Author Archives: Pinch

The Air Boss is the Almighty on an aircraft carrier, controlling just about everything aviation-related on the ship and in the immediate vicinity. This is the placard that he reads from into the flight deck/ship announcement system (called the 1MC) … Continue reading →

Tucked in tight with Camelot 106. This was no doubt on a cross-country transit to Fallon, hence the ferrying of the two orange TACTS (Tactical Air Combat Training System) pods. Also called ACMI for Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation, these are … Continue reading →

Sometimes you just put your camera up and take a snapshot, hoping something will come out. When we flew at night from the beach (NAS Oceana) it was usually to get some carrier landing practice (known as FCLP for Field … Continue reading →

Inverted flight, for anything much more than a short bit, can cause problems with a jet like this. Primarily, fuel and oil systems are made for one G or close to it flight, meaning gravity is an important contributor to … Continue reading →

A hundred years ago yesterday my great grandfather was killed, on 9 August 1918, in a wheat field near the French town of Amiens, outside the village of Caix during the Hundred Days Offensive which made up the last battles … Continue reading →

Been busy with trying to get the house ready to get on the real estate market here in northern Virginia. We moved in here, the Pinchettes and I, in late 2003 after I spent the summer in the Gulf (Qatar) … Continue reading →

Live Fire Test and Evaluation, or simply LFT&E as it is called in the test and evaluation world.  Any new weapons system needs to go through a testing program where it is subjected to a small sample of what an … Continue reading →

A nice close up of the combat business part of an F-22 Raptor fighter, the US Air Force’s premier 5th generation fighter jet.  I took this at an air show at NAS Patuxent River a few years ago. Even though … Continue reading →

An aircraft carrier is a small (some would say not so small) city on the sea. Physically, the ship is over 1,000′ long, weighs close to 100,000 tons and has over 20 decks or levels, from the keel all the … Continue reading →

…or Dissimilar Air Combat Training.  There are myriad reasons why you would want to train against and hone your air combat skills against different aircraft, the primary one being you never know what sort of aircraft you will come up … Continue reading →