The carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower is underway in the Atlantic conducting carrier qualifications for naval aviators, but it’s the unglamorous and often tedious work below decks that keeps the fliers going. A zillion things can go wrong with an aircraft — especially aircraft that operate in a maritime environment and bounce onto aircraft carriers. That requires checking everything from the big stuff to internal leakage. All the work has to be tracked. Then there’s the support for the support — the ancillary work. These unsung efforts underpin what everyone is hoping for topside: safe flight operations.
Browsing: Training
The quiet diesel-electric submarine Carrera slid through San Diego Bay on Sept. 1 for the start of a three-month deployment to the United States, where the Chilean boat will train with 3rd Fleet’s ships, subs and aircraft. Carrera’s presence in a U.S. port – it calls the submarine piers at Point Loma Naval Base its short-term home – marks the fourth time the Chilean Navy is sending one of its small, stealthy subs to play with the U.S. fleet. The goal of the Diesel Electric Submarine Initiative, of course, is for the U.S. Navy and its foreign seagoing allies to train…
I remember a 1990-ish visit to a Japanese submarine base and being dumbfounded to see the subs flying the rising sun flag off their stern masts. Dumbfounded, because being, ahem, of a certain age, I associated the flag — a red disc with red and white “beams” extending outward — with the aggressive World War II-era regime that launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in an effort to exercise total dominance over the Pacific. Its use was banned in 1945 following the surrender to the United States and its allies, but many Americans don’t realize that it was re-adopted…
The path toward the Sept. 30 disestablishment of 2nd Fleet, the command that oversees all Atlantic-based naval operations and the training and certification of fleet battle groups, and its merger with Fleet Forces Command, runs this week through a “merged staff functional assessment” — a four-day exercise that aims to evaluate the soon-to-be merged command’s ability to react to a crisis event. It would be interesting to see that evaluation. Concerns about the merged staff’s ability to do so were raised internally by senior officials involved in the planning of the move, according to an internal Fleet Forces Command report…
No, we haven’t lost our sense of decorum here at Scoop Deck. FRUKUS 2011 is an invitational naval exercise now underway off the Virginia coast involving ships from Russia, France, the U.K. and the U.S. Navy. “FRUKUS” is an acronym for all four nations — we’re guessing it rhymes with RUCKUS, which means a commotion — but it’s a bit more controlled than that denotes. It’s a two-week interoperability exercise … but let’s get to the pictures of the ships, shall we? ‘Ere’s the British ship, a destroyer … The French entrant, a frigate…
The recruits at Great Lakes had a visit last week from the Cubs. The picture above shows Cubs’ top-prospect reliever Andrew Cashner talking to future sailors on Jan. 13. Things change at Great Lakes from year to year: stress cards or no stress cards, boots or tennis shoes, utilities or NWUs. But the one thing that remains constant is the coke bottle, Jerry Lewis-esque eye wear the recruits call “BCGs” or “birth control glasses.” Cheer up, guys. It’s only eight weeks.
The carrier Carl Vinson left Naval Air Station North Island, Calif., on Tuesday for three weeks of training followed by a scheduled deployment. Here are some photos the Navy took as sailors boarded the ship and got under way. (Click for high-resolution versions.)
There is just something about Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training that is, well, photogenic. The grueling, six-month training course at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, Calif., is no vacation at the beach. Mother Nature at times makes it much more interesting. With ocean temperatures in the mid-60s – that’s relatively mild for the Pacific Ocean along Southern California – the chill isn’t as much a worry as the surf itself, as what students with Class 286 encountered during “surf passage” training Oct. 27. It’s known as “surf torture” for good reason.
