instapinch.com

No, I’m not headed over to the dark side on you guys, but at the risk of mixing metaphors,  the Hornet is our horse right now and we gots to ride her - and if you have a camera and want to take pics of navy jets around Oceana, you gots to take pics of the F-18s.  As usual, double clicks on the images gives you the fullsize.

The approach end of runway 23 has a great view of the  aircraft as they come in on short final - down at the bottom of this Google Earth screen capture:

Whcih can lead to a few nice shots of…what else…Hornets as they come in to land.

F-18F Rhino, the two-seat Hornet with a weapons system officer in the back - the “follow-on”, so to speak, to the Tomcat.

For the environmentally-minded, no birds were harmed in the taking of this photo.

You can really see the difference in size of the leading-edge of the wing between the F-18E Super Hornet (above) and a standard F-18C (below).

I was using a 70-300 zoom at a fairly high shutter speed optimized for movign objects.  For most of the shots I would back off the zoom as the aircraft passed over, but on these two I left the zoom in.  Pretty neat pics.

Until next time…I remain….

I’m down here at Oceana Naval Air Station for a week on navy duty and I swung by the hangars to see the VERY,VERY,VERY last Tomcat as it is prepped for delivery to the Tobyanna Army Depot in Tobyanna, PA.

Since there’s no suitable airfield near the depot to deliver the airframe in a  C-5 (as was done with Christine) and the cost would be rather impressive, the powers-that-be decided to truck the Tom up in the bed of a custom-made trailer - AFTER removing its various and sundry piece parts:

Imagine being stuck behind THIS.

You think you know Tomcats?  What’s wrong with this picture - aside from the horiz stab and vertical stab not being there?  First prize is an all-expense paid ticket to Denver for the Democratic Convention.  Second prize is TWO all-expense paid tickets.

There is also a squadron of French Rafael fighters visiting.  That is one pretty airplane:

If you zoom in on the nose gear, you’ll recognize the exact same launch bar that our aircraft use.  That’s because the launch and arresting gear system on the French aircraft carrier Charles de DeGaulle is made by our boys from Lakehurst - the Navy’s Aircraft Launch and Recovery folks.   We wrote about a visit to the USS Enterprise by a Rafael back on the Instapinch here.

I caught one of them returning to the base in the break - not much of a picture, but perhaps I can catch one in the landing pattern this week.

I bet the Hornet boys are having a blast fighting these guys, which I’m sure is happening.  They (the French) wouldn’t come all the way over here and not engage in some dissimilar air combat.   We used to love to fight different aircraft - its the name of the game, the nature of our business.  As far as the Tomcat went, the only time we would ever be expected to fight against our own-type aircraft was if we were to engage the Iranians, so fighting different aircraft and different platforms was always super cool.   You needed to do that, as well, to learn the different capabilities - turn rates, speeds, handling qualities, etc - of other aircraft.  It all went into your cranial library or your ACM tool kit.  You’d learn not to get into a slow fight (”knife fight in a phone booth”) with a high wing-loaded aircraft that turned well at slow speed, and you learned not to get into a high altitude fight with a huge thrust-to-weight monster like the F-15 (keep him low where the F-14’s big wings could bite into the air better and give you your best turning rate - not that it would necessarily help, mind you, but you wanted to give yourself the best chances possible) - things like that.

Alas….I miss that.

Now comes the latest Moonbat website I need to highlight, a tasty little number called “Pilots for 9/11 Truth” - or as we call in on the bright side of the moon, “PffT”.

PffT is a complilation of the efforts of one Rob Balsamo, a self-described “airline” pilot and grand doubter of the  events of 9/11 as they came to pass, not to mention one of the dumbest SOBs I have seen on the Net.

“PffT’s” list of members is a veritable cornucopuia of 9/11 moronic moonbattery - a “Who’s Who in the Moonbat Zoo”.  Balsamo likes to parrot the claim that his “numbers” are growing constantly, as this tidbit in an email to me states:

Keep an eye on the lists. They grow regularly. Im (sic) sure eventually we’ll get someone you know.  We’re still in our infancy.

_________________________________________

That’s the wrong end of the horse when talking about Balsamo

Infancy with regards to mental capabilities is true, at least.   As far as there being “someone” I know signing up, I doubt that very seriously. Everyone with whom I ran (or flew) with in the Navy or military aviation world operates on the side of sane, rational, cogent thought, not the absolute idiocy that makes up the PffT crowd.

His current list of “members” does have some names that one might recognize, if you have been involved with trying to unscrew the football bat/soup sandwich that is the “Truth” movement.

You have Robert Bowman, a retired AF colonel who is pretty much a laughing stock in every area he enters, with the top of the list his political aspirations, which since 2000 has included President (2000 and 2004) and congress (2006), all of which he failed miserably in and either didn’t even come *close* any nomination or was spanked severely in the election.

You have Captain Russ Wittenberg (ret), a retired airline pilot with a butt-load of hours (I don’t need to add that a “butt-load” of hours means absolutely nothing in the big scheme of things). His statement “I don’t believe it’s possible for… a so-called terrorist to train on a 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding it’s design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns,.. pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G’s… I couldn’t do it and I’m absolutely positive they couldn’t do it.” should strike fear into the hearts of air-travel people of today, if the pilots flying these aircraft can’t operate an aircraft. That, plus the ignorance of someone with supposedly such experience believing that anyone…ANYONE …can’t vertically navigate an aircraft (pull the yoke back, houses get smaller!) or laterally navigate an aircraft (turn yoke right, airplane goes right!).

You have Ralph “Rotten” Kolstad, who claims F-14 pilot experience and who flew for the airlines. You know, you live or die on your reputation in the military. It follows you everywhere, and if anyone cares about what this idiot’s reputation is within the F-14 community, check out the Tomcat Sunset board thread on him.

That is all the names I recognize on the “pilots” list.  The remaining names are the smattering of usual idiotic morons who  have made a nice living off the backs of the 9/11 dead - the “researchers” Aldo Marquis, Craig Ranke/Lyte Trip/Whatever his name is and Domenick DiMaggio (they gave themselves the title “reserachers”.  They are by no stretch of anyone’s imagination any sort of legitimate “researchers”.).  They really don’t do much else other than make trips to DC and videotape themselves talking to “witnesses”.  They then post a twisted, convoluted and lexiconically gerrymandered version of said interview up on the web and breathlessly state “This is going to blow this wide open!“) or the granddaddys of the 9/11 “Bush Did It!!” crowd, David Ray Griffen and Dr Steven Jones (Mr. Thermite/thermate).

I’d say go have a look at this PffT site, but you can read the forum posts only if you sign in.  I signed in a month or so ago and within a few days was suspended - apparently ol’ Rob didn’t like what I had to say.  Since then, he has extended my suspension through 2010!  I guess he *really* doesn’t like what I have to say!

OH…and don’t forget, folks!  YOU can pick up your VERY OWN  “PffT”  sporty Woman’s cap-sleeve TEE SHIRT, with the “PffT” logo manfully emblazoned on the front,  for ONLY $20.99!  That’s right, for ONLY $20.99!  Why not pick up one for that special little co-pilot in your life!  3,000 dead on Sept 11 is a small price to pay for us to scam money off you!

Yo Rob!  Pay attention to the sign!

You SOB.

Thanks, Laur!  That’s exactlty what it is - an “eyed click beetle”!  AND, we also know where he was headed now - to the Ugly Bug Ball!

The grill was making some chicken and brats into what would eventually become a sumptuous holiday repast, when Lesa says “What the hell is THAT!” and points down to this:

(If’n you aren’t all girlie-like and squeamish, double-click on them for bigger pics!)

Some kind of beetle, but I have never seen anything like it before.  Those big ol’ fake eyes on its whatever are wild. The aforenoted “whatever“, for your information,  is entomology techno-speak for “that big ol’ honking place that looks like a head but isn’t because a bug has a teency-little head with aentenna coming out of it and I’ve seen enough National Geographic specials on bugs to know they like to *fool* potential chow hounds by making themselves  seem bigger and scarier than they are, hence the big o’l honking fake head and eyes.”

Anyone have any idea what the heck that thing was/is?  And if I should be concerned about turning into a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon?

July 4th, 2008

For the Mrs Pinch and the Pinchettes, we want to wish all of you (especially all of you at DU and RI and LC and PI!) a wonderful and safe 4th of July!

Time for a little George Will:

“Most of us, most of the time, live in blissful ignorance of what a small elite, heroic group of Americans are doing for us night and day. As we speak, all over the globe, American sailors and submariners and aviators are doing something very dangerous. People say, ‘Well, it can’t be too dangerous because there are no wrecks.’ But the reason we don’t have more accidents is that these are superb professionals; the fact that they master the dangers does not mean that dangers aren’t real.

Right now, somewhere around the world, young men and women are landing high-performance jet aircraft on the pitching decks of aircraft carriers–at night! You can’t pay people to do that; they do it out of love of country, of adventure, of the challenge. We all benefit from it, and the very fact that we don’t have to think about it tells you how superbly they are doing their job–living on the edge of danger so the rest of us need not think about, let alone experience danger.”

When we’re out b-b-q’ing or swimming or watching baseball games or just enjoying the weekend, let’s not forget the soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines and coast guardsmen and women who are standing watch for us.

God bless this great and wonderful country of ours.

A month or so ago I was fortunate to be the blog radio guest of Crushing Chris Carter, who hosts his show on his web site, Unto the Breech.

The link to the interview is below, if anyone is interested.

As I tell everyone who might listen to this stuff, prepare to be underwhelmed!

Radio link

From the New York Times a while ago.  Maintaining these great ships as museums take a (no pun intended) a boat load of cash.  Its one of the reasons I doubt the USS John F Kennedy will ever become a museum.  Maintaining these WW2-sized carriers is tough enough - imagine the up-keep on a super-carrier.

Racing the Clock to Bring Back the Intrepid

By PATRICK McGEEHAN

Published: May 21, 2008

Correction Appended

Getting stuck in the mud on its first attempt to leave Manhattan was not the last or the least of the troubles that the aircraft carrier Intrepid has encountered in the past 18 months.

Skip to next paragraph

 Enlarge This Image

Damon Winter/The New York Times

The Intrepid houses a museum that was at risk of going out of business last year, as the costs of overhauling the carrier and rebuilding its home pier rose past $100 million, almost double the original estimate. More Photos »

 Multimedia

Slide Show

A High-Priced Voyage Home

The military museum the ship houses was at risk of going out of business last year, as the costs of overhauling the carrier and rebuilding its home pier spiraled past $100 million, almost double the original estimate, said Bill White, president of the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. To keep the work going and to stay on schedule to reopen this fall, the museum’s directors borrowed against the museum’s $15 million endowment, a move they had promised never to make, Mr. White said.

“This museum and this whole project was in danger of shutting down,” Mr. White said. “If we hadn’t taken this drastic measure to use the endowment, which I consider sacred, for this purpose, there would be no more Intrepid — unless someone was willing to write a check for 15, 20 million bucks.”

Now, with an electronic timer on a pier on the West Side counting down the days to the Intrepid’s return, museum officials are still pleading for additional public and private financing to complete the renovations on time. On the schedule that the museum set, the ship is due to be towed back from Staten Island on Oct. 2 — 134 days from Tuesday — and to have its official reopening on Veterans Day, Nov. 11.

For most of the past year, the 900-foot-long carrier has been the only warship moored at the Homeport on the north shore of Staten Island. But this week, it will have company when some active military ships sail in for Fleet Week, an event that revolved around the Intrepid until last year.

To bring the ship back in style, Mr. White has pressed the trustees of the foundation that runs the museum and other supporters to pitch in $10 million. He also has lobbied elected officials, including the city’s five borough presidents and Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, to add as much as $10 million to the $25 million they already had promised to the Intrepid project.

But he has failed to persuade Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to let the museum sell naming rights to the pier, now known simply as Pier 86, to a corporation, said John Gallagher, a spokesman for the mayor. The mayor is considering allowing the sale of sponsorship of the Intrepid’s visitor center, which sits at the edge of the pier, Mr. Gallagher said.

With the city budget being squeezed, city officials have not decided how much, if any, additional money they will provide.

“We are aware that the Intrepid has been facing financial challenges and that the renovation expenses are exceeding their original budget,” said Anthony Hogrebe, a spokesman for the Council. He added that the Council expected the ship to float back on time, with or without additional public money.

Moving the Intrepid became synonymous with futility in November 2006 when, with a clutch of elected officials standing by, a team of tugboats failed to budge the carrier from its mooring. City officials required the removal so that the pier could be rebuilt. After the Navy dredged out more of the muck, tugs towed the ship away for the first time in 25 years.

To prevent a repeat of that initial embarrassment, the Army Corps of Engineers plans to dig an extra-wide slot in the river bottom before the return, Mr. White said. In all, the cost of moving the ship out and back will total about $19 million, four times the original estimate, he said.

The main improvements to the ship’s exterior were completed a year ago, when it spent a few weeks in dry dock in Bayonne, N.J., en route to the Homeport. Workers at Bayonne Dry Dock and Repair patched up parts of the hull and repainted the entire ship.

But when the time came for the dry dock operator to collect nearly $5 million for its work, the city funds were not yet available. Officials of the Hudson River Park Trust, the state authority that is the Intrepid’s landlord and manages payments to the contractors, asked the museum to come up with some other money to tide the company over.

Mr. White said he scraped together $100,000 and hand-delivered a check to Bayonne. The trust later paid off the debt and repaid the Intrepid’s $100,000, according to Noreen Doyle, a vice president of the trust. Ms. Doyle said the tight schedule set by the Intrepid’s managers necessitated such unusual measures.

__________________________

To read the whole article, you probably have to sign up to the NYT’s free service.

In the “just finished reading” category comes Touching History by Lynn Spencer. The word “riveting” is overused at times when talking about things, but that is how I found this book.

It is the story of the skies over America on Sept 11, 2001. Spencer, an airline pilot for Continental Express, spent much of the last few years interviewing the principals in this infamous day, from air traffic controllers in Boston and Washington and Indianapolis to military controllers at the Fleet Area Surveillance Facility, Virginia Capes (FASFAC VACAPES, also known as Giantkiller, the controllers I talked to on nearly every F-14 hop out of Oceana), to the pilots themselves in 747 aircraft over the Pacific enroute to an unknown-to-them-at-the-time closed US airspace or in F-16 and F-15 fighters striving to make sense of this crazy day.

Spencer is an aviator and as such, the book is easily digested by those with “lifties” in their blood (lifties, for the uninitiated, are the little critters that run around the wing of an aircraft and make it fly).   At the same time, however, those unfamiliar with the vernacular and the language of the sky will take very readily to this book since Spencer is meticulous at spelling out those pesky acronyms and translating the sometimes archaic and mystifying code spoken by those who fly.

This book shines a bright and needed light on the confusion of that day, from the controllers who can’t understand what is happening to the aircraft under their control to the fighter pilots, launched on an alert but are vectored over the ocean because…how do you define a “mission” for something that has never, ever, ever happened before - as evidenced by this snippet of the conversation between lead Otis Air National Guard Base alert F-15 pilot Lt Col Tim “Duff” Duffy and the Weapons controller “Huntress” at NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector):

Okay, people are dying now, Duff thinks as he gapes at the smoke spewing from the burning towers. He instantly shifts into a combat mind-set.

“Huntress, Panta 4-5, say mission!” he impatiently calls to the Weapons controller at NEADS. “What do you want me to do next? What do you need from me right this second?”

“Uhhhhhhhhh….,” comes the hesitant response. The controller, staring up at the shocking CNN coverage, has no idea what to tell the fighters.

With no clear mission and no target information, Duff knows he has few options available. It would hardly be helpful or prudent to simply rocket into the crowded skies over Manhattan. he would be putting other aircraft in jeopardy. And what would he do? He has no authorization, just who is the enemy?

“Okay, tell you what,” he says, remaining calm and pulling his F-15 out of afterburner, bringing its speed down from supersonic, “we have Whiskey 105 reserved this morning,” referring to a military airspace training area over the Atlantic just south of Long Island. “How about we just jump in there and I’ll stay at the northwest corner so that we’re protected from airliners and out of your way. If you need us, we’re just 40 miles from the city.”

“Yeah, okay,” the bewildered Weapons controller responds, not knowing what else to tell them. “Go do that.”

Any sense of invincibility that the fighter pilots felt has turned to roiling feelings of anger, horrible frustration, and impotence. They glare at the smoke in the distance over Lower Manhattan, ready and willing but unable to do anything about it. His heart pounding, Duff takes a deep breath and reluctantly turns his F-15 away from the city.

Those of you who are familiar with the Instapinch know I have an ongoing, running gun battle going on with some elements of the Moonbat Left, those lunatic moronic idiots who insist 9/11 was an “inside job” or that things like a military stand-down order was issued to keep the military from “doing its job” on that day.  This book dispels those crazy notions - in fact it doesn’t just dispel them, it shatters them into a million minute pieces that can be crunched under the heel of a flight boot.

Lynn Spencer has done us all a wonderful duty here - she has captured the history of that day in a superb book, a history that we cannot and should not forget.

The book is available pretty much everywhere now.  I picked up my copy from the local Borders, but you can order it online at Barnes and Noble, Simon and Schuster,  and Amazon, among other book stores.

A nice bio of Lynn can be found here.  Not your typical airline pilot, but she writes one hell of a book.

Hey!  Can someone call my boss and tell him I’m getting behind in my blogging?  You know… get him to cut me some slack or something?

Had another couple of days down in Norfolk playing Force Protection Exercise guy.  This time it was the night-shift, from 1800 till 0600.  Got alot done, but when you get bored during the shift you can sneak out at various times to get some nice pics - click on them for larger images:

What a 5-sec timed exposure looks like of a beautiful moon in the sky at around 3am.

Moonset, USS Harry S Truman

Sunset, USS Theodore Roosevelt

Topside watch, flight deck, USS Theodore Roosevelt, sunset

VRC-40 Rawhide COD heading out to a carrier out in the OP area.  The trail of condensation from the tips of the props is pretty cool.

Keep the missing aviator in your prayers.

I think nearly everyone who has flown these missions at Fallon has their own near-miss story. I don’t know what this particular mission was - whether it was a 1 versus 1 or one of the huge gaggle strikes where dozens of aircraft are involved - but it is a factor of the business.

I was flying once with Dave Hicks (my pilot during our 10-g event) out there and it was one of those big alpha strike missions. We’re raging in from the north on a MiG sweep, started mixing it up with a couple of A-4 Skyhaws, and Doc is hauling the nose around when he yells “F***!!!!” and yanks the stick back in the other direction. I was doing my usual RIO business, checking our six and watching one or two of the other aircraft in our immediate area. I didn’t see what Doc saw, but apparently what he DID see was the planform of a Skyhawk that filled his windscreen and getting closer by the nanosecond.

This was one of those moments when I didn’t know enough to be scared, and when we got back on the ground we were looking forward to looking at the pilot’s head’s up display tape to watch the thing. When we opened up the fuselage bay where the tape machine was, though, the tape was all wound around the recording head. Go figure.

We did get a good idea what it looked like, though, when we ended up for the debrief over at the TACTS (Tactical Air Combat Training System) building. We got the replay to stop at that moment, and looked at this A-4 about hundred feet or two in front of us heading nose high, appearing without any warning, with us pulling around and boresighting him for a few seconds.

Navy Jets Collide in Northern Nevada; 1 Pilot Missing

Friday , June 13, 2008

FALLON, Nev. — A pilot was missing after two U.S. Navy jets flying a routine training mission collided Friday over northern Nevada’s high desert about 50 miles east of the Fallon Naval Air Station.Two pilots safely ejected from an F-5 Tiger and were rescued, but the pilot of an F/A-18C Hornet was missing, said Zip Upham, public affairs officer for the base.

The two aircraft collided about noon Friday near the town of Middlegate, some 110 miles east of Reno, Upham said.

The cause of the crash was under investigation, he said.

The pilots in the two-seater F-5 Tiger ejected and were picked up by a helicopter crew from the Fallon Naval Air Station. The helicopter arrived on the crash scene at 12:25 p.m. Those pilots were being transported back to the air base, Upham said.

“The location and status of the F/A pilot remains unknown,” he said in a statement.

No other information was immediately available.

Naval Air Station, Fallon, about 60 miles east of Reno, is home to the Navy’s elite Strike and Air Warfare Center. The center was formed in 1996 with the consolidation of the Navy fighter Weapons School known as “Top Gun” and the Carrier Airborne Early Warning Weapons School, or “Top Dome.”