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Plane guard duty isn’t very glamorous.  Steaming back behind the carrier for whatever time you need to be there, waiting to be called into action in case there is a ditching or an ejection around the ship isn’t much fun, but is a requirement sometimes and as such needs to be a graded evolution for the small boys in company.

Also, its not just a matter of calling up some ship and telling they have plane guard duty that day/evening/night.   What are the tactical requirements that are present?  Do you need a tomahawk shooter available or is there an ASW (submarine warfare) requirement?  Some ships are better suited for these roles than others, and you don’t want to assign plane guard duty to your primary ASW ship when there is a sub threat around and your ASW platform can’t be stuck around the carrier.

Why would you need a ship for plane guard? During our fly-days, the sun would set at around 7:30 pm and the  moon would not come up until 3:00 am or so, so there was close to zero illumination during the flight hours at night, making the job of the plane-guard helo more challenging (maintaining a static hover in a rescue-situation with no visible horizon - - disclaimer: I’m no helo guy so am just guessing on that part being more challenging).  Having a cruiser or destroyer in plane-guard station behind the ship provided an extra level of safety, mitigating some of the risk that exists.

HST, C2X, June 2009

The next pano/stitched-together shot is this one, taken shortly after we left Norfolk.  I love how the sea is so calm that the reflections of the clouds can be seen.

Full sized image here.

SJBill, in the comments for the FOD walkdown post, mentioned a half dozen or so white fishing boats that can be seen in the large image of this one.   There was some sort of fishing contest going on, I think, in the waters off the Outer Banks.  I’ve seen them out there before - we’ve sailed amongst them and flown over them.  When we got down to the JAX OPAREA, nary a boat to be seen aside from one shrimper one day.  Never saw any contrails, either, meaning we were away from the overwater jet routes headed to various tropical climes.

Yep, Pinchette #1 hits the ol’ 21 today.

Can we say “Over-The-Hill”????

Yo, Pook! Lesa and I are very proud of you!

Where *did* those curls go?

In New York City, 1992

I’m at work now so don’t have access to the *realy* good and juicy pics, so those are forthcoming!

In the meantime Kate,  enjoy your day and I love you very much

Update:  I’ve always been a bit reluctant (not that it has stopped me, though!) to post the whole big entire ginormous image of a honkin’ big picture.  The two comments below kind of reminded me of that concern.  I am aware there are some folks out there (like the Old Man) who exist on somewhat of a restricted bandwidth diet.  SO, I’m going to post the BIG ones to my Flickr account and just post a reasonably sized image here, with the link to the larger one image.  SO, the FOD Walkdown image has been resized here and the original is over at Flickr.

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One of the most enduring announcements on the ship is this:

“Now all personnel not on watch are invited to the flight deck for FOD Walkdown”

Every fly day the flight deck is assaulted by hundreds of eyeballs as they look for those little pieces of trash - bolts, wires, nuts, screws, plastic, rubber, whatever, called “FOD” for “foreign objects and debris” - that can be sucked into an intake and render a 3 or 4 million dollar engine junk in a few seconds.  There is usually a break between day and night time operations, so a FOD walkdown is done just prior to evening/night operations, as well.  The same occurs on the hangar bay as well, since aircraft are sometimes cranked up down there for low-power turns and such and a small bolt or screw could get lodged in the tread of a tire and transferred to the flight deck when the aircraft is moved there for operations.

You usually get a good turnout for these things.  Unless its raining. Or cold.  Then you have to haul out the cattle prods to get some folks up there.  Itis usually a good time for those who’s lot in life is to toil below decks, never seeing the sun unless there is a reason for them to go topside.

This particular FOD walkdown occurred after we pulled out and before flight ops began, hence no aircraft on board.  Carrier Quals (CQ) for the airwing started shortly after this evolution.

A couple of catapult officers in yellow are taking a look at the hook-up end of catapult one and a few green shirts are on the right, taking a look at something on the angle.  The rest are eyes down (for the most part), looking for those elusive pieces of FOD.

I give you the first of a handful of Profound Pinch PanoPics! As usual, double click for the full detail.  For the full sized image in all its 4.5 acre flight deck glory, head over to my Flickr page.

HST, 9 June, 2009

For the record and for entry into the “insignificant numbers” file, I ended up with a little over 4,600 pics totaling 19 gig of data.

Don’t get all wide eyed and gaping-mouth now.  A lot of those images were multiple exposures of the same subject as I tried out different settings and exposures and locations and such.  That lightning shot on day 1 was only one of about  130 images of that thunderstorm where only 3 yielded anything worthwhile. The other two were these:

The shot I think two of the best, the last sunrise shot from the stern and the shot taken from the starboard catwalk (in the post just before this one) was one of about 60 or so that I took that morning, so the photos that came out were the direct result of having a half dozen photo memory cards and a good camera that had a decent multiple-image drive capability.

I’ll be working my way through the rest, looking for any of note.  In the meantime, here is the latest in shipboard fashion, as modeled by a former naval flight officer, current naval reservist and all-around (at least semi) adequate guy:

As you can tell, shipboard fashions have not changed all that much.

More later…

Only a silly photo-fool like me would get up, on his last day, when he didn’t have to show up for the flight off the ship until noon, at 5:45 am to get some shots of his last sunrise at sea.  I’m glad I did.

From the fantail.

A few minutes later I moved up to the starboard catwalk, forward of the island.   T’was a perfect good-morning sendoff for this old sailor.

The sea was about as calm and as still as I have ever seen it.

More tomorrow morning.  Suffice it to say I think I have more than a few pics to post for a while.  I’ll tally up the images I took over the past 3 weeks - just out of curiosity’s sake.  The last photo card I downloaded, though, covered a couple of days and had 503 images on it.

Ruminations on this last trip to sea will be forthcoming, as well.

In Jacksonville.  We’re headed out to a Hooters for some chow.  More later when I get back

A few more for your general and collective viewing pleasure.

These first two are from the starboard catwalk during a sunset launch yesterday. 

The left turn indicates this was a waist catapult launch.  You always turn left after a case-1 (daytime)  launch from the waist catapults and you turn out right on a bow catapult launch.  These are called “clearing turns”.  After the initial clearing turn you turn back to the ship’s heading, climb to an assigned altitude and at a certain distance from the ship you can turn to arc around to your mission heading or wherever you need to go first (tanking, rendezvous point, etc).  This whole process was designed, I suppose, so that if you went in the drink right after launch the ship wouldn’t drive over you - which is always a distinct possibility and has indeed happened.

Taken from the fantail, the location of the “Spud Locker” of old.  This area used to be closed off during recovery operations in case someone comes in too low, but it was wide open and the stern watches turned nary an eye when I wandered back there.

A couple of HS-7 Dusty Dog green shirts.  Get used to it.

Can’t wait to get home so I can load up some larger images. 

More later!

I said before, trying to be creative out here and find a shot that is unique is not that easy.  Using the sun is one way to get something.

Plane captain, during recovery.

On the bow, blue shirt (he is - trust me) waits while a F-18 stands by on cat 2 and the Fly 1 director is taxiing another Hornet to the catapult 1 box.

Taken just a tad over 24 hrs ago.  What did YOU do to greet the sun this morning?

I have a few more half-way decent pics to post but the datapipe is somewhat slow these days.  Wanted to get this one out there and will try to get some more up a bit later today.