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God speed crew, beers on me when we meet at the ARCP, ARCT TBD. :beer:

No books yet, that requires work I'm sure. I haven't even gotten to the good stuff - my time as a Special Ops Fighter pilot. That stuff won't be unclass for a long time. Cheers to our fallen bros lately. Him Him. These are starting to get out of order as I finish unfinished stories up. This was a long long time ago. Enjoy. Combat Archer Pickle. Wait. Wait. WTF is wrong with this…. Wooooossshhhhhh. The AIM 9/M screams off the rail of my Viper with a thunderous roar. I wasn’t expecting to actually be able to hear the missile above the growl of my Pratt screeching along at 9/10ths the speed of sound, but off it went in a flurry of hate, drowning out the wind blast on my bubble canopy. Walking into the 53rd WEG, I knew this was going to be an excellent TDY. Parked right at the front door was a shiny new Porsche in the commander’s spot. I detoured slightly from the sidewalk and put a squadron sticker in the middle of the back window. Surely he wouldn’t mind. The Weapons Evaluation Group was established to test the Air to Air and Air to Ground weapons systems of the USAF and Navy. Specifically, WSEP, the Weapons System Evaluation Program, runs Combat Archer out of Tyndall AFB, Florida. This 2 week TDY evaluates the ability of a unit to deploy troops, aircraft and weapons to a forward location and then fire those weapons at aerial targets. It is staffed with some of the smartest 10 pound brains in the service and they evaluate every part of the process, from the way the airmen attach the fins of the missile, to the parameters the pilot fires the missile, the way the jet sends information to it and ultimately how it performs. It is also a way to get the pilot to experience actually firing, so when it happens in combat there is no first time anxiety. I don’t know what psychiatrist came up with that idea, but I’ll buy him a round for it. That is, quite possibly the most brilliant idea ever! It would be better to unload an entire jet on 5 different targets but beggars can’t be choosers. And yes I did say shrink, most fighter pilots are certifiably insane. Just take one out of the cockpit for a few weeks and see how he acts. We started out with extremely in depth technical briefings with experts in each weapon we carry, how they work, how they have improved over the years and limitations we have to using them. Over the years, the missiles, aircraft and operators have continued to improve. They have found things like chafed wires in the jets all the way to bad chips in the missiles. Without testing, this would cause a failure in combat when we needed it the most. It has also led to remarkable advances in missile technology. Early versions of the AIM 9 were susceptible to countermeasures. The first missiles were tail only heat seekers. Infra red Counter Measures, IRCM, in the form of flares were used to decoy the missiles. With testing and the advancement of computer chip technology, Raytheon developed IRCCM, or Infra Red Counter Counter Measures which can differentiate between a flare and the aircraft dispensing them. This is now fielded in the AIM 9 Mike – an all aspect missile that scoffs at flares. At our lunch break, the zap had been removed from the window of the Porsche. No matter, I’ve got a stack and it deserves another. It is one of the many unsung duties of the LPA. The squadron was going to fire several missiles over the next few weeks and when we weren’t shooting, we were flying LFE’s and dissimilar with the Eagle squadron who was also in town. It was an awesome opportunity to see several of my UPT bros who were now flying the light Grey and pick their nuggets about that world. I had several outstanding sorties with the F-15’s from that trip but those are stories for another time. On Tuesday afternoon, my commander pulled me aside in the bar. “LT. Get over here. Have you been putting Zaps on the commanders car?” Enable the standard Lieutenant defense. It kicks in without delay, a staple learned in basic, refined in UPT and honed to a razors edge in the goulags of survival school. Act Surprised. “Whhaaattt?” By this time, my count was 5. Deny. “I have no idea what you are talking about sir.” Deny. “ What car is that?” “It is the Porsche parked by the front door.” Deny. “I haven’t even noticed it sir.” “The Porsche. You haven’t noticed the nicest effing Porsche in the Pan Handle parked in the spot that says Squadron Commander right by the front door of this fine establishment?” Counter accuse. “Maybe it is the other squadron.” “Don’t give me that S. The other squadron is putting our stickers on the CC’s car? Explain that to me LT.” Reaffirm Counter Accusation “I have no idea why they would sir. Sounds like a pretty complicated prank to me.” “Cut it out. It is a Porsche. And make some popcorn.” That is certainly no rationale. Dollar value certainly isn’t a limiting factor to zapping something. Almost every Eagle out there has one of our squadron stickers tucked neatly away and those jets are easily worth a few mil. The key is putting one obvious sticker on the nose and then hiding the other in an inspection panel that rarely gets opened. We have found Zaps on our birds that were put there years earlier, behind an ejection seat or on the motor. Just because it is a Porsche offers no reprieve but since the boss asked, I’ll consider it. The next morning I walked in with our Squadron Commander and the Porsche had another sticker placed by a different pilot. Someone had my back. And my boss saw that there was no winning to be had. The day after that, a minivan was parked in the Commanders spot. With a sticker on the back that stayed for the remainder of the TDY. Long live the LPA. After a few glorious flights with the Eagles, it was finally time for my shoot. The plan was to take a simultaneous shot with another Viper while in formation and evaluate the missile performance. We had an instructor from the WEG who was briefing our flight and several others. We had two drones to share between 8 aircraft. The briefing was different from a standard fighter briefing, in fact after the shoot with the extra gas, we were slated to fly BFM, Basic Fighter Maneuvers or dogfighting. This normally is an hour long brief in itself, but today it was briefed as “Standard. Any Questions?” “No Sir.” “On to the shoot.” What followed was an extremely technical and procedural briefing on how we were going to shoot these missiles. As fun as it would be to go out and wail away whenever we felt like it, it would be a waste of money to do so. The idea with these shoots is to expand, tighten or validate the firing envelope of the missile. They want us to fire it at extremes, towards the edge of what we think the missile can do. The Engineers come up with boundaries of the firing envelope they want to explore and then run test shots with several missiles to see how they perform. This could be a high off boresight shot from a very slow speed to see if the missile can hack the turn, or a look down shot against a maneuvering bandit. Today, we were going to fire in formation at the edge of the known max range to see how the missile hacked it. The brief continued with the exact parameters of the shoot. The speed and angles of our jets, the drone and the chase ship. The formation we would shoot from and the range, offset and aspect they wanted us to fire. They wanted us on the numbers. Not 20 knots fast, or 50 feet low, but on the numbers. This is easier said than done when running an intercept. It would be a front quartering shot from a slightly lower altitude today. Next we covered all the airspace and the contingencies if the primary airspace was blocked by boats. Each morning, one of two specialized DeHavilland E-9A “Widget” Aircraft sweep the range. The Widget is a high wing, twin turboprop with a side looking radar that can sweep the area for surface vessels. Rumor has it that this is one of the best “Old Guy” jobs in the Air Force. Flying in the morning and fishing in the afternoon off the Florida Panhandle. Not for me yet, but I’ll keep it in mind after my inevitable spinal surgery from flying fighters. Since there will be actual metal falling from the sky today, the area has to be clear. I could just imagine a vacation charter with a 900lb tuna on the line being speared and sunk by a Phantom in flames. “Yeah right man, you had a record setting fish on the line and a Vietnam era jet smashed through your boat setting the tuna free.” Fish story of the century. Lastly, we spent a large segment talking about the comm for the flight. There is a very precise litany of things to say during the shoot. This was given to us on a card of exactly what to say and when to say it. Written out. Exactly. Word for word. Exactly what to say. This assures the area is clear and you are cleared to fire. It also cues in the engineers and telemetry guys to make sure the missile is set and that they are watching for the data to pour in. “ “What ever you do and whatever you screw up – just sound good on the radio! There are a lot of people listening.” Walking out to the jet today was different. I had fired the gun and dropped literally tons of bombs but this was a live missile that would not be there when I landed. It was expensive. Very expensive. There were a lot of people watching and it is the kind of thing that you have to answer for if you screw it up. The AIM-9M is a bad ass missile. It is used by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps and 27 other nations as the go to, short range weapon of choice. Developed in the 1950’s, the Sidewinder is the most successful Air to Air missile on the planet with an estimated 270 kills. That is two hundred and seventy kills. It is lethal, and many an enemy pilot loathed the day it was created. It was so successful initially that they even took the guns off the Phantoms. A disaster at the time, we are now repeating it with several versions of the F-35, but again, I digress. I love the missile, but I will slit your throat if you try to take away my gun. Even on a Viper, I still use it all the time. The heater has 8 fins, four for stability and four for steering. It is capable of right angle corners while at speed under incredible G. This is guided by an Infra Red seeker mounted to a gimbal which sends data to the computer. Preflighting the missile, the seeker droops down, requiring the gyro to spin up and stabilize it. It is cooled by 5000psi of Argon carried in a small bottle internally. The guidance unit is directly behind the seeker and works through black magic and voodoo. All I know is that it is smarter than me. It will take data from the jet’s radar to initially look in the proper direction or I can manually lock it on if my radar is down or being used for something else. Once it leaves the jet, the CPU takes over and all bets are off where it is going to go on it’s own. Behind the guidance unit is a target detector. This will sense when it is close to another aircraft and set the fuse. On many AIM-9’s, this has been obsolete because the missile actually speared the target. In the late 50’s over the Taiwan Straits, a Taiwanese fighter speared a Chinese MiG -17 with an Aim 9 that failed to explode and lodged in it’s fuselage. The MiG and the missile landed safely back home, and in very short order the Rooskies had a nifty missile dubbed the AA-2 Atol. A carbon copy of our sidewinder down to the part numbers, this advanced the communist missile technology by decades. When the target aircraft is within the lethal range of the missile it fires the WDU-17B annular blast fragmentation warhead. This nasty device is made up of spirally wound spring steel encasing 8 pounds of PBXN-3 high explosives and will shred flesh and aluminum and set fuel on fire. Poor souls to be on the receiving end, should have been born American. Today this warhead is replaced by a telemetry package that beams data from the missile back to antenna along the Florida coast broadcasting exactly what the missile is thinking and what it is doing. If the target passes within the lethal radius of the missile, it is as good as a kill and considered as such. This 9 foot long, 188 pound, harbinger of death is propelled by a reduced smoke Mk36 solid propellant rocket capable of hurling this missile several times the speed of sound. Outstanding. Just before we launch, they launch the drone. While they have full scale F-4’s, today we are going after one of the littler fellas. The purpose built BQM-34 Firebee Sub Scale Aerial Target. This is good. I don’t think I would have the heart to shoot at an F-4 – unless it wears the flag of some of our, ¿Cómo se dice, “old friends” who are still flying it. In that case, paint five of them on my jet and I’ll use the fallen pieces as spares to keep ours flying. The Phantom is my favorite plane on the planet and the first jet I ever saw at an airshow at 5 years old. I remember that day like it was yesterday and I attribute my military career entirely to that encounter with those two smoky General Electric J79’s spewing fire and noise over the Florida pan handle. I would eventually get a ride in one but that also, is a story for another time. As sad as it would be to down an F-4, they are soon to be replaced with F-16’s. This is borderline criminal and certainly against the Geneva Convention. Can’t we put the old girls in Arizona to retire like all the other great fighters? Even though unmanned, I know the Viper Drones will still wax the floor with the Eagles that try to shoot them down, sticking them in lag with the operator a hundred miles away snickering at the joystick and computer monitor in front of him. Eventually it will happen though. An Eagle will paint a Viper on the fuselage and Viper pilots across the world will sip a bottle of Weed and toss a nickel in the grass in mourning. Him Him. The Firebee is a little bad ass as well. There are many stories of pilots trying to shoot them down, bleeding off too much energy entering the turn circle and getting stuck looking out the side of the canopy with no firing solution. Worse, there are stories of the little orange BQM actually making angles on them. Only F-15’s of course. When we do manage to shoot them down, the wing owns a couple of ships to fish them out of the ocean, patch them up and send them out again. The “Tyndall Navy.” Now there’s a retirement job. Once airborne, things start to happen fast. The BQM doesn’t have a ton of gas, so we have to move quickly. It could not be a nicer day. Clear blue skies with a patch of cirrus clouds up high to highlight the contrast. A clear blue ocean below with virtually no waves. A great day to go shooting. I triple check the procedures on the lineup card on my knee. Even though I do these arming procedures every time I train, this time it is for real so I check them again. Our lead chase ship starts his litany over the radio to start the drone on it’s run. Turn in, Fights on! Radar Contact. “Viper 3 targeted Bullseye 269/25, 17000 feet.” Our two ship starts to run the intercept from 25 miles out. Aspect starts to break. Looks good. The key is timing the aspect break to arrive at our parameters at the correct distance. We are right on cue. The chase ship gives the clearance to arm the missiles. Arm Hot. I double check the missile is cooled. Good to go. I’m really going to shoot this thing. Adrenaline starts to flow and time slows down. “Chase, Viper Three.” “Go Three.” “Viper three has a problem with the missile” Damn. I look off my right wing at Viper Three. He is abeam me at about 3000 feet and I can see he is nugget down in the cockpit looking at his displays. I look left at the chase ship and he is now looking through me at number three. There is nothing these guys haven’t seen so hopefully he can talk him through it. 15 miles to the drone. We better solve this soon. “Go with your problem.” “I’m not sure. It. It…” “What faults are you showing?” “None. No Faults, I’ve got no symbology for the missile.” Looking through the HUD, there should be a ton of data provided to the pilot. The main thing is a diamond of where the seeker is looking. This diamond, when slaved to the Radar should be squarely over the target. His is missing. Mine is spot on. 10 miles to the drone. “3, download and upload your missile. Quickly.” The Viper reset. Not good. For some reason, every now and then there is a glitch in the Viper matrix and downloading and then uploading fixes the problem 90% of the time 60% of the time. 7 miles. I should have started my comm litany a while ago but they are working the problem. There is no room to interrupt. “2, hold your shot unless 3 starts working.” “2.” Eff. “3, what luck?” “3, no luck.” “Viper flight off dry, switches safe.” “2.” “3.” We are going to have one more shot at this if the drones don’t get shot down first. There are two drones out here and 6 other aircraft shooting at them with all different shots. We enter the bullpen again and try to sort 3’s problem. Orbiting about 20 miles away from the flight, one of the drones is splashed. We learned later that it was an enormous fireball with the missile puncturing the tank. Good on him, bad for us. Somewhere around 20 minutes elapse and I can’t stand it. All geared up, ready to go, and waiting. Tim Tebow on the Jets. So much talent…. I still digress. The good news is that three sorts his missile so we are both good to go. I know he is stoked. Back in the lineup we go. Turn in, fights on! Again. Radar Contact. “Viper 3 targeted Bullseye 273/27, 17000 feet.” Our two ship again starts to run the intercept. Aspect starts to break. Looks like this is going to work out great. “Vipers, Arm Hot.” “2” “3” My missile is cooled and called up as my primary weapon. It has a low growl. Normal for this range. “Hey Buddy, I’m just looking around right now.” the missile is telling me. If it could speak sentences, I imagine it sounds like Towelie from South Park for some reason. “Don’t shoot just yet, patience buddy.” The great thing about the heater is the way it talks to you. It has several different tones to let you know exactly how it is doing. From a low growl to a full on howl, I can tell how good of a solution the missile has just by listening. As we get closer, the missile starts to perk up and the growl gets meaner and louder. “Chase, 3 has the same problem.” You are kidding me! It was working a few minutes ago! “Copy 3. Let’s go through the same procedure we just did and get it working again.” My missile is starting to sound good. It has a good heat signature now and a solid growling tone. We are closing at 1.7 times the speed of sound. Lead and 3 begin to troubleshoot over the radio again but it is not looking good. I’m looking out the left and right side of my jet at each of their jets and say a silent prayer that the good Lord will let us both rain hate on this little Firebee drone. That and the standard Fighter Pilot prayer – Lord, Don’t let me F this up. For another solid minute the radio is packed with communications between the two, back and forth with troubleshooting. This is the time we should be running the standard comm litany on my kneeboard card. “What does the Fault page say?” “The Fault page is clear?” “Any MFL’s?” “3, Negative.” “And still no symbology? “Negative.” My missile is loud now. I uncage the seeker head and it stays firmly planted on the Firebee with no radar assistance. It will easily guide itself now. “Radar Lock?” “Afirm. Target, 272 for 7 miles.” His radar is locked but there is no missile symbol in the HUD. Not good. My missile is screaming. It is locked on and absolutely screaming in my headset above all the other comm. “Did you download and upload?” “Afirm, no change.” “Try a boresight.” This is where you target the missile without the radar cue. “Unable.” “Did you try…..” Woosssshhhhhhhh. Like a freight train, the sidewinder screams off my jet. My skinny wingman doing the Lord’s work. I hit the exact parameters and let it rip. Like a bottle rocket, it corkscrews off the jet violently until it picks up speed and stabilizes, then it makes a hard right turn a few thousand feet in front of 3’s jet to get some cutoff on the drone. I’m glad our formation was good. Awesome. That is freaking awesome. This shot completely took the IP of the chase ship by surprise. In the history of missile shoots, there is probably no one who has screwed up the comm that badly. I hadn’t said a word in 10 minutes. “Fox Fox!” He screams on the radio. This cues all the engineers back on the ground that a missile is in the air. There should have been a half dozen calls prior to this, leading up to a triumphant “Fox 2” when the missile left my jet. We were cleared on the range, cleared to arm and cleared to shoot so it wasn’t unsafe but it was non standard and we live by standards. It has never been done that way before and it probably will never again. I watch the missile make jagged, high G turns as the drone maneuvers and eventually I lose sight. At some point it runs out of steam and falls to the ocean below. To this point, the coolest thing I have seen in the Viper. 3 unfortunately had to bring his missile back home that day. The taxi of shame. The ground crews, Ammo, and everyone else are stoked to see ordinance expended. Bringing a missile home means that something went wrong. It was eventually traced to some corrosion or something on a cannon plug. Bummer, but that is exactly why we do this and that data and the fix will be incorporated fleet wide if it becomes a trend. In the debrief, nearly every pilot from every squadron gets together with beer and popcorn in the afternoon in a theater to watch the shots. The engineers gather all the data and show exactly what the missile is doing and recreate the flight on a slideshow that puts my powerpoint skills to shame. They pair that up with the Heads Up Display tape so you can hear the comm and see the shot from the jet. We watched several shots and cheered the great success of the missile. And then we got to mine. So there it was, for all to see. Massive troubleshooting, and out of nowhere, my missile firing off in the middle of it. “What ever you screw up, just sound good on the Radio. Isn’t that right LT?” Not today. The audience laughed their faces off at my expense. And rightfully so. It was an outstanding shoot and an even better TDY, and somewhere at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is a spent AIM-9 with a squadron sticker proudly attached to the side. Chive on.

Benefit to the C-17, all the tiedown hooks on the floor are rated to 25k. Oh, and the pallet locks are strong, probably a lot stronger than anything in a 747. Speaking of, is the 463L pallet anywhere close to the same dimensions as a regular commercial 747 pallet? 463L measures 108"x88"... It's funny, really your biggest limitation in how many vehicles your plane could carry wasn't so much how to space them in, it's how to get them in and have room between the vehicles to get the proper restraint. Yeah, you can go under a vehicle with the chains provided no more than 50% of the restraint goes to the axles and provided it sits high enough for you to get in there to do what you need, oh and that you have the time to do all this and not have your balls busted about takeoff times...but to have all that go hand in hand is rare. So you end up with wasted space between vehicles where all the chains go. Anyway to me, snap judgment from the 747 payload pics, it just looks like somebody thought more of 'how many of these can we cram in?' than 'hey, how good is our restraint here?'

The doc says she'll be walking again in 5-7 days and the ability to eat solid foods should be a few days after that. All in all, not the worst she's experienced.

Long post, but actually worth the read. Greasy, you should give lessons.

Crew identified...so sad. Godspeed, lady & gents. https://www.khq.com/story/22165013/fairchild-airmen-killed-in-kc-135-crash-identified

I was hoping this nonsense would continue just long enough for the first disillusioned passed-over 1Lt to write a "do not promote me" letter to the board & walk away from his 10 year commitment in six months....

A lot of angst out there for a slow-rolled bonus that is too low and that many won't sign anyway.

Not to steer this into a political discussion, but the current administration is contrary to the majority of *taxpaying* Americans as well.

How would you like to figure applied restraint on those spaghetti balls of straps?

Smart move...a PRF & promotion board for LTs was complete BS. I'll give Welsh credit.

I hope today's mishap reveals a systematic problem that can not be ignored, and results in the grounding of the ENTIRE KC-135 fleet. I know this sounds extreme, but hear me out. Perhaps the grounding of one of the AF's most prevalent aircraft (to include one flown by a LOT of Guard units) will finally highlight that we are LITERALLY flying our airplanes to the point of them falling out of the sky. We need to highlight that our fleet is DECADES past it's designed service life, highlight the botched replacement plan for the KC-135, highlight that even with the current KC-46 replacement plan we will at best replace tails one for three, and we need to highlight that budget cuts combined with no reduction in tasking has made the problem infinitely worse with literally ZERO ability to do anything about it. This is what NEEDS to be done, but I'm sure the Air Force is already desperately trying to find a way to pin this on the pilots to cover up the problems I am discussing, much like they pinned the Alaska F-22 crash on the pilot, despite the aircraft's faulty design.

Anyone else feel an overwhelming urge to punch that dude in the face standing on the vertical stab?

I don't think it does. Just because loads checked good at previous checks does not mean something did not break loose...