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Stupid questions about Naval Aviation (Pt 2)

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Picaroon said:
Is it normal for military personnel to call the Hornet the F-18? It always irritates me when I hear people say F-18 instead of F/A-18 but I saw that NFO Youtube video and the NFO called it an F-18 so maybe I'm just being anal about it.
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As long as the squadrons are called "Strike Fighter Squadron Whatever" or "VFA Whatever"...I don't think us "legacy" VF community guys care if the Hornet is colloquially referred to as an F-18 or not...

Now don't get me going on the demise of the "RIO" term in favor of "WSO". Oh, the humanity...
 
Stupid Quesion: Why are the backseaters on the F/A-18Fs referred to as WSO and not RIO or B/N?
 
Coota0 said:
Stupid Quesion: Why are the backseaters on the F/A-18Fs referred to as WSO and not RIO or B/N?
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I'm guessing because their job entails more than just working Big Ole Fire Control Radar or an All-Weather Medium Attack suite.


TTUalumn07 said:
I am 69" tall, laying down. Is this a problem if I am going for aviation? :D
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Unless, you mean to say you look like a beached whale laying down... No.
 
Question About Scrambling Fighters...

So this is just one of those "random" (:)) questions of mine, but I was thinking about in certain movies, for example Armageddon, Air Force One, etc...how they just scramble fighter planes very quickly whenever needed, and my question was, are there pilots who get dressed up in their gear and just sit around on standby to be scrambled should something happen...? In the movies, it's like, "Scramble the fighter planes!" and you see pilots in full gear go running out to the planes immediately. How does this work in reality? (If any of that is OPSEC I understand).
 
If you mean specifically continental air defense, then the answer to your question is "sorta". ANG does most of that mission.

We do stand alert on the Boat, when the situation calls for it. All the way from sitting in the cockpit and spotted on the cats to "let us know where we can reach you if the alert gets called away".
 
Put it this way, if there is a chance of a threat, there are procedures in place to counter that threat.
 
Ouch! This gave me a flashback to 12 hour Alert-5s during UNREP. Not fun in the middle of the IO, but at least it got me out of the working parties.
 
Even assault support helo guys stand alert. I've never been tasked with Alert 5 (you are sitting in the aircraft, rotors turning, awaiting launch order) but I have stood Alert 30 for CASEVAC (taxied in less than 15 - booyah!). I'd say the two most common we do are 30 and 120.
 
In LAMPS (MK 1), we would do Alert 15's on our small boy. Bird spotted on the deck, rotors spread, all pre-start checklists completed, bird hooked to DC power. WIth the crew standing by in the hangar. We usually could be airborne in less than 10 minutes.
 
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