Scudrunners

That's pretty cool. I can't figure out what goes past the camera towards his foot after the tail hook catches the cable. Possibly a snack wrapper?

From the horses mouth:
''The item that flew forward was a divert card to plan for a fuel divert in case we weren't able to get the jet aboard''
Got to love the throttle movement trying to land on a moving carrier in the middle of a storm
Brass balls

Holy shit. So much for a "stabilized approach"!!

Are there any pilots in the canadian force that are carrier qualified with the f18, I support our units are not equipped for carrier ops as well.

I suspect only if they've done an exchange tour with the USN (as opposed to the
USAF or RAF or RAAF). There might be one or two. There might not be.

You need to be real good friends with someone who has a large boat.



Even bigger than that one.

As mentioned above, there are a lot of cross contamination of different services. It’s done a fair amount, as you can learn a lot by watching others and how they employee the asset. There are probably a dozen or so CF dudes here in the US with a Navy or Marines as we speak.

There is a big difference between flying the aircraft, and employing in a combat role. I did a course with a former Thunderbird pilot. He was traditionally an A-10 guy who got picked up with the team. He wasn’t qualified beyond just wiggling the stick which is a small part of the overall picture as a combat aviator.


Also, Army pilots are better than Navy pilots , who are better than Air Force pilots.

In the 1960's the USAF wanted dear old dad to do an exchange tour in Vietnam - they
were really short of experienced pilots. He shoulda gone, even if TC thinks he's a
shitty pilot.

When Robin Olds did an exchange tour with the RAF, they gave him a squadron.

Things were different back then.

Hey, did TC Inspectors do a lot of missions in RP6? I've flown with guys with
"100 missions over north Vietnam" patches. Never saw one on a TC Inspector.

I have been working through a cpl of these "joint" adventures in the arctic. Yellowknife and Iqaluit, that was back after they had thrown millions possibly billion at the advanced deployment centres. Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet and Yellowknife and I think Inuvik. The only action these sites saw were a couple of joint deployments back in the 90's. These drive through hanger facilities subsequently turned into storage areas and in the case of Yellowknife, personal storage (boats, skidos and ATVs for the local members). The shit did hit the fan over that one.

Facilities like these seem to suffer from jet lag, no pun intended, and when the ideas are hatched they are outdated by implementation.

It seems that these remote and fly your support junk in falls under snafu and murph's law. They always left twisted metal and dummy bombs behind. It was usually a mix of canadian f-18's and USAF F-15's Why is that? I can only imagine the "growing" pains in an actual deployment.

This brings us to the Dewline. Initially decommissioned every second site because of beyond curvature of the earth radar and then having to add sites back because of cruise missiles. The military presence in the arctic was huge. Not many JQ public living a sheltered life in the south had any idea. Northern Greenland, all I can say is "holy crap" and then longyearbyen, with the Russians being right there.

I know I was on film and file with the KGB. The americans were doing sea bottom surveys and sub listening between there and the pole. We were civilian contractors supporting a so called university project, hauling 2 camps to 86N on the ice with a hawker. Funny thing is that all the support staff were submariners and subs were always popping up through the ice. The group had so much computer equipment that they had to sign an agreement not to sell or leave any of the hardware behind before the Norwegians would release the cargo.

Thule was originally set up for 20,000 people - damn and they built a reactor in the ice cap. Cold war, what a time in history. Sorry for the drift -- haha

Just a little foot note to the above.

When we left Longyear we were presented with some swag. One item was an atlas of the artic/antarctic, yup published by the CIA --