>>>>20 years ago I think the cost figure was $150,000 per hour of flight
>time.<<<
>
>I believe it was later 200k/hour for op. costs. Tomorrow or Wed I'll be
>over at March :-)
>
The Blackbird was undoubtedly a beautiful and sophisticated military
aircraft and I wish that I had had a chance to get to know it and to
photograph it, but...
Unfortunately, not all the most sophisticated or photogenic aircraft were
that exciting to fly. I'll bet that the average Blackbird pilot was bored
f**tless as we say in England. The sorties were long and required very
little poling (I expect that it had a good autopilot). It was recce stuff
(aargh!). The sensors were probably interesting to begin with, but they
soon became tools to be used. You never flew in formation, always as a
singleton. Your briefs and debriefs were probably with boffins rather than
with your pilot "buds". And... you couldn't tell stories in the bar on
Friday nights at Happy Hour. UAVs can pretty well do the stuff that
satellites miss nowadays - look at the performance of the Predator as far
back as Bosnia in 1992.
A friend of mine flew F117s (the first British pilot to do so) and he spent
his weeks away from his family, and then could not speak to them about what
he had done when he saw them at the weekend. A very clever system, with
good photogeneity but boring to fly for very long I would guess.
Vulcans were the classic: a wonderful shape, a large and fantastic machine
to watch being displayed, but it was full of people who weren't pilots (2
navigators and an electronics operator as well as the 2 pilots) and it was
ancient technology. It was not fast (subsonic) and it had been designed as
a nuclear bomber. That must have been boring.
Now F16s and F15s... there is only one "chair" (only the F15E has a
backseater). They go very fast (albeit M2.0, not M3.0) have wonderful
agility, radars and other sensors. They carry missiles (no boring recce
stuff) and they look cool when you need them to and you tell all your
friends what you do and how cool you are ;-).
OM content: I still have some photos that my wife took of me in a little
F16 with her little Olympus Infinity Twin - refuelling from a KC135 -
excellent quality and a nearly foolproof camera with fast lenses (OM P&S
cameras always seem to have faster lenses than their competitors).
My point is: well nothing really, just reminiscing ;-) Sad bit: my F117
friend died in a Hawk while displaying at Bratislava a few weeks ago. He
was doing a barrel roll and stopped pulling for a few seconds and the
barrel turned into the far side of a loop, from too low to recover :-(.
But he loved flying so he died doing what he enjoyed ;-)
Love and Kisses to all you SR-71 fans ... yes I would visit Robins or March
if I had the chance. I loved visiting Robins back in 1989.
Chris
_______________________________________
Chris Barker <>< mailto:cmib@xxxxxxxxxxx
Box 2, Officers' Mess,
RAF Brueggen, BFPO25, UK.
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