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These days, assuming the tanker crew hadn't already called bingo 10K high and left country, would never even get close to the border for fear of getting instantly Q3d by Joe Biden himself (even the boom who was thoughtfully making pizza at the time) for encroaching upon the same "allied" airspace that they were just legally transiting through a few hours ago. If the tanker could manage to coordinate through Wizard with people thousands of miles away to forgo the important mission of refueling Wizard, they might get cleared to take the blatantly more important tasking, assuming they didn't have to consolidate from a 135 that would otherwise have to dump fuel to land. For the joinup, the tanker pilots would be eyes inside dealing with some random system fault, thus unknowingly starting a low-SA turn into the fighter at 6 miles, not helped by the fighter strangling his squawk and yardstick to keep that very thing from happening. As the fighter lag-rolls into the contact position, the boom is still going through his checklist and the engineer is using spaghetti charts to calculate what speeds they can fly and how much gas they can give. Which sucks because they've both been asleep for the past hour with nothing to do. The fighter would call nosecoldswitchessafetailnumber6900003432201 and promptly fire off a flare while trying to plug himself. Yes, that actually happened a week ago. The fighter pilot would spend the rest of the RTB complaining about the sun being in his eyes and the tanker pilots would fix the problem (maybe on purpose) by flying through clouds and moderate-high turbulence. Everybody's and fighter aft-disconnects himself and leaves without saying a word. The tanker crew goes home and never debriefs anything while the fighter pilot spends six hours recreating the entire event from memory on a whiteboard. Three years later all the pilots are reunited at Creech while the boom and engineer have logged 12 more deployments. PA ignores the entire story, instead focusing on the Wing CC giving an award to some guy that installs air conditioners. Also actually happened a week ago. I think I got it all. Also, this excerpt is the epitome of awesome: Olds, who had been chasing the first MiG, gave up a chance for a kill to run off the three that were after Catton's plane. "Here he came, lobbing missiles over my head at the MiGs," Catton said. The MiGs high-tailed it, with Olds in pursuit. Robin Olds chasing three MiGs off into the sunset. That guy was a comic book superhero.

Don't think of it as canceling Mustache March, think of it as postponing the entire month. Until the ORI is over, just continue to sign everything off as February - Wednesday will be Feb 30th, Friday will be the 32nd... But Sir, if it was March, I'd have a mustache. Sort of like 'out-shoeing' the shoe. Was asked by a couple of people what Mustache March was, so based on some of what I've learned here, and read in a couple of books, I pounded this out on the keyboard today: "Mustache March and the Legendary Robin Olds" I'm not a writer, by any stretch, but maybe it will at least partially answer, "Hey, why do all of those guys have mustaches all of a sudden?" (Any comments, additions and/or corrections are welcome...)