I’ll be passing through PHIK next week, staying a day before heading on…
@toonces:
So Rimpac is getting ready to kick off and the jets have been going crazy at Hickam lately.
I was out yesterday and saw two interesting things. First, a flight of F-22s took off, presumably to tangle with a pair of F-15s that had taken off earlier (along with a KC-135). I was paddling in as the F-22s returned. As usual the flew the break upwind abreast of one another, broke left at the same time. However, lead must have intentionally or inadvertently hit his thrust vectoring or something. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. He rolled into a 90 degree’ish bank like normal, passed crosswind, and then the jet just…pivoted…for lack of a better word, almost right in place. It was extremely unusual, he just did 90 degrees of turn practically in-place it seemed like. Now dash-2 is following lead but does his turn like normal. He levels out crosswind, then banks again and levels out downwind (like normal), and then banks back towards the runway to correct his line up on lead since lead cut so much off his turn. I thought maybe I imagined lead’s turn, but when I saw two have to correct I knew I had seen something unusual. Quite cool.
Second, like I said, the F-15s took off before the F-22s. They were out for my whole 2-hour session, so they must have gassed up at some point as they usually only stay out an hour. Anyway, I’ve noticed that when the F-16s or F-15s come out here to play with the F-22s they carry external tanks (obviously) for the trip out, but they also seem to always keep the tanks on when they go out to scrimmage. I would think that degrades their performance significantly. I wonder why they don’t unload the externals while they’re here and then put them back on for their trip back to the mainland? I can only guess that they’re worried that if they take the externals off, they might get a malfunction when they reattach them that causes them not to work properly, so you’d have to fly a team out to fix the jet at that point. Or maybe they’re only running intercepts and don’t need the extra maneuverability. Or maybe carrying empty externals is no big deal, but I find that unlikely.
Well, that’s it I guess.