Posted on 04/20/2010 9:05:16 PM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
Imagine flying a fighter jet at a speed of sound and reaching out for your radio switch only to discover that the control you’ve hit unexpectedly triggers your speed brake.
That points to just one of the many differences pilots in the 120th Fighter Wing have had to ask their bodies to memorize as they’ve switched from one aircraft to another over the last year and a half.
“It’s a game of milliseconds and split decisions that you have to make up there,” said Maj. Matt Ohman. “We can fly the plane in relatively few hours, but to be able to employ it is a relatively different thing.”
Ohman — call sign “Bad” — is one of 21 pilots with the Montana Air National Guard who had to be retrained to fly the F-15 Eagle after amassing more than 1,000 flight hours on the F-16 Falcon, a smaller, single-engine aircraft.
“These guys were at the top of their game. They’d just come back from a combat deployment in Iraq, and now they’ve been asked to be beginners again,” said Lt. Col. Jim McComas, director of operations for the fighter pilots.
(Excerpt) Read more at billingsgazette.com ...
Ping!
His callsign is .... “Bad” ?
Is this a joke ?
How interesting — I am sure the transition is difficult but rewarding.
God, I envy these guys.
Sadly, I had 2 problems that kept me out of the cockpit:
1) Bad vision
2) Acrophobia
Other than that, I was good to go!
Bad Ohman.
>>His callsign is .... “Bad” ?
Is this a joke ?<<
Short for Badass?
F-16 ping.
The major’s last name is your clue.
>>The major’s last name is your clue.<<
Bad Ohman (someone already caught it). Some nights I am just not on the ball.
Thanks!
Talk about me not on it — that was YOU that caught it LOL!
a bad... “omen”
to hit what should have been a radio switch only to find yourself in a sudden deceleration... would be unnerving all right. you’d think there would be something like a standard configuration for all fighter cockpits.
Yes and it's on you. Sit up a little higher in your chair and it won't go so far over your head.
“you’d think there would be something like a standard configuration for all fighter cockpits.”
That will never happen, even in the same model of aircraft (let alone different models). Not that it wouldn’t be desirable, but different planes do things in different ways. Same for cars, boats or even people.
Certainly in the civilian world, it was an extreme rarity that I flew an aircraft with identical cockpit setups during the same day (but I’m talking Boeings here). One can standardize the aircraft (unlikely), or you can just hire/train better pilots. Different carriers approach this conundrum in different ways. Some, when mixing different versions of the same aircraft model (ie. 737-100, -200, -300), will actually not allow the use of an advanced system because it is not “standard” within the fleet. In the past, a very prominent carrier did not allow their pilots to use VNAV or RNAV function in the more advanced Boeings because it was not available in the older aircraft. Of course, this is a ridiculous abuse of standardization leading one aeronautical wag to quip that if the altimeter cover glass was cracked in one aircraft in the fleet, it should be cracked in all the altimeters in the fleet. ;-)
The only time you’ll ever have a common cockpit, is when you only have one aircraft.
They should stop whining. They're lucky they're flying at all.
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