3 hrs? What's so special about that? That's a normal preflight. Now if they wanted to show the public something special, it would be 6 or 7 before we downed it.
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Orion Obsession; giving it up for the mighty P-3C
- Thread starter HeyJoe
- Start date
Yeah, but air shows are all about demonstrating actual combat maneuvers...right?
Don't you have to have an airframe to actually participate?
Weak.
You forgot that I have an airframe...one that would do an airshow demo just as "impressive" as the Orion. (Except that my current whip can do a ONE-engine fly-by.
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Definitely a cool picture, but I don't think it fully captures the majesty of the P-3... Now if the artist could somehow get across that the crew is currently experiencing an emergency, or could somehow express the hatred being shown to the NFOs (mainly the NAVCOM) by the flight station...
Shut up 3P, don't you have lunch to make? 
Am I the only person thinking that the P-3 is still a kick-ass aircraft???
(Truth in posting statement: This was not helolumpy's original comment - I changed it to what I know he really meant to say instead of his accidentally insinuating a P-3 would go lost contact in this situation.......
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Had an event where the NAVCOM was calling me off course by 1/100th of a mile. And they wonder where the hate comes from.
Happens all the time. "Nav, you realize that means we're 52 feet off, right? That means one of the wingtips is still on. . ."
That's my old squadron. Pelicans from hell!
Nope. Still a great plane with a lot of capability. She's somewhat hindered by her age (stuff failing that nobody every planned on having to fix) and the small number of them that we fly the crap out of, so he can get a bad rap. If the chips were down and we needed to, she'd produce.
With a few million $ and the right motivation she could be pretty amazing again.
You're probably talking about a NAV mining event at 30. Yeah, what they called was stupid, but that's not how it happens in the fleet. What they were doing was solely an exercise to see the dude's ability to keep flight on course. With CNS/ATM, it's basically futile since flight and nav have the same picture, but with regular INS setup, the nav's course calls can be a bigger part of the game.
Moral of the story, if you're at 30, don't get your panties in a wad about what the nav is doing in the tube for training.
Afterall a dipping sonar will always yield to the ASW prowess of the mighty DICASS buoy....
Except someone has to find the sub first, and then put the dipping helo in contact..... And that is historically the kick-ass P-3. But I agreed, once the dipper is in contact, it's better than the mighty DICASS buoy.
However, those dippers used to regualrly piss us off. We'd find, localize, track and hand the sub off to a dipper. The dipper would ping for a few minutes, launch a simulated torp and then just pull out of his hover saying "See ya, we're RTB!" without so much as a last range & bearing to the sub. Then they'd blame us for the lost contact....."We had them when we came out of the hover at offsta. We have know idea why the P-3 lost him."