More NAS Pensacola!

Found an F-4 Phantom II at the NAS museum.

Some stuff opened.

Alas, no boarding ladders.

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Here's an FJ-2 Fury(top), the Navy attempt at making an F-86 into a capable carrier plane.

Didn't really work due to landing gear and other issues, but it does look nice in blue. And that's an F-11F Tiger below.
Another shot.

The F-11 Tiger is famous for being the first jet aircraft to shoot itself down.During a test-firing of its 20mm cannons the pilot fired the guns while in a dive. Eventually the cannon rounds slowed down but the jet did not and as it crossed their path, it was struck by several and damaged, ultimately crash-landing. The pilot, Tom Attridge, survived, but I wonder if he didn't have to paint his own picture on the side of his plane in the space normally used to denote enemy "kills".

And this is a FJ-3. Not am FJ-2/F-86 at all but a redesigned version that was as capable as any of the F-86 variants.

I would like one of these.

Here's my Corsair again.

And an F6F Hellcat.

By now, Paige was starting to get plane fatigue so I had to let her play in the Blue Angels cockpit for a bit.

Found an Me-262, too.

Can't have a Navy museum without a Douglass Skyraider, right? So here's one.

And a Japanese N1K2 "George" is here too. Great plane, but like the Me-262, came along too late to make a difference.

And here's a Curtis P-40.

I'm thinking Paige is now really getting over-planed...

But there's so many more to come. I really had to make it up to her later, but for now, this is MY trip to Mecca!

FALLON!!

So I couldn't not be in NW Nevada and not go to Fallon NAS, home of the Navy's "Top Gun" program now, could I?

I drove up to the gate of this Navy facility way out in the desert only to be challenged by some rough and ready MP types who let me right in and gave me directions to all the cool stuff to see once I gave them my ID and dropped Old NFO's name.

The actual name of the field is Van Voorhis Field, named for LCDR Bruce Van Voorhis.

And the plaque bearing his Meal of Honor citation is flanked by these two gate guardians, a Vought A-7 Corsair II (left) and a Douglas A-4 Skyhawk (right).

There's also a beautiful Douglas A-1 Skyraider just inside the gate.

And across the street is a slick-looking North American A-5 Vigilante.

And here's a Grumman F-14 Tomcat, a pane so cool even Tom Cruise could not screw that up when he pretended to fly one on the movie Top Gun.

They have lots of really cool warbirds on display in an open-air park here. I spent a fair bit of time walking among them and I was the only one there.
Here's a Grumman A-6 Intruder.

They have another Douglas A-4 too.

There's another A-7, too.

And a Vought F-8 Crusader, the "last of the gunfighters".

And naturally there's a McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom. There has to be.

Apologies is some pictures look close-cropped or don't show both sides of the aircraft. As a guest here on this active duty installation, I don't want to photograph and publish pictures of the many, many communications and radar antennae that are all around. Erring on the side of caution for Opsec at the expense of numerous photos. Sorry.

More to come soon as I can. Many, many more.

Skyraider Love

After Old AF Sarge's wonderful blogpost last Friday where he featured the Douglas Skyraider, I felt compelled to dig into my own modest photo archives and do a post on the same aircraft that Aaron of The Shekel and I saw this past summer at Thunder Over Michigan.

At Thunder over Michigan 2013, there were Skyraiders. Big, beautiful bad-guy-smacking Skyraiders. (click on the pics for close-up awesomeness.)

There was this AD-1.

And this AD-4.

There was this AD-5W four-seater, sitting there looking lethal.

And there was this AD-5W, shown here getting a clean-up in between flights. Got to get all of that soot away from the exhausts.

And they flew, too. Here's one leading a flight of three, with an A-4 Skyhawk on one wing and an F-4U Corsair on the other. radial engine harmony accented by jet roar.

Then the Skyhawk and the Corsair went away, and more Skyraiders came up. All four were flying for a while, and it was beautiful.

Bye!

And yeah, it goes without saying that I need one of these.