Scoop Deck blogger Lance M. Bacon just completed a 24-hour embark aboard the carrier Harry S Truman. This is the play-by-play. HT2 Anthony Picillo and his team stands in front of the 10-foot hydraulic line that shut down Cat 3 — but for only two hours, thanks to the ship’s metal shop. (Photo by Lance M. Bacon) 1930 Catapult 3 is down. Heat and vibration cracked a hydraulic line that wraps around steam lines. The failure is not even visible to the naked eye, but is quick to announce its presence when the line ramps up to 3,000 psi.…
Browsing: Aviation
Scoop Deck blogger Lance M. Bacon just completed a 24-hour embark aboard the carrier Harry S Truman. This is the play-by-play. Capt. Jay “Spock” Bynum talks with Scoop Deck as closed circuit TV gives live feed of an F/A-18 trap over his shoulder. (Photos by Lance M. Bacon) 1630 Scoop Deck is in the office of Capt. Jay “Spock” Bynum. This is a pretty cool meeting – some 20 years ago, Spock and I were aboard Independence as she kicked off Operation Desert Shield. I was with the Marine Detachment and he was a lieutenant with the VFA-113 Stingers. Small…
Scoop Deck blogger Lance M. Bacon just completed a 24-hour embark aboard the carrier Harry S Truman. This is the play-by-play. ABCS (AW/SW) Ernest Taylor (left) gives Scoop Deck a full tour of the flight deck during flight ops (Photos by Lance M. Bacon) 1445 Scoop Deck has hooked up with ABCS (AW/SW) Ernest Taylor, the safety LCPO. We spend the next 45 minutes traversing the flight deck – 4.5 acres of controlled chaos.
Scoop Deck blogger Lance M. Bacon just completed a 24-hour embark aboard the carrier Harry S Truman. This is the play-by-play. The view from the Mini Boss’ seat in Pri Fly as Rockhound launches from catapult 1. (Photo by Lance M. Bacon) 1400 Scoop Deck has copped a squat in Ready Room 7, home of the VFA-105 Gunslingers, based out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va. This F/A-18E Super Hornet squadron boasts a storied history, and a number of “nuggets” – junior pilots on their first operational deployment.
Scoop Deck blogger Lance M. Bacon just completed a 24-hour embark aboard the carrier Harry S Truman. This is the play-by-play. 1200 We’re boarding the C2-A Greyhound COD (Carrier Onboard Delivery) that will take us to the ship. Flight time will be about an hour. Last week, Scoop Deck wrote about the first-class treatment inherent to flights with the Chief of Naval Operations. This isn’t quite the same. The cabin is hot, cramped and wreaks of hydraulic fuel and exhaust. And I love it.
If you are in Manhattan this weekend, the hot spot will be the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, which will host the welcome home event for the “Legends of Aerospace Tour.” The tour has brought famous aviators and astronauts to visit military stationed in Europe and Southeast Asia. Participants include Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, the first and last astronauts to walk the moon, Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, SR-71 Chief Test Pilot Bob Gilliland and the last Air Force Pilot Ace Steve Ritchie. The team most recently visited the carrier Eisenhower in the Arabian Gulf on Wednesday, where…
It’s no secret the naval fleet has more gaps than O.J.’s alibi. The Navy is lacking surface vessels, especially amphibs. Submarine and aviation gaps are on the horizon. Even the carrier fleet will drop below requirements for at least three years beginning in 2012. Adding the crushing blow on this already sizable dog pile is the fact that SSBN(X) will cost $80 billion — which the Navy doesn’t have. Unless Congress coughs up the cash, the shipbuilding budget will be cut by half for a whopping 14 years. Ouch. Since it’s very unlikely the Navy will get everything it needs,…
A few weeks back, we wrote a story about the future of electronic attack aircraft in the Navy and Marine Corps. That story made a reference to preliminary talk of the Marine Corps eventually using the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for electronic warfare. But I was over at the annual Electronic Warfare conference this past week and bounced that idea off an EW expert from the Joint Electronic Warfare Center and he called the idea “ridiculous.” The jamming signals emitted by the EW pods are “loud” and make the aircraft easily identifiable on any radar, he said. Why would we spend billions…
In this week’s paper, we reported a story about how the Navy is thinking of making the V-22 Osprey the Navy’s next Carrier Onboard Delivery aircraft — colloquially known as the COD. I had a chance to speak to a C-2 pilot this weekend, as I flew from Norfolk out to the carrier Harry S. Truman. The pilot noted some drawbacks for the Osprey — it has about half the range, it’s a little bit slower and it can’t pressurize its cabin. The pilot said he’d love to see a completely new aircraft, specially engineered for the COD mission –…
President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates haven’t really said anything about the push to buy more F/A-18E/F Super Hornets. And that silence may be telling. Now that summer’s over, Congress is back in session this week. And lawmakers may finally hammer out a deal allowing the Navy to buy a new batch of Super Hornets. So far, the Super Hornets haven’t gained any of the attention that some other hot-button aviation issues have. For example, Gates recently threatened a White House veto of the entire defense bill if it includes cash for a extra F-35 engine that he…
