I guess not having a tank made my previous post a waste of time.


Cool...

why?

You must've cross posted, you don't have a previous post in this thread.

I guess it's time for this:



This email apparently originated from a young kid who sent it to CNET (Chief of Naval Education and Training) wanting to know how to prepare himself for a future career as a fighter jock:

To CAPT XXXXXXX:

Sir,
I am DJ Baker and I would appreciate it if you could tell me what it takes to be an F18 fighter pilot of the USN. What classes should I take in high school to help the career I want to take later in my life? What could I do to get in the academy?

Sincerely
DJ Baker



From: XXXXXX, X.X. CAPT USN

Anybody want to help this poor kid from Cyberspace?

"Charlie Oscar"



< A worldly and jaded P-3 Pilot, LCDR "Jay Beasley", rose to the task!! >

Dear DJ,

Obviously, through no fault of your own, your young, impressionable brain has been poisoned by the superfluous, hyped-up, "Top Gun" media portrayal of fighter pilots. Unfortunately, this portrayal could not be further from the truth.

In my experience, I've found most fighter pilots pompous, back-stabbing, momma's boys with inferiority complexes, as well as being extremely over-rated aeronautically. However, rather than dash your budding dreams of becoming a USN pilot, I offer the following alternative:
What you REALLY want to aspire to is the exciting, challenging, and rewarding
world of Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance. And this, young DJ, means one thing...the venerable workhorse...THE P-3 Orion!

I can guarantee no fighter pilot can brag that he has flown a mining run at 300
feet above the water, at 300 knots, while trying to calculate a means of justifying an emergency divert to Pattaya Beach, Thailand, avoiding shipping,
and yelling at the TACCO, all while eating a box lunch, with the engineer in
the back taking a piss and the navigator puking in his trash can!

I tell you, DJ, Maritime Patrol is where it's at!

Where else is it legal to throw hazardous material out of the aircraft, and not
even give a crap what Greenpeace and the other tree huggers think! No where
else can you crawl in the back of the aircraft and take a nap because you are
so hung over that focusing your eyes takes too much effort!

And talk about exotic travel? When P-3's go somewhere, they GO somewhere
(usually for 6 months, unfortunately). This gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself in the local culture enough to give any natives a bad taste in their mouths for the USN and Americans in general, not something those jet jocks can do from their airport hotel rooms and 3 day port visits!

As far as recommendations for your course of study, I offer these:

Take a lot of math courses. You will need all the advanced math skills you can muster to enable you to calculate per diem rates around the world; and when trying to split up the crew's bar tab so that the 3P really believes he owes 85 percent of the whole thing and the NAV believing he owes the other 20.

Health sciences are important, too. You will need a thorough knowledge of biology to make those educated guesses of how much longer you can drink beer before the tremendous case of the shits catches up to you from that meal you ate at that place that had the belly dancers in some God-forsaken foreign country whose name you can't even pronounce!

Social studies are also beneficial. It is important for a good Patrol Plane
Commander (PPC) to have the cultural knowledge to be able to ascertain the exact location of the nearest nudie bar in any country in the world. Then be able to convince the local authorities to release the RADAR operator, after he offends every sensibility of the local religion and culture.

A foreign language is helpful, but not required. You will never be able to pronounce the names of the NAVAIDs in Italy, and it's much easier to ignore them and go where you want to anyway. As a rule of thumb: Waiters and bellhops in France are always called "Pierre", in Spain it's "Hey, Pedro", in Puerto Rico it's "Juan", and in Italy, of course, it's "Mario". These terms of address also serve in other countries interchangeably.

A study of geography is also paramount. You will need to know the basic location of all the places you've been when you get back from your deployment and are ready to stick those little pins in that huge world map you've taped to your living room wall, right next to that gigantic wooden giraffe statue and beer stein collection.

Well, DJ, I hope this little note inspires you. And by the way, forget about
that Academy thing. All P-3 guy's KNOW that there are waaay too few women and too little alcohol there to provide a well-balanced education. A nice, big
state college would be a much better choice.

Good luck and see you on the Data Link! (if it works!)

LCDR Jay Beasley

Is that Travolta's 707 back there?

 

Second to last post on page 4, right above your last post on the same page.

 
 

Sorry, I went back through the entire thread twice.

Where was that deployment?

Wow, I didn't know Charlie Sheen was a member here.

Who flies the P-3 out of Dallas-Love Field?  Where do they go?  Gulf of Mexico?  Whats their mission, ASW or WoD?

Probably not a VP squadron, might be Customs, they have 2 or 3 they fly.



 

Spent my 1C cruise summer of 93 stationed at NAS Sigonella with the now defunct VP11. One of the best summers of my life. All of my middy friends spent their summer on gray boats in the Atlantic while I was lying on an island in the Med, PT'ing and partying with the EOD squad (they kick ass a water polo btw), interspersed with 12hour missions off the coast of Bosnia below 500'. We were told we were the first squadron since Vietnam to carry live munitions into a theater, not sure how true that is but I think it was regarding the air-surface stuff, we weren't sub hunting up in the Adriatic and had Harpoons. Some of the planes had Cast Glance. Seems forever ago.

Live near Savannah, GA and there are always Orions up here out of Jax doing touch and goes at Hunter AAF

Jerry's Kids

Exactly what I was thinking

I was supposed to do my 1C cruise wih a VP squadron in Kef in 1989, but I got a nasal infection and couldn't val salva - damn!
So I got stuck on the Germantown LSD-42.

I flew those SHARP GUARD missions over the Adriatic from Sicily in 1994 on my second deployment.
I was in VP-5 and we were deployed to Kef, but supplementing VP-16 with three crews and two planes in Sicily.
We were carrying torpedoes and Rockeye cluster bombs.
Some of the VP-16 planes had just gotten the Maverick mod so they were carrying those rather than the Rockeye.
The Cast Glance birds were flying overland missions, we stayed feet wet the entire time.

That was all well before the AIP upgrades.

Nice pictures.

Yep, that's when I was there at the beginning of Sharp Guard in June 93. I don't remember why but the IT's wouldn't let us fly over so we had to fly around the boot every damn time so it added a good bit of time to and from station. It was cool sometimes though when we would come around the boot and turn west above the clouds and it looked like a carpet of clouds and then Etna poking through the top like an island in the clouds, navigation was easy there :-)

We were feet wet all the time too, flying "boxes." Seems like there were a few missions with Mavericks as well, long time ago on the brain though. I just remember it seeming really cool for the first few weeks, then it just became a PITA to have to taxi out to the hot spot to arm before take off, then tax back and sit at the hot spot after a 12 hour mission and wait for unarm so we could taxi back in. Made for a long night.

Propellor Mechanic (Aviation Machinist's Mate) on P3s @ AIMD, Jacksonville, FL from '82 to '86.

That's back when we were indepently expeditionary, had flying ordnanceman and the crew would load its own weapons.
We'd taxi down to the hotspot and load the torps with a hand cranked winch.
The ordies would hand hump the Rockeye.
We got it down to science, like a pit crew.

Shitty thing was downloading those torps after coming back from a 10-12 hour mission.

Since we were the augment crews we had a sweet schedule for 2 months.
Ready alert, fly, 36-48 hours off - with no ground jobs.
We would barbeque during the ready, never launched and we'd rent a car and go out to Taromina and stay the night during the down time.
Got very familiar with the beach, the tram, the hotel at the base of the cliffs and the resaurants up on top.
Loved the blood orange juice.

Topless beaches packed with young Europeans!!!  

Uh, not always a good thing

haha, yep, like I said, one of the bets summers of my life. Taormina was great, we went cliff diving, and "sight seeing," there. Also remember going down to see the amphitheater ruins in Syracuse. 4th of July was a weekend long party at the other base, have some VERY embarrassing pics of a buddy back at the BOQ that had too much vino and then had more.

We had few duties as middies, is was a cake summer. If we weren't flying we mostly just got to hang out where we wanted, that's how I met the EOD guys and getting in trouble with them.We spent most of the time in shorts and a tee shirt so all we had to do at night was throw on a flight suit to hump it from the BOQ to the galley for midrats every night if we weren't flying. Pretty sure I gained weight that summer. I ate better, mass produced, Italian food in the galley than I can get at most restaurants I've been to here in the States since they brought the locals in to cook.

Taormina is kind of a nicer vacation spot there, I don't remember seeing much there that I didn't like, the coast is gorgeous too.

I have worked with a few p-3 guys in 07 and in 10/11 when i was in astan, one of them happened to be the same person who remembered me

ETA: One time I was watching Tv, fliping the channels and a porn show came on. I said OH SHIT, and changed it right away, this was on a deployment with a Navy Lt, the P-3 LNO, she was smoking hot. She said put that back on, i want to see people fuck.

It was definitely a destination spot.
There were French, Dutch, British, etc. eighteen to twenty somethings all over the place.  

In the Q we'd unplug the base cable TV and fasion a "phased array" antenna from coat hangers and aluminum foil to pull in the local channels "late night" programming.

Some of the guys bought some porn tapes in town and learned the difference between NTSC and PAL the hardway.  

Lucky.
In Masirah all we had was Arab TV, including the Iraq channel before we went across the border.
Depressing.

 

Repost since it didn't show up the first time.

Its USN marked.  I think there is one there, but there might be more.

Which Jerry's Kids were yall thinking of?

Jones or Lewis?  I suppose they could be one in the same.

You could always hope the stall speed of any opposing aircraft was higher than war speed for an Orion on a mining mission.  I'm pretty sure we learned in WW2 4 engine propellor bombers flying low and slow were not conducive to a long and happy life.

My wife's mother's cousin was killed in a take-off mishap in a PBY-5A on Ascension Island, in Mar '45