, to CFITs, Hornet drivers' mistakes often went unnoticed until it was too late. I know of no Tomcat that ever CFITted into the water, but plenty of Hornets have done it. And, I know of no Tomcat pilot ever G-LOCing and crashing (since the RIO could either wake him up or punch them out), but two friends of mine and plenty more Hornet drivers have taken the dirt nap.

All in all, I'm not too proud to say, I was glad to have a second guy to catch my mistakes, and was glad to have caught those of my buddies.

Awesome write up.

As a flyer of little piston planes with big fat straight wings, I think about some of the things I have done that were dumb (not on purpose) or the times I have found myself behind the plane. Fortunately, little piston planes with big fat straight wings can be really forgiving of less than precision flight and less than stellar choices. Of course, the hope is you get better and you do. "but I am only a little off of the runway after turning final.....just a little more bank.....is that my stall siren ****! did I actually not watch my speed!.....little voice in head "go around" my thoughts as the throttle goes firewall way "I cant believe I got myself in that situation, do not ever do that dumb thing again....only 10,000 other dumb things to learn not to do!"

When thinking about ultra high performance military jets....and how damned big some of them are, and how much speed and precision they can require, from my vantage point it amazes me that anyone ever survives it. Of course, military training and structure helps so much.

F14Scott · August 23, 2018

Awesome write up.

As a flyer if little piston planes with big fat straight wings, I think about some of the things I have done that were dumb (not on purpose) or the times I have found myself behind the plane. Fortunately, little piston planes with big fat straight wings can be really forgiving of less than precision flight and less than stellar choices. Of course, the hope is you get better and you do. "but I am only a little off of the runway after turning final.....just a little more bank.....is that my stall siren ****! did I actually not watch my speed!.....little voice in head "go around" my thoughts as the throttle goes firewall way "I cant believe I got myself in that situation, do not ever do that dumb thing again....only 10,000 other dumb things to learn not to do!"

When thinking about ultra high performance military jets....and how damned big some of them are, and how much speed and precision they can require, from my vantage point it amazes me that anyone ever survives it. Of course, military training and structure helps so much.

Here's a little secret nobody believes. The jets were sooo much easier to fly than the prop, and the Hornet was the easiest of all.

When I learned to fly the T-34, it was just like I described the Tomcat, only way worse. Add power, airplane torque rolls, stick into the roll, aircraft yaws, input rudder, all those surfaces deflected requires more power, add throttle, begin again. Trimming was constantly turning wheels vice (in the Tomcat) moving a coolie hat or (in the Hornet) doing NOTHING. In the jets, with symmetric thrust, you just don't touch the rudders unless you really need to pull the nose around.

Yes, we fly twice as fast, but the distances are three times bigger, meaning we have even *more* time. I never took a Tomcat or Hornet into a runway smaller than 8,000 feet, and most were 12,000x200. Big, big approach and departure plates, designed for jets that land faster but that can't pull 7 Gs.

Heavy? Yeah, but you know what that weight does? Smooths out the bumps, big time. I would watch the light civ aircraft get thrown around by updrafts and downdrafts and have to worry about wake turbulence and winds on the parking ramp. In my 65,000 lb jet, none of it was ever a factor. Aside from flying into the middle of a thunderhead, weather was only a thing when it was below landing ceiling/vis mins. Otherwise, we just didn't care, at all. Maybe because we had

So. Much. Power. Enough to fix almost any mistake. We had a procedure for if we completely lost situational awareness and were afraid of hitting the ground or any obstacle, called the Terrain Avoidance Pull Up. Roll to the nearest horizon. Max Gs to 45 degrees nose up. Zone 5. Do it, and you'd clear Everest and anything shorter, and then go figure out where the 400' antenna is.

And finally, ejection seats. Sure, sucks if you have to use them, but they beat augering in, and I don't own the jet, anyway. I loved my seat, so much. Flying without it gives up a big security blanket.

Any pilot who has soloed a propeller could just learn the new bigger patterns and immediately, masterfully take off, fly, and land a Hornet. It is so easy that I, a RIO, did it on my first try. (Well, not take off or actually land; my pilot wasn't an idiot to let somebody he just met potentially put us in a ditch, but he let me bring it into the break and through the 90 before he took her back).

Sent from my phone using Tapatalk