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In a news conference last week, the President and the Sec of Transportation announced that "Thanksgiving Express Lanes" would be opened through Special Use Airspace to alleviate East Coast congestion. In the press conference quoted below, the FAA said they had a diagram - has anyone seen this...

CVWR-20 is now the "Tactical Support Wing" (TSW); still call the boss CAG, though. Our jets are still AF coded. http://navyreserve.navy.mil/Public/Staff/Centers/Forces+Command/Centers/Commander+Tactical+Support+Wing/WelcomeAboard/default.htm

It is interesting to look back at the anger and vitriol the design provoked - I remember very clearly the words "black gash of shame" being used over and over. The fact that the designer, Maya Lin was not a veteran seemed to anger people quite a bit. The competing designs seemed to follow in...

Courtesy of -138; some good front seat shots:

If anyone was ever curious what I looked like, that's me in ECMO-3.... (If the pics were in fact taken between 17 Oct and 23 Oct; I got a lot of FCLP time in ECMO-3 that week.)

Up until 2004, Fallon's tap water was about the worst I ever tasted. High mineral / salt content, plus lots of concerns about arsenic (which was always suspected as a possible contributor to the childhood leukemia rate). In 2004, they opened a new water treatment plant, and the difference is...

If you have access to SIPR and are ever having a bad day, google the Navy Operations Center and read the daily OPREP/SITREP archive. No matter how bad a day you are having, someone somewhere in the Navy is having a much worse one, and the gory details are posted for you to read. There are...

Unfortunately, the laws of physics (to say nothing of budgets...) dictate that we'll get sharks with freakin' lasers long before we ever get AEW from space. Space can enable a lot of missions; this isn't one of them. Deeper conversations on the subject can be held in other forums.

I was impressed to see 6 RAG Prowlers on the line at Oceana last Friday. It's a rare thing to launch 6 on a x-country and have all 6 arrive. (Of course, they might have launched 10 to make 6, but I'll never know... :icon_tong) BTW, Oceana is one busy place...

He also never got the gouge on proper uniforms. The first time he had to wear Dinner Dress White Jacket (not chokers), he wore white shoes and pants as well. There was a lot of pointing and laughing, and it took him a long time to live that one down.... I was an instructor at NSAWC with...

Please don't smear a fine handgun by associating it with Leninist thugs... it's PKK/Kongra Gel. This situation is an excellent example of the old Lord Palmerston (look it up!) pithy saying: "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests." Turkey is doing (and has...

+1 rep for citing obscure naval treaty in current events discussion!

Or worse, those crafty devils might invent "missiles" that they could mount the nuclear weapons on, and launch them at us from their own territory! If they are really creative, they might make those missiles mobile, to further confuse the targeting problem. Or if they got really dastardly...

My google-fu is strong today: http://se2.isn.ch/serviceengine/FileContent?serviceID=PublishingHouse&fileid=4A053B54-6DC7-5027-A690-8A61FCC8ABAE&lng=en In Operation Iraqi Freedom, coalition fighters and bombers flew about 20,700 sorties and struckapproximately 19,900 aim points, delivering...

To say nothing of the fact that he was inverted when he did it!

Background investigators do pull credit checks, and will ask you about anything of interest - including things like "Why were you 30 days late on a credit card payment in March 2001?" (True question from my last investigation...) They will look for things like excessive credit card debt, or...

At least they're synched up!

Bugs crawling around in signature blocks....

"Joint Day on the Tanker": Me/us (USN Prowler), F-16, Marine Prowler, and Navy Hornet (out of view).

It's a fuel transfer rate issue. Drogue = ~2K/min, booms = 6K/minute. It's one thing to top off a Prowler that needs 10K thru a drogue; when a B-52 wants tons, then it helps to have a boom to get them their gas quicker. Useful discussion of the issue can be found here...

Congrats on your selection. Having said that, you have to go into these things fully on-board with what you're signing into. Will you "likely encounter any struggle" if you want to redesignate? Hard to say, but I could envision scenarios where it might be hard - like if you were mobilized and...

Word on the street has it that shortly, if you don't get your request in at least 3 hours prior to your flight, "there is no guarantee that it will be serviced in time"... Or something to that effect. Maybe my faith in technology is misplaced, but I bet requests could be serviced in about 3...

The author, Carlo Kopp, has been around for some time in online forums. He publishes here and there, and is pretty much exactly as Flash describes him. I fit him in the category of "Thinks He's A Lot Smarter Than He Actually Is". For better or for worse, the number of people I fit in that...

In the mighty Prowler, you just take your Ipod and a Belkin FM transmitter (the same one you can use in your car), drape it over the scanner, and bingo - tunes for everyone who selects SCAN on the ICS. One of our guys had the book on tape "No True Glory", about the battle of Fallujah. Weird...

If by "recently" you mean "last week", our flight surgeon was going through the course there. I'll get a debrief from him next weekend and ask him about any helos.

Tell him to check this month's Tailhook if he hasn't already seen it, under the CVWR-20 update. We're famous!! Too bad I'll miss Tailhook this year; otherwise I'd be glad to sign copies...

Unfortunately, USNI has not posted that piece on the web, and since HeyJoe has edumacated me with great knowledges concerning intellectual property law, I won't even post a good link to the (improperly cited) article. However, if you were to cut and paste the title of the article in Google...

The referenced article was from the Oct 2005 issue. It's an interesting read, but not analytically well-grounded. The author used a software tool to compare (simulated) performance of two (simulated) receivers in three (simulated) RF environments. (Detect a trend here...?) His conclusion...

Really depends on exactly what you intend to do with one. If you're not in the business of walking around on the ground, then they probably have minimal utility. I had a Garmin Forerunner 201 that I used to track my running distances, and would carry with me in an inside flight suit pocket as...

My personal favorite, the G in the colors of the Fighting Two Hundred and Ninth.... Unfortunately, unless politics and $$ change significantly, it's the only G you'll ever see in VAQ-209 livery...

Read about the Army sharing Presidential lift responsibilities in a WSJ piece in the Early Bird. Didn't realize that, but it's true as stated in HMX-1 Official History: Realizing the urgent need for his presence in Washington, President Eisenhower directed his staff to find a faster way to...

More an issue of body position than speed - since he was hanging in the straps, the seat had at least several inches of free travel after it fired before it contacted (impacted?) his legs. Since there was no body mass in the seat as it fired, it was free to accelerate much quicker than the...

He was the skipper of the NORMANDY. He was lucky he had both femurs still intact. He landed face first in a yucca bush though, and had some nice scratches on his face. In the club that night, he never seemed to figure out that everyone was laughing *at* him, not with him....

Owww, that hurts.... As someone who is 4.1 hrs away from my 200 in the Prowler, I won't disagree too much, other than to maybe suggest a rephrasing: "I wouldn't put any stock in anyone just because the have an NAO...". Me, I'm freakin' Google (from a stock perspective, that is). :icon_tong

The general rule of thumb for picking up new guys is "junior most qualified", so being senior can be a challenge. Conversely, it depends on the unit's manning document at any given time - for example, we are dying for pilots right now. Any O-3 or -4 pilots out there interested in a Reserve...

The answer is that it really depends on the unit - life (and subsequent $$) in a flying or "hardware" unit is much better than in a more traditional reserve unit. There are a number of different pots of money you can tap when you drill. The most basic are "drills", which come in half day...

Funny story about what happens when you lose track of your ordnance, even the big stuff... http://www.gunnies.pac.com.au/gallery/grand_slam.htm Apparently when Lincolnshire County Council were widening the road past RAF Scampton's main gate in about 1958, the 'gate guards' there had to be...

You can't do better than the OV-10 in that line of work - blow the dust off them at Davis Monthan and you can be in business pretty darn quick!

Sounds great. So exactly how do we go about doing this?

Fallon has the advantage of having NSAWC and the N2 Department; at Lemoore, you'd only find the various squadron spies milling about, wondering about f-poles and trying to pull the "kick me" signs off their backs. See http://www.fallon.navy.mil/nsawc.asp for a quick overview. Since your...

Speaking of NEXRAD, by far my favorite radar site on the web is run by Weather Underground. There are all sorts of options you can play with (including varying the elevation angle of the scan, using automated storm cell tracking, getting all the gee-whiz independent variables associated with a...

There's an old saying, attributable to either Kelly Johnson or Ben Rich, that "an aircraft tends to gain a pound a day". As an airframe ages, folks are tempted to keep adding on new widgets, until 10 years later you're 3650 pounds heavier. (For the math challenged, that's a pound a day for...

I'll try shame as a motivator: Took the PRT on Sunday. Male, 40-44 block. Situps: 96. Pushups: 76. Run: 9:53. Put down the Play Stations, stop text messaging, knock off the doughnuts, and hit the gym, people! On second thought, keep the doughnuts - is there nothing they can't do...

Well, he got that much right. "Pigs in Space" was always quite the sight...

Try a UDP deployment to Iwakuni and you'll see exactly what lengths we go to in order to avoid upsetting Japanese sensibilities.... PC?? Moi?? Them's fightin' words where I come from. Good thing this ain't where I come from! :icon_tong

It's a face shot in that we're reminding them "we kicked your a$$ in the Big One!" There's nothing wrong with embracing a Japanese motif; it's one that has you machine gunning their national ensign that may be a bit questionable. VF-111 had the Sundowner motif uninterrupted since WWII...

Yeah, but of all the decom'd VF and VFA squadrons that were available for "reactivation", why did we have to pick the one that is a face shot directly to one of our better allies? Seems like poor headwork on someone's part.

If you're interested in the battle and your only knowledge is derived from watching Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, and Glenn Ford in the bitchin "in Sensurround" movie Midway (which I saw in the theater in 1976...), I highly recommend the book "Shattered Sword". Get it at...

Yep. Arleigh Burke's commanding officer relieved of duty http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=125145&ran=14849

Ah, it warms the cockles of my heart to see discourse on the future of Navy intel.... (and to say "cockles" and "discourse" in the same sentence!). For Brett: What I was thinking about wasn't as much platform-level specialization as it was becoming a "Jedi Master of the Intel World" - being...