(Part IV) YV-411, airborne over Venezuela. The sky was growing a deeper shade of blackish-blue as the South American evening crawled slowly along. The shock of having the business end of a 9mm pointed at his head had begun to subside as he went about the business of flying the Beechcraft. Consulting the hand-held GPS that accompanied…
It started with a letter (the old fashioned kind — pen and paper) that began "You don’t know me but we have a mutual friend…" It grew into a whirlwind relationship with precious time grabbed between squadron dets, workups and deployments and culminated on a humid Virginia Beach evening in August, twenty-five years ago by…
Story sub-arc starts here ‘New day, new site, new mission.’ ‘Well, kind of’ thought the CICO as he prepared for landing. ‘Wonder what luck we’ll have with this change in venue…’ Settling to the runway, the Hawkeye made the midfield intersection and turned for the transient ramp. At the far end it, it was led…
Ed note: We’re going to try something a little different here and change the POV for a couple of posts. Note that the events portrayed here are a conglomeration of many encounters over several years and do not represent any one interdiction flight. Think of this part as being ‘informed fiction’ and try not to…
Panama. Two months into this endeavor and the novelty has worn off. Standing in the hangar at Howard AFB, the LCDR surveys the flight line – what little of it he could see through the sheets of rain, and does some mental calculations. ‘Do I make a mad dash for the plane and wait inside for…
Part I here. “Yeah, should be a good night for hunting – wonder what we’ll bag tonight…†he thought as he walked out to the waiting Hawkeye with the Skipper. “Omaha 51, check right one o’clock, 4 miles, heading 280, angels 3…†“51, negative contact†Damn he thought, Is this guy blind or what?
It began with a phone call – “It always begins with a damn phone call…†the young LT thought morosely to himself. Any other time he would be drinking in the warmth of the Florida sun, enjoying the beach, such as it was, across the highway from Patrick AFB, but not this time.
The mind is a funny thing sometimes. During a recent (long) layover at a major metropolitan airport your humble scribe was gazing out a window, as he is wont to do from time to time, and watched the ground crew prepping yet another jet for its journeys over the horizon. His attention was drawn to…
Naval Aviators (and by extension, Naval Flight Officers), of the tailhook variety that is, tend to be a peculiar lot. On the one hand we live to fly “at the boat†and yet, the prospect of actually doing anything besides actually aviating is well, anathema – for some. Early on the behavior was learned at…
Part I Part II Part III Standing up and stretching after what had seemed an eternity on this C-141 flight, the LTJG was finding aches and sore points that he had previous not known. As he stepped off the plane onto the bright tarmac, the colors of Norfolk in mid-spring bloom came crashing in upon…
