Jet Fighters Pursue Cessna Stolen by Flight Student

He is said to have been having "Emotional Issues".

He said he was hoping to be shot down.

If that is the case why didn't he just auger it in?

 

Brian- Not enough guts. The same sort of people use the police to perform their suicides.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

How about that trick y'all could do with the fuel dump and afterburners?

 

I can't buy a Ferrari, we can't live in a 5000 square foot house, my wife won't let me buy 60 dollar scotch, and I have to eat my vegetables or I can't have dessert! Man! You talk about emotional issues! ! I've got 'em big time! I think I'll go out and ride my bicycle into the fence.
Switches

 

Don't do it Bob. Think of your family....friends.....Ooops, forget the friends.

I'll buy you a Scotch, the good stuff


Sparky wont drink with me. We can get drunk and you can tell airplane stories.

 

Brian, Bob- Sign me up for that. Bob, you can have my dessert. I am pushing the diabetes numbers on blood sugar and now save my entire sugar allowance for beer and an occasional single malt, Aberlour preferably. Bad to get old but terrible to get no older.

Just as an aside, my only instrument check was in 1978, when I was a flight examiner in standardization and evaluation in the F-111D at Cannon AFB. The pilots all thought it would be fun to see if a WSO could pass an instrument check, so the chief of stan eval gave me one. Unofficially, of course. With over 1500 hours of simulator/ sim instructor time and about 1000 hours in the F-111, where a large percentage of flying was at night, flying instruments and keeping tabs on your student lieutenant pilot was necessary to stay alive. Plus I had been teaching instrument school to pilots for over two years (an annual requirement for them). I passed without problems, including the overhead pitch-out and landing, but somehow (to keep everyone out of jail), the checkride never made it into my flight evaluation folder. The good old days. We used to say TFR or IFR at night. Night VFR was a very good way to get killed.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

Just found this thread and Mr Parks & Brian, you're killing me. Haven't laughed this hard in days

And Taz, thank you for your service to this country.

 

John- Just about all of us would have paid the US to fly fighters, if any of us had actually had any money, which we did not. It was great fun, but I buried around 100 friends killed in flying accidents, so it was dangerous. I was in a five man weapons shop at RAF Lakenheath. Out of the five, two were killed in flying accidents later, one in an F-5E, and one in an F-111D, a third caught epilepsy and he never flew again. Not good odds. My scheduled replacement at a test squadron at McClellan AFB was killed in Eldorado Canyon over Tripoli's harbor, along with a good freind of mine. Fun, but you paid for it.

Interestingly, during Desert Storm we lost no F-111Fs, although an EF-111A crew collocated with us in Taif, SA did kill themselves performing a defensive maneuver. They were locked up on radar by an F-15C they thought was a Mig. Very inexperienced crew, unfortunately. A more experienced crew would have called "Buddy Spike" on Guard frequency and that would have been all they did. The maneuver they tried required more altitude than they had and, naturally, was at night, so disorienting. On our side of the lines, too, which made it even more tragic.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

I still have a few but I would rather listen to Terry, he has done some great stuff.
As far as scotch and friends .....it's funny how many friends I can collect when I DO have a bottle of good scotch and what's really funny is that they are all me. I don't know anyone who likes scotch except my brother and he lives in Santa Rosa so me and my " friends " can guard the bottle and make up more tales.

 

Y'all fly with NVGs or did they come later? I couldn't imagine trying to fly low level at night without them.

 

Mark- We tested NVGs in the F-111, but they were not needed and did not help us. Between the pilot's E-Scan of the terrain following radar and the WSO's use of probably the best conventional ground-mapping radars ever built (that worked on all returns, including those straight ahead, not just those off to the side like doppler pulse sharpened radars ), night TFR was very comfortable. You needed to realize it could kill you if it malfunctioned and you did not recognize the malfunction. The TFR would fly you reliably at 200' AGL, but it was difficult to navigate at that altitude because of the limited radar horizon caused by terrain and the Earth's curvature. 400' AGL, however, was nearly an ideal compromise between limiting the bad guys' ability to target you and being able to radar navigate. In Desert Storm, we only used the 200' setting when crossing roads or other lines of communication where groundfire was intensive. TFR had 200', 300', 400', 500' with some limitations, 750', and 1000' settings. We rarely used the 300', 500' (radar altimeter) and 750' settings. 200', 400' and 1000' were all we really needed.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

Man, this night flying stuff at 200 AGL with TFR at umpteen miles per hour with hopes that it won't fail, that ain't for me. BUT, I'll bet that it was fun. That is a segment of the flying game that is beyond me, I guess because THAT ain't no game.
Terry, your mentioning that your dad flew P-36's. I don't know who realizes how far back that goes. The airplane was produced in 1937 and when I was a 12 year old in Florida in 1938 I heard the roar of " big airplanes" one cloudy day and ran out in time to see a flight of three P-36's flying low and in flat pitch showing a bit of U.S.Army Air Force muscle. I imagine that they came from the east coast because Mac Dill and Drew Field weren't built then. You have a lot of history that your dad left in his 32 years of service. How proud you must be.
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