Leaderboard

Against a peer adversary, the A-10 stopped being a Day-1 weapon around the time that it was rolling off of the assembly line. We were simply going to accept higher attrition in the Fulda Gap as part of the plan. By the 90's, the Hawg wasn't even a Week-1 weapon. Going into 2020, the Hawg simply won't be in the fight until ground troops cross the line. But there's the rub--we don't roll ground troops under contested airspace. So yes, the A-10 will sit in the chocks until the air is permissible--and it's going to continue to need cover while it does it's job. But the capabilities simply do not translate to those platforms which are being counted on to bring down the air threat, and provide cover moving forward. The F-35 simply won't do under the weather, low vis, escort, rescort, knife-fight close proximity...and the list goes on. To be blunt, the A-10 and it's core TTPs just aren't that far removed from an A-1D over VN. But then again, linear battlefield infantry tactics (at least looking down from the air) haven't either. Leaders have become accustomed to pred feeds and the whispers of the military industrial complex saying "but with this new technology just around the corner, EVERYTHING will be different". My bet is that even in a German Formula 1 team garage, amongst the computers and precision calipers and multimeters, there's still a claw hammer in a drawer somewhere.

Ultimately, it's one big jobs program. That's it and that's all.

Holy Fvck ygbsm....the F-35 was over budget by $4B last year alone. The USAF is like an obese person who takes the pickles off a Big Mac because they are watching calories.

I remembered another one – I went through my log book and realized I totally brain dumped this one. It’s both a shit and puke story, so it’s a twofer. A good deal materializes in an otherwise routine month teaching fledgling Eagle drivers the ropes while stationed at Tyndall. IP cross-country!! Tyndall is having its annual open house/air show over the upcoming weekend. A 4-ship is needed to do a fly-by Sunday morning to kick off the day. Since the field will be closed over the weekend, the 4-ship needs to be elsewhere until needed that Sunday morning. In addition, Randolph AFB needs a flyby Friday afternoon. Tyndall closes Friday for show prep so we have to bug out Thursday afternoon. Our ONLY marching orders: Do the Randolph flyby Friday and make a 1200L TOT for the flyby at Tyndall on Sunday. Easy. The plan: 5-ship (1 air spare for Sunday). 4 – C-models and a D-model. Personal shotguns and golf clubs loaded in bay-5 (behind C-model seats). The jets are clean since we’re in the BFM phase and we decide to stay in the general vicinity of the Southeastern US. We’ll hit Ellington field Thursday night and spend some time on one of the largest sporting clay ranges in the country Friday morning. PM departure to hit the Randolph flyby and spend Friday night at the Auger Inn. Saturday morning on either the Randolph golf course or skeet range (maybe both). Sat PM departure to NAS New Orleans (conveniently close for Sunday flyby). Sunday morning 1100L takeoff for 1200 TOT continuing on to Patrick AFB for Sunday PM bikini contest on the beach. Monday RTB. The somewhat short notice on the whole affair leaves many of the bros without a kitchen pass that weekend and we were unable to fill the pit of the family model. After hearing this, our young, single intel officer (we’ll call him Fred) decides he wants to come along and see what’s so fun about this whole cross-country thing. Since D-models are in high demand at the FTU, Fred’s opportunities to get some time in the pit were few and far between. Even though he does have a few sorties under his belt and he’s never actually barfed in flight to that point, he’s a little concerned about airsickness. So, he grabs a bunch of barf bags, just in case. We load up and depart during the second go Thursday afternoon. We do a little VFR tour of southern Texas and arrive at Ellington that evening. Pacing ourselves that night, we grab some Tex-Mex with plenty of beans and of course several drinks. We spend much of the time advising Fred, who (according to him) is on his ”first real TDY”, to throttle back a bit. It’s going to be a long weekend. The next morning, we spend several hours blasting the shit out of helpless clay pigeons and depart that afternoon for Randolph. Since we don’t have far to go, it is decided that we will drop into Wichita Falls and beat up the pattern on the way to Randolph. The IP leading us is a euro-NATO alumni and thinks the studs will appreciate it. We scoff but get overruled. In order to ensure we have the gas to do the flyby, we skyhook at FL450 up to Sheppard. It’s been a while since his altitude chamber and according to 5-Alpha, Bravo’s digestive system appears to be incompatible with cabin altitudes in the range of FL180. Being a newbie to the single-seat flying world, Fred has done a poor job of shit management and is paying for that oversight dearly. A rapid descent to Sheppard pattern altitude in the Texas summer heat doesn’t help matters. Once the pattern has been suitably beaten there, we climb back up to observe the curvature of the earth on our way to Randolph. At this point, Fred looks and (according to 5A) smells like a giant turd in a flight suit. We get the report that Fred has shat himself over the aux-radio along with a request from Five to “push it up”. The airshow gods must have had sympathy for Fred, because when we arrive ready to do our best T-clone impression for the crowd it’s about 300-1 and the show is cancelled. ILS to a full-stop and when we shut down on the TA ramp, Fred is in full sprint to the Base ops bathroom before the turbines have stopped spinning. As it turns out, it was a minor shit-fart separator failure as opposed to a full up evac. 5-Alpha pulls me aside in base ops and offers me twenty bucks to take the D-model the next day. Fred comes out of the head trailing “eau de-farm animal” and I graciously decline. So, the night is looking up, Fred promises to show up at the club not smelling like a 2-year old and we are beer in hand at the Auger by 1900. Fred is stoked. He’s wearing a (clean) bag in the Auger, two vomit-free sorties under his belt and the whiskey is flowing. Probably as a result of a few hours at altitude and his extreme exuberance over the reality of Friday night in the fast-jet business, Fred overshoots the OBL. We manage to pour him into his Q-room later and decide to let him sleep in while we blast more clay targets the next morning and play a quick 9 before we leave. Fred rallies by departure time but is definitely looking a little rough while we file in base ops. He curls up on one of the couches in a fetal ball and might have had his thumb in his mouth when we woke him up to step. The afternoon flight to New Orleans is very gentlemanly and requires no trips to the ionosphere which is greatly appreciated by Fred. 5-alpha even let him fly for a while and he tried his hand at route formation. Fred would take the jet and immediately start climbing or descending out of formation. The hilarious part was, each time he starts flying, he asks, “Hey, where are those guys going?” The cumulative effects of the weekend so far were starting to have an effect on him, however. He was looking a little green when we landed, but he’s still 0 for 3 on barf bag usage. The marine duty driver gets us to our hotel one block off Bourbon Street and promises he will be there in the morning to pick us up at 0945L for our 1100L takeoff. Keeping in mind, the only reason we are out on this boondoggle is to do the Sunday flyby, we haven’t had to takeoff before noon since we left home station AND we’re in New Orleans on Saturday night, we are all aware of the potential for failure. Everyone promised to set their room alarm clocks while we were sober before we left the hotel that night. We quickly forget our concerns and hit the Big Easy. Fred is a N’awlins virgin and quickly decides he really, really likes hurricanes. Two hours and 6 hurricanes later, Fred is a blithering idiot and his lips look like he’s either a local cross-dresser or a 5 year-old who has OD’d on watermelon jolly ranchers. Since we went with the liquid dinner option, eventually some of the bros get the muchies and decide some craw-dads are in order. The place we went first wouldn’t let Fred in because he was too blotto. Someone had given him some kind of blue drink at the last bar that I’m pretty sure was pure grain alcohol. Think about that – how drunk does someone have to be to get refused service………IN NEW ORLEANS!! After some food, the drinking continued (at least by those who could still walk on their own). Since I wouldn’t trade jets with Five, he directed me to split North and get Fred back to the hotel since we were all rapidly losing any ability to care for anyone but ourselves. Fred was fully established in the “I love you man” phase of drunkenness by this point. By the time we were getting close to the hotel, he had transitioned to the “Crank up the Enola Gay” phase and was ready to pick a fight with anyone who would listen. We stopped twice so he could hurl. The first time, he ejected what looked to me like three whole craw-dads. I started laughing at him because they didn’t look like they had even been chewed. At least the shells were gone. I can also report that even when mixed with stomach acid, primary colors work. The combination of red hurricanes and whatever the blue death drink was did, in fact, make purple. I got him to his room and even remember to keep his room key since it was almost guaranteed he would need to be revived before departure. We got back to the hotel at some point and that’s all I have to say about that. Miraculously, the next morning, all five pilots were conscious and ready in the lobby at pickup time. Fred was back in the fetal position on the lobby couch after being pulled out of bed still in his clothes. 0945L came and went with no sign of the duty driver. Phone calls began shortly thereafter to attempt to find out where our ride was. We had given ourselves a 15 minute buffer, so no need to panic yet. However, as the minutes ticked by, we were watching our potential failure at our one and only mission loom on the horizon. We were finally able to determine that our driver had gotten a late start and gotten lost. We bit off on the “he’s 5 minutes out” for 20 minutes like a bunch of hungover idiots….wait, what? Just as we were about to exercise the taxi option, the driver finally showed at 1030, 45 minutes late. On the drive, individual duties were assigned to each guy and those duties were to be accomplished at the speed of light or faster, if possible. One guy would file, two guys were the bag stowing gurus, the other two would pre-flight all the jets and Fred would strap in. We got the driver to attempt a new land speed record and he dropped us by the jets at 1105L. Screeching to a halt in the parking lot, we scattered to our duty locations looking like an indy car pit crew (on Quaaludes). The rest of the ops looked like an Air Defense Alert scramble but slower. The first engine started turning at 1120 and we taxied quickly after that. Tower let us takeoff to the east and as soon as One got on the runway, he lit ‘em and blasted. The next two hadn’t made it to the runway yet, I (as Four) was just passing EOR and Five was leaving the TA ramp. Time now – 1135L. As I crossed the airfield boundary doing 400 knots and accelerating, I got a boresite lock on One. He was on my nose for about 8 miles with 200 knots of opening Vc. I came out of AB to stay sub-sonic and was able to hold about 650 knots in mil power as we slowly climbed. Range to One – 7.5 miles, 25 knots of closure. You do the math. It took me until abeam Eglin to get inside a mile. I'm sure ATC was highly impressed with this 5-ship of idiots staggered out in a 10 mile long string blasting across the Gulf of Mexico. For those unfamiliar with the amazing array of air to ground computer power available in the Eagle, we could have probably done better with a slide rule. TOT calculations were limited to a basic set up. You could get a “time to destination” in the HUD to whatever point was in the steer to INS window. That time was figured using your current ground speed based on the actual conditions at that moment. Destination “B” was usually home base and as I lifted off and began to try to catch One, I selected that and the appropriate mode to give me the data in the HUD. While I was still accelerating, my heart sank and failure appeared imminent as I looked at the time to destination which read 32 minutes. Time now 1137. TOT 1200. Muthaf…..we are so, totally, totally screwed. As I continued to gradually climb and rapidly accelerate to the little known cross-country, gotta make an airshow tech order climb speed of 650 knots, I noticed the time to destination beginning to look better. By the time I stabilized in my race to catch One, it now looked like we might arrive abeam Tyndall with about 2 minutes to spare. Okay, maybe it won’t be real pretty but we’ll fill the square. Halfway to Tyndall and still about 4 miles back from One, we changed freqs in an attempt to contact the Airboss. For the show that day, the Airboss was a squadron pilot named “Hoss”. Now Hoss was a big fella and a little rotund, filling out his flight suit quite well. He looked more like a USAF version of Friar Tuck than an F-15 pilot. He would be positioned in the SOF truck acting as the ground FAC for the fly by. The SOF truck was equipped with the standard one each, UHF radio as expected. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to raise him after getting airborne, we finally got him. We could picture his round, smiling face as we finally heard his jolly, booming voice come across the frequency about the time we were abeam Eglin AFB. 60 miles and 8 minutes to get there. Holy shit, this might just work. “Eagle 11, Airboss… I’ve been trying to call you for 30 minutes”. “Ah, yeah, sorry about that – long story.” “We have a 15 minute rolex, I say again, a 15 minute rolex”. 5 sets of throttles hit the idle stop at about the same time as we attempted to save some of the JP-8 we had been spewing out the back like a fire hose for the last 20 minutes. Lack of closure problem finally solved. We coordinated with approach to hold in one of the MOAs to the west of the field since the flyby was to the east. Five held high as the 4-ship got into fingertip and tried to fly something that looked marginally presentable. As One was making his slide rule calculations and planning his final turn inbound for the run, we got another call from the Airboss with another 10 minute rolex. During this final 10 minutes, we got some additional info from Hoss about the location of the band, the color guard and the guests of honor. We were getting a pretty good running commentary on the situation and it looked like this would be it. Inside of 5 minutes to the new TOT and Hoss gave us an exasperated call indicating another possible delay… a pause and then….”standby”. Reaching the front of the MOA with no further word, One began a turn cold back into the area. All through this turn, he attempted to raise Hoss. “Airboss, Eagle 11” “Airboss, Eagle 11” Rolling out of the turn, pointing away from Tyndall, he was still unable to raise Hoss. “Airboss, Eagle 11”………..Nothing. Suddenly, a new, female, timid, non-Hoss –like voice came over the frequency. “Eagle 11, uh… this is Airman Jones…..The radio in the SOF truck stopped working and he’s running to a different truck……but, the music has started.” So many, many things flashed through my mind in the next few seconds. First was, of course – ah shit! Second was, who is Airman Jones…she sounds kind of hot. Third, was incredulity as I attempted to picture Hoss running….anywhere. The thought of his round, now red face as he huffed, puffed and pounded across the tarmac toward whatever vehicle might have an operable radio was hilarious. Last, was a little more complicated. You know the hero shots on display in the Squadron or Wing buildings with aerial photographs of the unit aircraft in action? Inevitably there is usually one photo taken on initial from the number two aircraft. Number One has just pitched out and is belly up to the camera, 90 degrees of bank about to bend his jet around to inside downwind. So, it’s a face full of aircraft belly a wingspan-ish away. Cool, right? Well, that’s what One looked like the instant after Airman Jones called. The only major, but important difference was Three and I were looking at the top of his jet, not the bottom and it was coming our way fast. So, not cool. He racked his jet up to get us turned around and I think both three and I saw our miserable lives flash before us as we bunted – hard - to keep living an extra few seconds. The rest was pretty anticlimactic. We flew inbound, never heard from Hoss, descended through an undercast and popped out a mile from the ramp. We did the fly by and never even knew our status. No one said shit to us when we got back, so I guess it was okay. We didn’t feel the need to share too much either. We rejoined with Five and started east. Weather from Tydnall to Patrick was total DS so we split into 3 and 2, got separate clearances and flew over there IMC. We had been so focused on the airshow issue, no one had even thought to wonder about Fred. Since I was leading Five now, I had a few brain cells left on life support and began to wonder how he was doing. I looked over at him and he gave me a thumbs up - so I guess, okay. We had a way to go and if Five felt like I did, the last thing he was going to want was 30 minutes in fingertip in the weather, so I cleared him to drag back to radar trail. That decision was critical for Fred. I’m no expert on the workings of the inner ear, but I can say, in Fred’s case, having another aircraft for attitude reference is a good thing. Pulling the power, popping the boards, deceleration, acceleration, all while IMC and making the aircraft for reference go away?….bad…..very, very bad. I’m sure the aftereffects of his first night on Bourbon street as well as the cross-country up to that point had a lot to do with it as well. Fred was not capable of going cold mic and Five cursed me silently from 2 miles back for refusing the D-model as he listened to every retch. If he had live missiles, it’s possible I may not be here writing this now. Considering none of us had eaten anything since the craw-dads the night before, it was kind of amazing there was much available. Especially since Fred had already made a couple of deposits back on Bourbon street. Unlike my negative-G pal in Germany, Fred managed to make do with just one bag. We finally cleared the weather, rejoined and came up initial at Patrick. As we flew in fingertip, he held it up proudly from the back seat as I laughed into my mask. After we landed and we were heading inside, Fred walked by me carrying his craw-dad surprise. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the damn thing had a slightly purple tint to it through the bag.

There is an unlimited supply of money for the F-35 due to political and industrial interests. There is very little money for existing weapons platforms only valuable to servicemembers because it doesn't significantly grow stock values. Cutting money from the boring A-10 does create money for some other boring stuff politicians and leaders do think we need, but can't leverage billions of dollars to support. We need that money for SARC briefings, suicide prevention, or cyber security CBT's.

F-15C, Tops in Blue, all bands but the HAF Band, and 96.9% of anciliary "training". I'll be expecting change with that by the way. The A-10 is dirt cheap compared to other areas where the AF hemorrhages cash.

I've never puked in an airplane, but once I came really close. Flying the AC-130H we typically tried to squeeze as much training into a five hour sortie as possible. One summer night I was a new AC in the Gunpig flying a Live Fire, Dry Fire, Pilot Pro mission at Hurlburt. The aircraft recently had some recurring sensor issues that maintenance had tried everything they could think of to fix. As a result they added a female sensor maintenance troop to observe the system in flight and make sure it was truly repaired. The Spectre has no real air conditioning to speak of and the start of a summer sortie was like sitting in a car in the hot sun with the windows rolled up typically you were drenched from head to ass crack, but we didn't care we were flying a freaking gunship! Once airborne we would climb to 6000 feet and slowly cool down over the next hour as we proceeded to the H area and knocked out a sensor alignment. Over the next fours hours you would be mostly comfortable as you conducted your live fire and dry fire, but once you dropped back down for pilot pro, the airplane would start to heat up again. On this particular night we had an IP and two extra copilots who needed some approaches for currencies. I flew most of the dry fire and half the live fire before getting out of the seat for the IP to grab the second half of the live fire and get set up for the pilot pro. I made my way down to the booth where the TV, IR, and EWO sit so I could strap into the red seats for the pilot pro. Unlike other C-130's most of the interior is filled with guns and at the time the only extra seats were pull up floor seats which meant sitting on bare metal for copilot pilot pro (a suicide mission at best), or one of the few red seats in the booth. While the choice might seem obvious, sitting in the booth was no picnic. There is absolutely no view outside the aircraft, it was even hotter in the booth than the rest of the aircraft, and the inhabitants of the booth are a very special and very sadistic breed. I opened the door of the booth to grab a seat and the female sensor maintenance troop was sitting on the end closest to the door so she could see the TV display. She was a bigger girl and when I sat down next to her there was not a lot of spare room and our legs were actually touching. We made our way back to the radar pattern, knocked out our decent checklist and dropped down to fly a few instrument approaches before jumping into the VFR pattern. On the first approach I made the mistake of looking over at the IR display as we were coming into the flair. Having been in the booth before I knew some of the sensor operators liked to screw with each other in the booth and would track the runway with the sensor, just after touchdown they would roll the sensor sideways or under the aircraft, if you weren't prepared the visual allusion would make you feel like the aircraft was doing something it should not. One of the more sadistic sensor operators was running the IR that night and he was having a good ole time screwing around so I looked away and focused on something else. The booth was getting hotter by the minute and the smell of rubber from the tires was overwhelming. Again, the AC-130H is different from other C-130's and with all of the holes and openings for sensors, guns, and other equipment, things like tire and gunsmoke instantly fill the inside of the aircraft. I've been on live fires with the 20MMs firing where you could not see the back of the airplane from the smoke. Not related to puke, but I must mention in passing how much fun the 20MMs were to shoot. We could put both 20's on the line with the 40MM at the same time and the result was staggering, 4100 rounds per minute of death raining down...the best part was the 20MM were pilots weapons, bolted to the floor unlike the other guns that were on trainable mounts and slewed to wherever the sensor was pointing. As I mentioned earlier, the airflow inside the plane was such that the gun gas filled the inside, for the pilot in particular the effect was even better because the gun gas from the 20MM's rushed forward onto the flight deck and curled over your head and in front of the HUD while you were shooting. I will never forget the smell or the instant stiffy that followed, I loved that plane. Flashing back to that mission....I was doing my best not to watch the sick fuck sensors as they played their game I noticed and when I looked to the right I noticed the maintenance troop was sweating profusely, in fact, I could feel it on my leg...her nasty sweaty leg rubbing on mine...combined with the tire smoke and sensor operator constantly rolling the ball...for the first time in my career I was feeling less than perfect. I took a drink water and tried to think of something else as we came in for another touch and go, just as the tires touched the runway and a rush of smoke and stink hit the booth I heard a roaring noise coming from my right and barely snapped my head around in time to see a rope of projectile vomit coming out of every facial orifice on the maintenance troop and on to my LEG! It was surreal and it took a minute for my pea brain to process the wet hot vomit soaking my flight suit and running down my leg. In an instant I realized what had happened and suddenly I felt my own vomit rising up...it took every bit of self-control and mind power to prevent my own giant chunder in the booth. If not for the fear of severe embarrassment in the squadron I would have sprayed her like a car wash. Mercifully the booth called up and the IP decided we had enough training, the next one was to a full stop...after we blocked in I skipped the MX debrief and spent 10 minutes in the parking lot taking a shower with the hose. Ahhh the things I will miss when I retire.

Long enough ago that I must finally admit to myself that I’m an old dude, we had a 2-ship of Eagles on the way to a weekend airshow in France. In the lead aircraft, a two seat D-model, I was accompanied by a crew chief who was one of two maintainers that were joining us for this grueling weekend flying for the crowd, drinking and generally living the dream. His partner was already a couple of hours southwest in one of the base vehicles beginning his land journey when we lifted off. That guy had no desire to slip the surly bonds, which meant my GIB got to look forward to an extra sortie on the way home. After departing Bitburg AB, we spent about an hour of that beautiful summer Friday tapping various NATO fighters, taking in some of the sites and raging around Germany and France VFR. 1-Bravo was taking it in stride. He seemed to really be enjoying himself and had no problems with 6-8 G conversion turns, wrapping it up with some of the aware fighters and just bouncing around in the typical hot summer thermals at low altitude. 500 knots on initial at our destination, a snappy high G pitch out with the jets disappearing in balls of summer vapor completed his test and he passed with flying colors. Man, I wish all my incentive rides were with guys like that. In addition to the standard fare of military aircraft demos, there were also a large number of civilian singles and teams flying everything from classic Warbirds to Extras, Sukhois and Stearmans. At various points in their displays, some of those high performance civilian aircraft were flying outside loops, resulting in what I’m sure were some fairly high negative Gs. As we were watching this, the other pilot and I must have made some kind of remarks, cringed or probably both. My backseater asked why with a look of confusion on his face. We did our best to explain the negative Gs but I don’t think we were completely successful. Since I was still getting the “RCA dog look”, I offered, “I can show you on the way home if you want” – and promptly forgot. We finished up the rest of the weekend and got ready to depart Monday morning. The plan was to do another VFR low fly mission, land at Spandahlem AB, drop our bags and 1B off and fly a full-up BFM mission (since bags and a maintainer kept us at limited maneuvering training rules). His buddy would be waiting to pick him up and take him and our stuff back to Bitburg. After crossing back into Germany, we completely our sweep of low fly-7 and were RTB cruising at a couple thousand feet. Up to this point, his performance had been similar to the flight out and his enthusiasm was still high. While we enjoyed the morning view, he remembered my suggestion during the airshow. “Hey, what about showing me those negative-Gs”. I was kind of surprised that he suggested it (or even remembered after the weekend we had). But, considering how well he had done up to that point in both sorties, I didn’t think much about it. After a quick check to make sure the map case was covered and he didn’t have anything loose, I let him know it was coming. I then proceeded to pull the nose about 20 degrees up, paused and then smoothly, but smartly brought the nose back to the horizon with some forward stick. Duration of the event was at most 2 seconds and the G-meter registered just shy of 1 negative. Halfway through the 2 second interval of negative G, I heard a noise begin to come over the intercom that sounded like a clip from a demon possessed Linda Blair in “The Exorcist”. It starting out as a low growl and then, as we finished the maneuver, rose in pitch enough that I momentarily wondered if a loose lap belt had allowed him to float off his seat and he had crushed one of his nuts under his thigh when we returned to positive G. After that, he said nothing and communicated only with head nods and an occasional feeble thumbs up. To his credit, he found his sick bag in record time and even had the presence of mind to go cold mic without any prompting. The next 15 minutes were epic. It was like having Mr. Creosote (Monty Python’s Mean of Life) and his “wafer thin mint” riding in my jet. What was most alarming were the total body muscular contractions involved in each and every bout of literally violent vomiting. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he split the back of his flight suit up the middle like the Hulk. I don’t think I will do it justice if I tried to describe the noise he made with each hurl. Suffice it to say that it reminded me of a large wild animal and I could hear it through my earplugs and helmet over the ambient cockpit noise while he was cold mic. I monitored him with some morbid fascination using the mirrors and some fairly regular glances backward when the noise rose from behind me. I was amazed that he didn’t blow a hole in the bottom of his first sick bag which was filled in record time and looked like a white water balloon in his hand when he was finished. He managed to tie it off and prepare his second (and last one) as the next wave hit. During the initial part of this, I climbed to try to find some cooler air for the poor guy as he alternated between his incredible Hulk and Wild Kingdom impressions. As we got closer to Spang, we had to descend and I rocked #2 for a quick BD check. Apparently, that was the exact time my passenger was trying to tie off his second bag and my stick movement hit his hand and caused him to drop the twist tie. Anyone who had spent any significant time in the mighty Eagle knows that if you drop something on the floor, you may as well have put it at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It’s gone until you land, shut down and get out. Unbeknownst to me, as we were making our approach, this poor bastard is feeling round 3 arrive and he is still trying to decide what to do with unsecured water balloon #2. Possibly as a result of dealing with a clean-up similar to those describe in previous posts, he made a stellar command decision to sacrifice the loaner helmet bag life support gave him Friday. Unfortunately, he opted to hold previously mentioned open bag #2 in one hand and the helmet bag in the other as he convulsed for his next delivery. When using his sick bags with both hands available, he was able to bring them completely up to his face. Now, with both hands occupied during this round, he didn’t consider the fact that his oxygen mask was dangling just to the side of his mouth ready to catch whatever flew out. Halfway through the next explosion, he realized the situation with the mask was a significant problem and made the grave error of trying to halt it mid-stream. Anyone who has witnessed such an attempt or tried it themselves knows what often results. There are other holes in the human head available to alleviate the quick pressure build up created in such a situation. Since this last part was fairly self-critiquing, he quickly realized his error and flexed back to the primary exit. Luckily, what didn’t fill up the mask (immediately unserviceable, for certain) blew straight past it into the helmet bag with some minor collateral damage to his flight suit. As I flew the straight-in, I knew things had gotten bad back there based on the smell and I was starting to think my BFM sortie might be on hold. By the time I was turning off the runway, I was very, very thankful for the opportunity to open the canopy. After shutdown, I got out of the jet and waited for him to do the same. It took him 15 minutes to actually exit the aircraft and make it down the boarding steps. He probably would have stayed longer but the fuelers made him get out so they could gas the jet. He told me later he didn’t go to work again until Thursday. When I climbed up to secure the back seat for the next flight, amazingly there were only a few stains on one side of the lap belt. I even found the twist tie.

Well, she came through for my neighbor. He built an airstrip on his land 3 years ago and applied to the FAA for a airport designator. They have ignored his emails and phone calls since then. He called MMc's office yesterday and got a call from the FAA at 0730 this morning giving him his designator. I've got to give her thumbs up for that. LS