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Thread: Real Pilots?

  1. #11
    Before Nuclear non-proliferation had it's own office and South Africa and Israel were rumored to have homemade nuclear weapons I put on a brand new Bonanza Airlines DC-9-10 and flown to McCarren Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada. This was my first jet flight ever and I was impressed how the pilot just sort of looked down among the mountains, sighted the airfield and descended to land smoothly like, in my mind, a carrier pilot. With me was Wing Commander Stanley Hubbard of the RAF (retired) a member of the American Helicopter Society, the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and undaunted I found out later by deep soup in the Carolina mountains. As we sought out the house of his contact, the Commander of the USAF Fighter Weapons School, we could look up and see the blinking beacons and after burner flames of Thunderchiefs taking off and headed West. The next day we checked in at the gate as visitors and soon were in the ward room with a bevy of F-100 and F-105 Wild Weasel pilots with one or two 100 mission patches on their shoulders. No Misteys here. Name:  basic airframe F-105 real wing CAR1  CAR3 CAR5 CAR7 002.jpg
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  2. #12
    I have to face the reality that I'm not a real pilot after first trying to fly the Beech King Air 350 in the Japan Exhibition flight where I did not really want to spend over 4 hours of stick time and then yesterday found the AI just goes straight and in a jump to FINAL descends slowly and then crashes into trees without sight of the runway at Haneda. Fortunately, for my opinion of the MS-FS 2020 I had already flown from Osan Korea and SFO to Haneda previously with the A320neo and a BOEING 787. I have seen Yoko ONO's box car at the DIA in Detroit and need no special inner warmth for Nagasaki.

  3. #13
    I recently saw in a news letter from the McDonnell-Douglas-Boeing retirees Association that Robert (Bob) Watzke had passed away. He worked in the Stability Control Section of Aerodynamics and in my era was the keeper of design flight derivatives on the A-4 "Skyhawk." With second moment inertial data from Ted Trugood in the Weights department I was able to mockup a 6-degree of freedom module for the ABS-III computer model I had modified from the McDonnell ABS-II they had built for the USAF FX competition and given to the USAF royalty free.

    Terry Moore a new hire from the McDonnell Houston co-operative program when he was in College brought the Euler and eventually Runge-Kutta solutions structure to Douglas Long Beach. I have never flown an airplane so do not have the mental and small muscular coordination references that use the semicircular inner ear and it's canals. My references are from riding a desert Hare and Hound motorcycle with Russ Schleeh and at first John Correz.

    You can expect me to have the ballistics down from leaning and sliding and even rather spectacular jumps both from the rolling terrain and from unexpected soaring after hitting a berm crosswise. Even Jack Simmons a TT rider at Ascot and my dealer was impressed!

    The 6-DOF module was built on the new TSO terminals with online access to the IBM-370-75 in VM and later VS using FORTRAN-II and JCL with a job card all by now on IMS disc and no more handfuls of cards. The module was tested and the output plotted on a Gerber plotter with Terry Moore having had formal training on the CALCOM plotters of that era.

    While in 1974 Francois Reider from Computer Graphics had created a display mode for the basic flight and tactics with skeleton graphics on a IBM 2250 Vector tube and then the SC-4260 and later SD-4460 at Missiles & Space for hard copy print by 1977 his wife had gone back to Washington state and he returned to Boeing and the actual mating up of ABS-III and 6-DOF got blocked at the Editor/Assembly debugging level, the imitation paper tape flight parameter and atmospherics and dynamics traces allowed a Navy tactical trainer with either two or one engine to allow the choice of the Hawker-Siddeley "HAWK" to become the McDonnell-Douglas "Goshawk."

    It's right over there on my art cabinet now in diecast white metal at 1/100th like all the USAF airplanes I worked on that are still in inventory. I had hoped it was in 1/72nd scale to include with the USMC/NAVY airplanes I worked on that are up on one of my bookcases and in the real world still in inventory.
    Last edited by 2ndsegment; 03-04-2021 at 01:41 PM. Reason: I remembered the name of the manager in the Weights Department.

  4. #14
    In dealing with the F-4 forum where many members are family or maintainers I had a key date for when the back seater in the Air Force had to be a pilot. Because this date was not comprehensive for all Phantom crew members in all services it seems confusing because the Airforce Phantoms remained beyond 1968 when the ground forces began to leave Viet Nam and remained in Thailand and operated in nearby countries also. US. Navy Phantoms remained on aircraft carrier ships off shore until the peace treaty was signed in 1973. Exactly, when USMC Phantoms or crews ceased to operate off carriers I don't know. Why is my information so sketchy? Get a copy of the Pentagon Papers. Look up government agreements about what sort of aircraft were allowed to operate in Southeast Asia after Dien Bien Phu. Learn about the origins of the OV-10. Ponder how the AD and T-28 got into the inventories of local countries in SEA. Research, the use of the F-8F "Bearcat" as a troop transport. Then look really hard at 1968 and how the role of navigators and the other roles they played were going to be taken over by avionics and how simulators were going to replace all the procedures trainers built by training commands. Then examine the collapse of the total scheme as celestial navigation was dismissed by INS and the controlled temperature INS was taken over by strapdown first for missiles and later by laser ring gyro and then radio took over to get out of the airplane as GPS. Amuse yourself as LABS toss bombing for nuclear and SHRIKE delivery was first replaced by CCRP and CCIP as computers and stable platforms made possible accuracies of 10 mills all to be taken over by PAVEWAY and PAVE TACK laser guided bomb delivery in clear day and occluded conditions with IR using pods. 3mils accuracy?
    Last edited by 2ndsegment; 03-16-2021 at 06:05 AM. Reason: I kept remembering the I in CCIP as Intercept based on the F-106 mechanization ,not Impact.

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