sherpa
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Posts posted by sherpa
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It's not a hurricane.
Low pressure systems meander all around, and are driven by other pressure systems and the jet stream.
Hurricanes typically start from the west coast of Africa, drift southwest into the Carib, gain their strength and move NW.
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34 minutes ago, DC Tom said:
Didn't for Best, did it?
I'm not sure what your point is here, but if "doctrine" is, it is ridiculous.
The initial strikes against the Kido Butai were 'doctrinal," and not only useless, but suicidal.
Idiotic high attitude strikes against ships?
Ya. that works.
Dropping level dumb bombs against maneuvering ships?
Ya.
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Jesus Tom. as much as I admire your research on this, you fail to realize the reality of being in the seat during a war.
It is quite simple. "Doctrine," as you use the phrase, disappears the minute you launch.
You find the people who are trying to kill your people and you kill them before they do that, trying to stay alive in the process.
McClusky, out of fuel, found the Japanese fleet by chasing a destroyer.
He started the 10 minutes or so, that resulted in killing three Japanese carriers, and leading to the end of the fourth, effectively ending any Japanese offense for the rest of the war.
It can be argued, with great credibility, at least among those of us who have done this type of thing, that Wade McClusky, of South Buffalo, executed the single most definitive aggression of the Pacific battle of WWII, and I'm OK with that.
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1 hour ago, DC Tom said:
6) Dive bombers held their dives. They didn't move to avoid "mid-air debris" - partially because there usually wasn't such a thing, but mostly because they're diving to hit a target. Once they nose over, they're trying to hold their sight on the target and maneuver with it to put a bomb on it. Diving from 18k feet, they have 2-3 minutes to sight the target, put the reticule on it, figure course, speed, and rate of change of both (in their heads, no computers), and decide how to release the bomb. If they maneuver in a dive, they miss.
You absolutely move to avoid mid air debris.
It makes no sense to die holding a pipper on a target.
Dying is worse than missing, and you can readjust after avoiding a mid air.
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3 hours ago, DC Tom said:
Except McClusky screwed up. He was a fighter pilot who didn't know naval bomber doctrine (he was promoted to air group commander just before Midway, and didn't have time to learn). During the ultimate bombing of the Kido Butai, he was leading the scout bomber squadron in the low position, and should have flown on to bomb Akagi while the bomber squadron in the high position dove on Kaga (as doctrine at the time was one squadron per enemy carrier). Instead, he incorrectly dove the scout bombers on Kaga, while the bomber squadron correctly dove on Kaga as well.
Are you serious?
The man and his formation were out of fuel, spotted a carrier formation, attacked it and changed the course of the Pacific war.
He should have "flown on?"
The man landed with about one gallon of fuel after destroying a Japanese carrier.
Jesus, sometimes you try too hard to establish academic bona fides.
As an operator, I can tell you this, and you can dispute it as you will.
If you are out of fuel, as he was, and as a leader of a fairly large formation, he had to assume his wingies were even worse, and you see an enemy carrier, you destroy it and get home.
Simple, operational reality.
When you see a "high value unit," "doctrine" be damned.
You destroy it.
You certainly don't press on, looking for someone else and guaranteeing that your wingies will have to ditch.
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3 hours ago, CookieG said:
I've never looked to see if there was a McClusky Street, a McClusky Park or a McClusky statue in Buffalo. He certainly earned it.
The Us Navy did commission the USS McClusky, which served in the Pacific Fleet for years until it was ultimately used as a target and sunk as part of an exercise.
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22 hours ago, Tiberius said:
The Blue Angels were suppose to take a break, but Trump is having them fly over too. Costs? Who care, we can starve the migrant children to find the money.
This is truly an ignorant and disgusting suggestion.
The Blue Angels have a budget, like any other squadron.
I'm quite certain they can adjust any number of things to accommodate this, and it is part of their job.
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For a Western New York connection, and we have talked about it before, LCDR Wade McClusky, from Buffalo, was credited by ADM Nimitz with deciding the fate of the US carrier task force.
In short, though low on fuel, McClusky's decision to follow a Japanese destroyer steaming at flank speed led his formation to the Japanese carriers. He was serving as Enterprise's Air Wing Commander at the time.
To this day, the Navy's award for the most outstanding attack squadron is named after him.
Lesser known trivia about Midway. It was claimed as a US possession in 1867 by the USS Lackawanna.
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i hope they get it right and don't turn it into some stupid love story to attract women, as they did doing Pearl Harbor.
I really hope they give significant consideration to the points made in "Shattered Sword," which refutes a lot of the silly nonsense , and tells the true story from the Japanese tactical doctrine and procedural practices.
As a student of the battle of Midway, I can't wait.
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4 hours ago, Nextmanup said:
PS: In the above video, Commander Fravor points out that the incident directly or indirectly involved about 6,000 people on 2 different ships. He said he was one of the "20 most important people" of that group (being the commander of an air wing) .....
Just for clarity, it didn't involve 6000 people.
That would be the total compliment of sailors on those ships.
It would involve very few.
Additionally, he was never a "commander of an air wing,"
He was the CO of an F-18 squadron.
The one thing he certainly gets wrong is that he claims there are only two things truthful in the movie "TopGun,."
He doesn't mention that the Miramar O Club was an entirely accurate depiction.
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17 minutes ago, boater said:
The 60's were a significant period--delete some hippies and it would have been perfect.
Well, if we could forget about a couple of assassinations and widespread race riots.
But the 64 and 65 Bills were OK.
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5 hours ago, I am the egg man said:
The 1st Apollo mission burned out in a launch rehearsal, the astronauts in the craft.
Wonder how much mention that gets ? It should be a lot since they all died inside it.
There is a Memorial for Apollo One .
It is called "Ad Astra Per Aspera," "A Rough Road Leads to the Stars."
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On 6/23/2019 at 4:29 PM, Nextmanup said:
Where's Sherpa when we need him!?
I think he could help us make heads or tails of some of the HUD/FLIR stuff in these videos.
He has HUD in FLIR mode, so other than displaying some basic velocity and vector stuff, the HUD is displaying FLIR data.
There is one panel in the video that explains most of the stuff, but they don't explain the laser target designator data on the right, just below the center , or the DCLTR annunciation below the altitude display on the lower right.
All that means is that he has the HUD in declutter mode, and is not displaying scores of other data that would be in use during other weapons selections.
He is simply getting the least amount of data on the HUD in FLIR mode.
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11 hours ago, Hedge said:
For the armaments that are not used during flight, then are jettisoned before landing, are they merely dropped into the ocean and recovered? Are they equip with a self destruct mechanism? Are they fired and explode upon impact with the water? I can't imagine that they are left intact and lying on the ocean floor (or would some float?) without recovery efforts, since these are not things you would want other nations recovering and looking inside of.
It simply doesn't come up.
If you are carrying live ordnance, like bombs or other stuff, you are doing so for a reason, like bombing a thing behind a ship, which is towing it.
If you are carrying missiles, either air to air or air to ground, there is no problem bringing them back aboard.
In two cruises and 300+ missions, I never jettisoned anything.
The one thing I do know that would not be brought back aboard was the flares, but the only time I carried them at sea was for a fleet airshow, and I dropped them normally.
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3 hours ago, Cinga said:
Sherpa, ever wonder why Ordnance is a bit crazier that everyone else?
Napalm?
How old are you?
I never saw that stuff, and we never had it aboard.
Anyway, I loved our "ordies."
As you probably know, on a carrier the various specialties wear different color sweatshirts.
The ordies wore redshirts.
If they hadn't gotten to me prior to man up, they would do their thing, look up to the cockpit and give the hand signal with the shooting gun action and a thumbs up.
Back ashore, I knew they had worked their butts off for two days to get a walleye working.
Walleye is a TV guided bomb that uses a TV picture from a camera in its nose to allow you to lock what you want to hit.
It has two parallel horizontal and two parallel vertical lies. The "box" that is created is inside the four lies the aim point, highly amplified.
I really wanted to reward them with a good video when I carried it, so I locked up an RV on a north/south highway in the Owens valley in Ca, heading at me.
I locked him at about ten miles, and got kind of carried away trying to sweeten the video.
The video is transmitted back to the cockpit and you can sweeten the picture by slewing the box.
Anyway, at about one half mile and 300 feet, I see the thing pull off the road in a cloud of dust.
He must have seen me and gotten really scared and decided to pull off the road,
A fighter flying head on at you and really low and really fast.
The ordies loved the video, but I told them not to let it out, and I worried about the guy making a call for days.
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1 hour ago, Ol Dirty B said:
Well I can't. Because I know what I don't know. That was my only issue with his post.
None of us can definitively say it was over the hormuz or over Iranian air space that was the point of my post.
If it can be shown it is over international airspace, then a response is deserved even though I don't think we should be heavy handed.
I'm not sure what a war with Iran accomplishes. We've got to be smart and not take the bait as a country.
I don't mean this as left or right, I mean this as how the rest of the world views us. If we alienate this useless country, then invade, destroy and do what happened with Iraq, we're just creating another generation of enemies. Giving another reason for crap anti US propaganda.
We can all disagree and see different solutions. I just hope at least with me, and hopefully with others, we can see that people want to offer the best solution.
I'm not anti-American, I'm not a pacifist. I'm just try to be pragmatic.
EDIT: also nothing he said is a fact besides a 150 million dollar drone got shot down. As someone who'd like to cut down on government spending, I'd prefer those don't get shot down.
There is zero chance it was in Iranian airspace.
We are not going to invade Iran, and any talk about "alienating" them should have been had in the 70's.
Iran is an "Islamic Republic," and the people who are part of that "Islamic Republic" sailed that ship 40 years ago.
The majority of the people aren't interested in being an "Islamic Republic,,"
The leadership of rogue nations that attack things in international airspace or waters need to pay serious consequences.
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10 minutes ago, DC Tom said:
I've read that it does, but not from a reliable source. A2A in particular, since it usually has to withstand multiple cycles.
Makes a certain sense...but "makes sense" doesn't make it true.
I've been thinking about your post since I read it, and I can't really recall ever having an airplane that was loaded up on a previous cycle with air to mud and not downloaded.
We always hooked the sidewinders first thing, and loaded the gun.
F-14's did the same with sidewinder and sparrow.
I think AMRAAM is the same.
What most folks who aren't familiar with carrier aviation don't think about is that weight is a big thing.
So is drag when coming aboard.
Having a lot of dead weight in the wing pylons was a pain in the rear.
For those reasons, you always planned to get rid of whatever you launched with, ex missiles.
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Just now, DC Tom said:
Can't the shock of landing degrade weapon reliability, too?
Good question.
Don't know.
To your point, most of the stuff I carried ex dumb bombs was pretty sophisticated seeker head stuff, and the electronics guys would always plug into the seeker and test it before launch to validate performance, but other than air to air missiles, which were left on for a day at a time, most of the stuff was offloaded between cycles.
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25 minutes ago, CommonCents said:
You brought up something in an earlier post about jets returning to a carrier with ordinance. What’s the procedure for that? Are there conditions where they would shoot them into the ocean to make the landing safer?
Some stuff is no problem.
Air to air missiles, air to ground missiles like anti radiation stuff used to take out radar sites are not a big deal.
Dumb bombs are cheap and not worth the weight and risk of bringing them back aboard.
More exotic stuff, which is far more expensive, is worth it.
Things like flares, which is burning magnesium, providing one million candle power for night stuff, is absolutely not worth it, but fortunately, with the US's night capability, it isn't used much anymore, but would have to be jettisoned prior to landing.
Either way, the sailors that work the flight deck don't like weapons on the landing airplanes, and neither does the captain.
Lot's of bad things can happen.
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Glad to see an ill advised, reactionary, stupid response wasn't our course.
I'm more certain now than ever that what was called off last night was a cruise missile thing, which is very expensive and does little damage.
Cruise missiles have small warheads.
Kind of the big hat, no cattle thing.
Looks cool, but does very little to your adversary.
Still, there simply has to be a response.
We cannot allow the Iranians, whether it's their central command or rogue elements of the Revolutionary Guard to destroy our stuff in international airspace.
Going down that path has no good end.
I don't care if it's military, economic, UN driven or any other means, or how long it takes to do something, but we simply cannot allow this to be inconsequential.
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1 hour ago, Hedge said:
If you feel like sharing, I am curious about a few things. I really like to hear from those who have actually been on the front lines, as it's a perspective that can't ever be fully comprehended by those who haven't been there.
- Going with the 10 minutes timetable that has been mentioned, if strike aircraft were going to be involved (and were stationed in the immediate vicinity, much closer than 10 minutes flight time), how far into the process had it gotten? Would it be correct to assume that any pre-flight briefings had concluded, that individual targets had been parceled out, and that armaments would have been fully loaded? Would the pilots already have been in their planes awaiting take off, or would they have already been in the air?
- What would be the overall emotional sense of the pilots after getting called off? Relief? Disappointment?
I can answer some of that, but a guess at what Trump "called off" would be pure speculation.
First, you have to consider the source. Trump saying "ten minutes" is not something I put a lot of credibility in.
But, if that's true, it sounds like it was a cruise missile thing.
They are easy to abort because its just guys with easy and reliable comm sitting at launch stations, whether in the air, at sea or on land.
Calling off a really serious strike is a lot more problematic.
People often don't get the word.
To answer your question, from a manned aircraft strike package position, the airplanes would have been loaded and ready.
On a carrier it would have been hours before, up to about one hour..
Same with the air Force
Launch briefings would be very detailed, including tanking, (air to air refueling) plans, search and rescue considerations, post strike egress corridors to make it easier for AWACS or a carrier air wings early warning aircraft to know who was a friend or foe.
Specific weapons delivery timing and a whole lot of other things.
In addition, though the Air Force has an easier problem, once its launched a carrier strike force does not want to return and land with ordnance.
They can, but it is really undesirable because the force of a carrier landing.
Pilot are pilots. they get train to do this stuff and do what is necessary.
Still, once a significant strike plan is launched, its pretty hard to turn it off, another reason I think this was probably a cruise missile plan against Revolutionary Guard air defenses or other assets.
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5 minutes ago, Ol Dirty B said:
Do we actually know it was international airspace?
Yep.
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19 minutes ago, LeGOATski said:
What happened to the Expos??
Franchise moved to Washington and became the Nats.
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19 minutes ago, DC Tom said:
You took part in Praying Mantis?
I'd suggest that Iranian air defense in 2019 isn't quite the same as it was in 1988. But I'd also suggest that we'd take their AD system apart very quickly.
In fact, I'd suggest that would be the strongest acceptable military response to this drone shoot-down: take their air defense system apart at the seams. Nothing else, just degrade their capability to the degree that they know they're vulnerable to follow-on strikes if they try anything else.
Lots of stuff here.
No I did not fly during Praying Mantis.
The guy who stuck the LGB down Sabalan's stack was a dept head in my squadron and good friend of mine-still is by the way.
He stayed in and dropped the thing as CO of his squadron on Enterprise. My old squadron.
You are quite correct in the difference in the Iranian air defense system now vs. when I was doing this stuff.
It was US built I-Hawk at that time, and is now Russian and a newer generation.
A big problem, but we could handle it.
That isn't how it will probably play out though.
There are two scenarios, one, which I think is likely and was foreshadowed by Trump today, in a small comment regarding a rogue element of the Iranian military, is that the US thinks that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is on their own on this, and that's what I think the response will target.
The other issue is the known mission of taking out the nuclear capability, and that, I'm certain, involves a massive bunker buster strike at a few locations that are underground.
That involves the full capability of US air power, with a huge jamming component to deal with the air defense system.
If the US feels confident they can jam the air defense, or get through it by stealth, they will not need to take it out, they will simply strike the underground facilities.
If they don't think they can do that, they will take out out, but that will take a few days.
I don't think we're there yet.
What I think is that if any Iranian combatant does anything that is remotely aggressive, like those stupid small boats that they run in and near the Strait of Hormuz, and they have in the past without response, they will be destroyed with immense response designed to send a message.
Not simply the guns from a destroyer taking out the belligerent alone, but maybe the boat dealt with by a US combatant, a but its harbor and sister ships eliminated with an air strike.
24 minutes ago, reddogblitz said:I thought the reason we had drones was because they didn't risk American lives and if one got shot down, so what.
Starting a war over a flying computer would be really dumb.
Can't yall see they're trying to get us to jump in? Why help them? Don't give them what they want. Again, no Americans were killed.
I hope Trump is smarter than this.
Have they found those WMDs yet?
Is communism still spreading over the far east?
Because the right of free navigation in international waters and international airspace must be protected.
Don't need to "start a war."
Need to defend the right.
The Strait of Hormuz and adjacent waters are extremely important, and need to be defended as international water/airspace.
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2019 Hurricane Season
in Off the Wall Archives
Posted
I'm aware.
What is your point?