Posted on 05/04/2004 11:07:15 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
ELECTION 2004 Did Kerry make up jet-pilot story? Seasoned flyers doubt yarn about taking controls over Israel
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: May 5, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
It's been a tough week for John Kerry's credibility.
He's been called unfit to be commander in chief by many of his Vietnam comrades and commanders.
He's been criticized for accepting a Purple Heart for what amounts to a scratch on his arm treated with a Band-Aid.
Now, seasoned jet pilots are calling into question his latest claim – taking the controls of a fighter and flying it over Israel in 1991.
Kerry told the story Monday in a speech to the Anti-Defamation League. He claimed it gave him a different perspective on Israel. He said probably no one else in the room has seen the country upside down from an Israeli Air Force jet.
He asserted that authorities in Israel kept denying his request to fly one of their planes, but that the colonel who was showing him around Israel during a 1991 visit not only got him into a trainer, but let him take the controls.
"I take it off, we go up into the sky, climb up, head down toward Aqaba," the senator said. "And I wanted to look at Aqaba, so I'm coming down over Aqaba, and I suddenly hear this voice on the intercom, and he says, 'Senator, you'd better turn faster, you're going over Egypt.'"
Kerry said the colonel then gave him permission to do "a little aerobatics" and that he made a loop at about 12,000 feet.
"To be able to come out upside down and look down and catch the horizon in back of me and see all the way down into the Sinai to the old base that had been given up, all the way across into Jordan, all the way out into the Gulf of Aqaba, and to see Israel beneath me, and the lines contained, and to see it all upside down was the perfect way to see the Middle East and Israel," he said.
But Internet boards were abuzz with skeptics – some of them seasoned jet pilots themselves.
"I'm sorry but I don't believe for a second much of what John Kerry says," wrote Ron Pera, himself a veteran Navy combat fighter pilot."
I believe even less that he makes the comment he took off the jet trainer that he reportedly flew over Israel."
FreeRepublic.com and other bulletin board sites were inundated with similar posts.
"First of all jets are more difficult to take off than propeller planes because they accelerate much faster and the speed they need to get airborne is much higher," Pera wrote in an email to WND. "This requires more precise control and you will not have that the first time you are in the plane. It takes practice to get those skills, a lot of it. Second of all no rational military trained pilot would take the chance of hurdling off the runway at 160 mph just to let some bigwig handle the controls. Takeoffs and landing are two of the most dangerous times during an aircraft flight. Once you are tens of thousands of feet in the air then it is much, much safer to let some inexperienced person take the controls since you have time and altitude to regain control. This is not a blessing on the ground."
Pera added that unless Kerry many hours flying military aircraft "it is next to impossible he took the plane off."
"I speak from experience as a former Navy fighter pilot and I have no problems releasing ALL of my records," he wrote. "Will Kerry flip-flop on this statement also or just yell at whoever asks the question?"
"I take it off, we go up into the sky, climb up, head down toward Aqaba," the senator said. "And I wanted to look at Aqaba, so I'm coming down over Aqaba, and I suddenly hear this voice on the intercom, and he says, 'Senator, you'd better turn faster, you're going over Egypt.'"
From a pilots recollection in Nam (see above for full post)
During the flight, he told everyone how he had taken a Cessna (a small General aviation plane) up with a fighter pilot, and the fighter pilot remarked that Kerry was one of the best pilots he had ever seen. I don't know about other pilots out there, but it's hard to imagine a little, single-engine prop plane pilot being able to show the 'right stuff'.
Let me get this straight, this guy does this:
CONCORD, Mass. --Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry took a spill from his bicycle while riding
Dem presidential candidate John Kerry called his secret service agent a "son of a bitch" after the agent inadvertently moved into his path during a ski mishap in Idaho, sending Kerry falling into the snow.
And he is givent he controls of a 15 million dollar fighter jet just sconds after take off? I doubt it.
Also, how come we have not seen pictures of both falls plastered all over the media? Oh, never mind, he is a liberal. They don't fall down, they are always on their knees.
John Forbes Kerry swerved his two-seat plane across San Francisco Bay, heading straight toward the Golden Gate. "Let's fly under the bridge!: Kerry shouted to his sole passenger and close friend, David Thorne. Thorne tried not to panic as the tiny craft buzzed low across the swells.
Most students who had graduated from Yale with Kerry the previous year knew him as the ultimate Brahmin, the studious and serious class orator who longed to run for president someday. But Thorne and other members of the university's elite Skull and Bones society knew another side of Kerry: He was a young man drawn to danger. During his senior year he "majored in flying," as Kerry put it, learning aerobatics and performing loop-de-loops instead of focusing on his studies.
Thorne also knew that Kerry had been fascinated with the legend of a Yale professor who once looped a bridge, pulling a 360 around the span. It was a summer day in 1967. The sky was clear as the Golden Gate Bridge came into view. Kerry clung to the controls of the rented T-34, similar to those used for military training, and the two young Naval officers headed toward the famous span.
Wham!
The plane jerked and veered. Out on the wing, the feet of an unfortunate seagull stuck out like a scene from a cartoon. Seconds later the scene flipped from Looney Tunes to Alfred Hitchcock, as more birds appeared in front of them. Suck one into an engine and a young pilot's life story could conclude right there: Yale aviator, dreamed of being president, killed on joyride.
Kerry, the son of a World War II test pilot, pulled up the nose of his small plane, ascending beyond the dangerous flock of birds.
"We were worried the wing would come off," Thorne recalled. Instead, Kerry steered the aircraft away from the bridge and toward a nearby airfield, leaving behind whatever stunts were lurking inside his 23-year-old brain.
You don't turn "faster," you turn harder or steeper. Its not an "intercom" its a "headset." And why would anyone go out of their way to see Aqaba?
Its a story he told a vietnam pilot. It doesn't sound like the GG story, although the plot is the same.
I myself got back seat rides in D model F16, an F-4 Phantom and early in my career on the jumpseat of a B52 when I re-enlisted.
Not sure what IDF policy is on such matters but USAF gave/gives such rides and my pilots even let me get a few minutes of stick time (at altittude ) before my E-Ticket joy ride expired.
Stay Safe !
I heard John Kerry once pulled 14 G's in an outside loop, flying an ultralight in the Grand Canyon with a John Deere lawnmower engine. Never even broke a sweat.
Sounds like one of those cases where you'll tell 'em anything to get back down on the ground.
And the inventor of the well-known "carrier landing without a carrier" maneuver.
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