Here. Right over here. I’m afraid of those.
B2 left a note in the T-28 post below about weather phenomenon being both beautiful as well as terrible – which, now that I think on it, reminds me of some of the folks I met in DC last weekend.
But anyway, trolled from out of the musty archives, here are a couple of tales about weather that contributed in no small measure to the forrest of gray hairs adorning the noggin of your humble scribe.
The first, entitled “In Flight Refueling” was mostly about how we refuel around the ship – a survival skill for a Hornet pilot. It does seque into how hard it can get when Mother Nature acts up.
The second is one of my earlies tales, the somewhat inappropriately named “Neil Diamond Lied!”, which morphs from a perfectly banal story about motorcycling in the wet to falling into the heart of a huge thunderstorm.
So. Weather, if it do ya.
Update: Meeting the (un)smiling folks from the DoD IG subsequent to the Navy’s witch hunt investigation of Tailhook ’91. It was foggy, in JAX.
Hey!! I was nice. I was actually on my best behavior.
Whose afraid of T-storms? I sure as @#$% am. Getting within 20 nm of one of those things in the bug-smashers I fly in is a recipe for self-dispersed aluminum confetti.
I like to watch thunderheads from the safety of the ground. From cumulous to mature to dissapating, it only takes an hour and ‘a terrible beauty is born’.
With 38 years of aviatin’ in my past, I’ve got a couple of stories about weather. Problem is, I don’t tell nearly as well as you do. Wish I had your way with the words.
Capt,
Yeah, I’ll stick my hand right up there too. I’ve got a healthy respect for bad weather, having been severely battered and bruised one fine late evening and early morning trying to get back into Lajes. To this day, anytime I get a little chop I get some momentary clamminess on my palms. I’m not to proud to admit it. Put the fear of God right into that one did….
But anywho, yeah… and didn’t the bad guys know it, and knew just where to park their boats when we were lookin’ for ‘em too. Ask any ASW guy about how big a factor sea state and thunder-bumpers are to his mission.
Respects,
Not a pilot – but hate thunderstorms with every nerve ending. Flew thru one in an 18 seat, twin engine puddle jumper in the Carribean when I was about 11 years old. Watching lightning dancing off the wing tips while the plane shuddered, heaved and went thru a ballet of pitch, yaw, roll – repeat – the entire 25 minute flight. Put me off flying in general for YEARS afterwards. And never got over my fear of thundestorms either – on the ground or in the air.
I marvel at how you can so casually retell the tales Cap’n.
I’m guessing I’m one of the terrible ones… or one of the innocuous ones. I’m not sure which would be better. Terrible because then no one wants you around or innocuous because then no one notices you’re around. Heh.
As for weather – after a few flooded basements – I fail to see the beauty in many storms, but that’s just me. *grin*
Thanks, Captain, that was a timely post for me… I had an IFR training flight scheduled last night for Williams and had to cancel due to clouds not unlike those pictured behind the T-28 and “blowing dust.” Anyone who’s been in Phoenix this time of year knows just how much dust they’re talking about when they say that. I’m too old to go flying into those kind of conditions by choice in anything, much less a 1370 pound helicopter, but I always get depressed when I have to cancel a flight. A little reminder of just how much I don’t want to be in those conditions makes me feel lots better!
I’m a SWO for a living, but a pilot for fun. Scariest weather story for me was my instrument rating check ride. I’m VFR under the hood, and the weax went to hell. Examiner is vectoring me around the scud, and we ended up flying back to Ahoskie at about 150 ft. He wouldn’t let me file IFR, because I was PIC and didn’t have a rating, yet. We flew past a water tank and it had the name of the ‘wrong’ town. Doh! Finally saw the end of the runway, and couldn’t see past the numbers due to this huge wall of water. On roll-out, plowed into one of those storms with baseball sized raindrops, and felt our way back to the ramp. He signed me off, then loaned me his car to drive home to Va Beach. Had to drive back the next day to get the plane.
Thanks for pulling those up from the archives. I love to hear about things from the other point of view. Always have been – not many of my shipmates read through every issue of approach like I did.
I imagine you all were happy to have that tanker up their orbiting above the boat. I just remember long, long nights – looking up and knowing that as long as I could see those lights up there, we hadn’t recovered everybody. I was oh so happy when they came home and we could post-op the gear and catch a little shut eye before we were up and at em for the first event that would only be a few hours away.
Me too. Although not emanating from the like experiences as you & above commenters have expounded on, not that I wouldn’t be if I had. In the job that I’ve had, lo these many years, a few moments of well placed lightning strikes can result in DAYS of frustration returning a once perfectly functioning electrical distribution system to normal. Seeing anvil shaped clouds hanging about, leaves you with a sense of impending doom, kind of hits you right in the abdominal region.
It’s nice to enjoy a good thunderstorm when you are visiting another area, though there is always that nagging feeling that some poor sap, in the environs you presently occupy, is suffering a nightmere he can’t escape.
Crewed a delivery cruise along with both my brothers of a brand new 40′ J boat during a gale from Rhode Island to Castine Maine… At the time, I had an 8 month old and a 2 year old being babysat by my sister in law. We made it through, lots of puke and broken gear. My sister in law said to me “yesterday, I decided I would marry your husband if you and my husband didn’t make it through”…
I’ll never forget it and, I spent the better part of my life crewing boats.
This is not to mention serfing down 20′ waves out in the gulf of Maine, everyone tied onto the boat, both of my brothers screaming like they were on LSD, and one of them turning to me and saying “don’t worry, I’m insured for a million dollars.”
That really was the trip of a lifetime…
Several years later I “tried out” to crew for a 50′ boat that was going from SoCal to HI. We went out for the day and just the coastal waves made the majority of the crew hurl. It was so bad that the side of the boat needed to be washed down when we got back in.
Needless to say, I decided I didn’t want to crew the boat to HI. Never mind that it was a “vegetarian” cook.
The boat was sponsored by a community college in SoCal. Someone called me a few weeks later. I told them that I was not willing to serve on a boat where the first mate was hurling over the side within sight of land…
I flew (as a passenger) from B’ham to DFW one evening in thunderstorms all the way – a miserable trip. We had to stay away from the terminal for about 45 minutes after we landed because of lightning strikes loving the plane’s tail. Had I known the pilot felt like you guys, I wouldn’t have been so calmly reassuring the first time fliers on board.
I’m not one bit fond of lightning since I came home from work one day a couple of years ago to a collapsed carport and everything electronic in my house totally fried, among many other weird things. It had struck a big tree beside the carport & blew out one of the brick support columns. From the evidence, I’m extremely lucky the house didn’t catch on fire – lots & lots of smoky spots around the entire house.
Well, I live in Florida, the lightning capital of the world. You betcha I never go out, without a weather eye to the sky.
I think I adverted here, a while back, to an account of a Naval Aviator who ejected from his F8U in the middle of a thunderstorm over Ohio or some similar benighted place, and went up and down in that thing for an hour or two before it finally let go of him.
The hailstones beat him up right badly, I think.
There was a book written about that, called “The Man Who Rode the Thunder”, I believe.
I’d really like to read that, but I think the thing is rare and out of print