More Aviation Noseart Gone Wild!!!

More stuff out there.

Gorio

So where is the picture of the PC Rosie.

She would in nice with Ride the Pig. (That had better be on a Wart Hog.)

I love their sense of humor. Some of these are magnificent.

lookit these ping. oh yah.

She would fit in nice with Ride the Pig. Seesh I get worse at grammer and proofreading every night.

FReepingbeautiful! I can almost hear the jet engines roaring with A100% American Pride.

Wow .... pretty cool art work. My favorite is the last one because the Flag looks great waving in the wind.

"She would fit in nice with Ride the Pig. Seesh I get worse at grammer and proofreading every night."

Grammer=grammar. Now how do you feel? LOL!

What'd the wagon come off of?

F-15

Gorio

Nice art work...thanks for posting.

Too bad the artists who rendered this don't have the artistic license that was given
in WWII.

Funny, I suspect that most of the "enlightened" "ladies" that love
"The Vagina Monologues" are so happy that the artists didn't have true freedom of expression.

Politically-correct hags like that are worse than blue-haired "church ladys".

If you like the Vargas Gals of WW2, click on my profile. They are at the bottom.

Oh, those were the days.

I'd like to see a revival of WWII nose art--the kind we had when men were men and pilots too.

Unfortunately, according to this news story from the Wall Street Journal, even pilots are an endangered species.

As Military Touts Pilotless Aircraft, Top Guns Wish To Shoot Them Down By Anne Marie Squeo, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

It's in his blood, says Air Force Capt. Braxton Rehm. When he was nine, he got an aerial view of Abilene, Texas, in a plane his grandfather, a World War II pilot, built in the garage.

By 16, Capt. Rehm himself was flying. And before he could legally drink, he'd learned to fly fighter jets for the Air Force. The young pilot was dodging gunfire over northern Iraq a year ago in an F-16 Fighting Falcon when he was given his next assignment: flying robotic reconnaissance planes called Predators -- from the ground.

"You can't even come close to translating the Predator and an F-16," says the 32-year-old pilot. The needle-nosed F-16 soars at 1,500 miles per hour; the Predator goes about 115 mph. Capt. Rehm admits to throwing stuff around his room after he was told of his new assignment. "I was not happy," he says.

After their recent successes reconnoitering Afghanistan, unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Predator are all the rage in defense circles. Politicians love them because they are cheaper than manned aircraft -- and Americans don't get killed flying them. After years of cultural resistance, the military is embracing them, too. Every branch of the armed forces is now clamoring for its own pilotless plane. Big contractors, including Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., are pouring millions of dollars into developing all sorts of these aircraft, from helicopters to stealth bombers.

But one group remains decidedly cool toward this kind of 21st-century warfare: pilots. "There's a big difference between flying an F-15 at 30,000 feet going Mach 1.5 and sitting in a trailer watching a TV screen," says Air Force Capt. James McGrew. Not unlike Capt. Rehm, he'd been spending his days flying over southern Iraq when he was tapped to fly the Predator. Both men spent about three months in Afghanistan earlier this year.

Not only are fighter jockeys concerned that they are losing their edge while grounded on two-year assignments flying unmanned aircraft, they also gripe that this is a sorry reward for the time and energy they put into training to fly fighter jets. "We signed a lengthy contract with the Air Force to fly and went through a rigorous and long training,' " says Capt. Rehm, now stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

Pilots assigned to duty on unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, say they worry it is career-limiting work -- a sign they have fallen out of favor with the higher-ups. The grousing caught the attention of Air Force Secretary James Roche as he visited troops around the world over the past five months. In response, he and Air Force Chief of Staff John Jumper began sitting down with pilots on UAV duty, serving both as therapists and problem solvers, in the hope of coming up with ways to ease problems.

"The kids were right. Their feelings were somehow being shunted," says Sec. Roche. "But they are pioneers, taken out of the cockpit in order to teach us about this new technology."

That's small solace for men and women who got into the business of flying supersonic jets for the thrill, skill and glamour involved. Operating a Predator is about as far as it gets from rocketing through the skies, pumped full of adrenalin, in the high-atmosphere equivalent of a Ferrari. Predator ground stations resemble shipping containers. Inside, they're like office cubicles, offering nothing like the panoramic view they have in the cramped quarters of a cockpit.

When flying a UAV, a pilot and navigator sit side by side, each with two TV screens -- one with a map of where the aircraft is flying and the other with a view of what the aircraft's cameras are seeing. Maneuvering the craft requires a keyboard, flanked by a throttle button on the left and a joystick on the right. Two brake pedals are under the table, a poor substitute for the real ones that pilots can use to outwit an enemy plane coming up from behind. Currently, there are 71 UAV pilots, with another eight expected to join their ranks in early May. That number is expected to grow greatly in years to come as more of these machines are deployed, though openings for pilots in the armed forces have yet to be cut as a result. During missions in Afghanistan, Predator pilots played a key role calling in attacks on targets detected with the aircraft's on-board cameras. But that's expected to diminish with the next-generation UAVs, which will render the pilot little more than a witness to the proceedings. The newest UAV addition, the Global Hawk, which made its battlefield debut in Afghanistan, is programmed for its flying mission before it ever takes off. All the pilot has to do is flip a power switch, tap a few strokes on a computer keyboard and click the on-screen "execute" box. Unless there is a problem or a change in mission, the aircraft does the rest.

To add insult to injury, the accommodations for Predator operators on recent missions were nothing like the well-appointed barracks or hotels that normally await Air Force pilots in distant lands. Many of the Predator pilots who did 90-day tours in Afghanistan spent most of their time sleeping in a squat, one-story building crawling with spiders and mosquitoes, with beds just a few feet apart from each other. "I thought 'What have I gotten myself into?' " says Capt. Elissa Beddow, a 30-year-old who used to pilot cargo planes.

The Air Force requires pilots to control the UAVs, because of their understanding of how aircraft work. Both manned and unmanned aircraft, Air Force officials say, are susceptible to similar problems, such as icing on the wings, engines cutting out and turbulence. Knowing the different sorts of weaponry available facilitates the speedy flow of information in the heat of a fight. That may be so, but pilots feel that they have been trained for something much grander and more difficult. Air Force pilots spend one year doing intensive class-work, flight training and grueling physical workouts in order to win their silver wings. Once they join a squadron, the training continues nonstop, including so-called Red Flag exercises that take place in two-week chunks, four times a year. In those sessions, pilots conduct simulated dogfights, conduct risky low-altitude bombing runs and dodge dummy surface-to-air missiles.

Once posted to a UAV squadron, though, they are effectively grounded. The more time spent not flying, the harder it is to regain previous levels of expertise, they complain. Recently, "I put a dollar into a fighter game at an arcade, but I didn't do so good," says Capt. McGrew. At times he pretends he's in an aircraft and concentrates on the controls in the cockpit and the radio commands -- just to stay fresh. "But all that information seems to be draining away," he says.

Sec. Roche got an earful about this lack of contact with real airplanes. In response, he's looking into refurbishing old T-3 training aircraft -- not exactly state of the art, but better than nothing -- and assign them to the UAV squadrons so pilots wouldn't go through their two-year stints entirely landlubbers. Sec. Roche also is reversing the order that said UAV pilots shouldn't get flight-time credits for the hours they spent operating the drones. That hurt their flight pay, determined by the flight time logged at various points in their career. Air Force officials are also seeking ways to make the experience of sitting in the windowless container more like flying a plane. They are working on ways to give ground operators a more panoramic view by putting additional cameras on the sides of a Predator. "We're trying to make it feel more like a plane," Sec. Roche says. Even so, pilots are yearning for the day they can squeeze back into a real cockpit. "In a fighter, the sound and the senses come together to make the whole picture," says Capt. McGrew. In a trailer, he adds, there's just no way to get "that seat-of-the pants feel."

Gorio

Then this one's for you:

The Dragon and His Tail (not for politically correct old ladies, or kids, or people with heart problems)

LOL!

Well, uh, given all your chit chat on the Phillippines 'natural resources,' you might get a hoot out of these.

The B-17G, courtesy of the Confederate Air Force, Galveston TX.