Flew the club Cardinal out of Montgomery yesterday afternoon for the flight to Hanford, California. The shoreline VFR transition route took me through LA’s Class B airspace and, having flown direct to Ventura to leave the Class B, I was free to pick my way across the low mountains guarding southern California from the central, San Joaquin valley. (For GA pilots planning cross-countries, AOPA‘s Internet Flight Planner is a lovely tool that, among other things, can show weather, winds aloft and route, both overhead and vertical profile. It’s nifty, and well-worth the annual $39 subscription service.)
Culture changes with geography out west, and as the densely populated coastal enclaves fell behind me a broad, and sparsely populated rural plain unfolded beneath me. The terrain is deceptively sere – the valley is one of the most productive agricultural regions in America – and breathtakingly hot.
N217AF is not much to look at, as a club aircraft she’s been run hard for many years. But she was honest and upright with me for a little over two hours, giving 23″ of manifold pressure at 8500 feet yielding about 130 knots of indicated airspeed or maybe 150 knots made good with light winds aloft.
It beats churning up the Grapevine.
After an uneventful landing – the best kind – and wrapping the bird up for the night, then out State Route 198 to NAS Lemoore, California. It’s been over eight years now since I last left Lemoore in the rear view mirror, and I haven’t looked back much. All things change, but some change less than others.
I tried hard to find something to feel nostalgic about as sights from the old days spun out behind me – flat farmland and dusty, hard-bitten hamlets, the false promise of the murky Kings River, fat mourning doves perched on power lines. But it wasn’t any good – there are many places I might go once the kids are all successfully launched down track, but Lemoore is not atop that list.
The air station itself has undergone a number of superficial changes. The old naval hospital where I spent too many mornings with my elbows on the table lies eerily deserted, with a shiny new facility across the street. On base housing has been totally redone, and looks less like the old cinder block public housing nightmare than someplace you might actually want to live – a neighborhood. Somebody had a lot of MILCON to burn, and since Lemoore is considered borderline hardship duty, it was money well spent here.
Had dinner with a pair of old Hornet jocks who are still hanging on, good men from the old Navy, navigating their way towards the final few turns to the pier. Caught up about mutual friends, talked with our hands over a few adult beverages. A lot of flying talk.
We used to fly a great deal more than the kids do today, back in the day. It isn’t that the missions have gotten any easier – they haven’t – it’s just a matter of what can be afforded. There’s a fine art to managing the knee in the curve of training hours, proficiency, effectiveness and safety. It’s my sense that naval aviation is right up against the margins.
They’re doing it by being much smarter about training: When I was a junior officer thirty hours per month was considered about right, and you could get that by flying your daily sorties and going on a BFM cross-country down to Miramar, throwing yourself up in the air three times a day on Friday through Sunday, finding out for yourself what worked and what didn’t. With the youngsters today flying less than half as many hours monthly – and some air wings taking months off entirely post-deployment – they have a much more rigorous preparation process, with value being wrung out of every moment.
I had a small part in developing and teaching the standardization process that enabled that rigor, but there are times when I almost regret it. We’ve taken a portion of the sheer joy of flying fighters out of the game and replaced it with a kind of monastic devotion. What used to be the Navy biker gang has instead become a clan of Shaolin monks, living in a remote citadel, heads immersed in text books, chanting out ritual incantations to employment timelines, factor range and energy rate transitions.
I guess these are always somebody’s future good old days. I’m just glad I had mine.
Lex/
And we in the USAF thought we were up against the margins of safety when they limited us to 30 hrs/mo in the early 70s. And we didn’t even have carrier quals to soak up the time! All of that THAT Navy time equivalent we devoted to ACT/ACM (take your pick of acronym) and/or CAS tng–and we STILL didn’t think it was enough! But they’ve got enough in the budget for “community organizers” like ACORN, right?
VX, I recall the ‘Oil Shocks’ in the early 1970s brought our profligate fuel usage and flight time to a jarring reduction. No more ‘get airborne to dump excess fuel in the A4G underwing tanks in a ten minute flight at MAX IAS & MAX Continuous Power at LOW LEVEL’ that all the newly qualified Midshipmen just wanted to go for! Sigh. In excess of 30 hours per month were soon down to 20 h/m or less. The incorrect fuel could not be re-used so dumping it in flight over ocean nearby was the most ‘productive’ way to ‘lighten the load’ (usually for new pilots under training for specific sorties).
The leaching away of the Good Deals worries me.
Nobody denies that the military life was, is, and always will be a hard one. But there used to be Good Deals to sweeten the pot. Flight time. The occasional cross-country. The flight in the back seat for the maintenance troop. Space-A travel. All the things that Tom Wolfe called ‘the monkeypod life’.
These days, the Good Deals have been eliminated. Which leaves pay as the only enticement. And paying better than Blackwater is going to be quite expensive.
It makes you wonder if maybe the Good Deals were cheaper than the alternative…I guess we’ll get to find out.
Mike M./
The elimination of “good deals” began long ago. It’s just that the process moves in fits and starts–but unfortunately in only one direction. Used to be that every USAF base had it’s own T-33 to do–well, pretty much anything it wanted to with it–give desk-bound pilots/navs x-countries to exotic climes to maintain flt pay, etc., you name it. All those had gone away by the time I entered the service in ’66. Then along came Jimmy “hair-shirt” sweater-wearing Carter and his cost-saving measures. The things he ruined in the military in regards to the VITAL things like steaming time and flight hrs are too numerous to mention–but he savaged what few nice perks were around too. Those who read here of a certain age who were stationed in the UK or spent much TDY/TAD time in London my well remember that grand old AF O Club, the “Columbia Club”–a beautiful old white Mansion just off of Bayswater Rd opposite Hyde Park just down from the Lancaster Gate tube station.
Old-timers will remember the Trafalger bar between the dining room and the lounge/tv room, the “Tartan Bar” in the basement and the grand two-room bar and dancing area with band and small circular dance floor on the second floor replete with balcony overlooking Hyde Park. Well, he closed THAT grand old place in a “cost-saving measure, too.
Which, as you say leaves only pay–which one can get more of in many places. The armed services as a profession is not just a 9-5 job–it is (or was)a unique way of life. As Napoleon once said, you can conquer the world with a few bits of ribbon. Take the ribbons away but leave the death and drudgery and the pay will never be enough. “Man does not live by bread alone.” or, alternatively, “It’s the little things that count.”
As someone also said once about even the “volunteer” force and pay rates as sole inducements: “Money alone will never entice a man to cross an exposed bridge under heavy automatic weapons fire.”
My Navy aviation days spanned Nixon and Carter – Things were pretty ugly by the time I got out in ’79. This too shall pass, but sadly the service will lose a lot of people it really needs before things shift to the better. Just like last time.
The damage is cumulative, and the services never recovered from the last time. We’ve had a lot of wear and tear since Reagan rebuilt the service. Bush I and Clinton began tearing it all down, and Clinton took the “Peace Dividend,” and Bush II piled on a lot of wear and tear that hasn’t been repaired, and the Obamanation has no intention of fixing anything, and will tear down most of the rest.
15 hours a month isn’t enough.
I read a science fiction story years ago that was set in the ‘after times’. The navy-like organization to which group one belonged to had ‘ships’. Thanks to the decline of interest in defense or exploration the gear was old and worn and spares were rare. Group two (the groups new nothing of each other, having been separated by chance or evil, I can’t quite remember) Group two painted or tattooed their ranks and qualification badges on their skin, and chanted maintenance manuals and procedures like shamans repeating the story of the beginning of grass, because they were where the tip of the spear was when the guys at home lost interest and stopped sending parts and changes and routine communications etc.
All ended well when the two groups accidentally met each other in time to thwart evil designs or evil fates, but still, it is starting to look predictive….. except that part about the ships being available in run down condition… scraping exotic metals is good for Gaia.
Joel,
That sounds like “The Spectre General”, a short story by Theodore Cogswell, that I have from Blood and Iron, book 3 in Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War anthology.
Ditto having the good ol’ days under the belt. Hope your son, or my daughter, can find some, since our stories fuel their search.
Very true about taking the joy out of flying! When we transitioned from Tomcats and moved from Japan to Lemoore, we were shocked at what the Rhino community had become. Instead of JOs clamoring over open seats and flights, they were avoiding them like the plague. No O Club scene or squadron life outside of normal business hours. Very different way of doing business for sure.
I hate to say it, but that sounds like sour grapes from a former Tomcat guy that said “These JOs will never be what I was.” What were they, six years your junior? Same generation, same crowd. Maybe if their leaders and mentors had ‘Shown them the ways’, they would have been more inclined to participate.
Flew to Grissom AFB today (recently opened to civilians) for the adventure that was in it. Flight following through the MOA. I can’t say that Air Force living arrangements looked that attractive but they did fly jets so maybe there’s the offset. The trip was very much worth braving the Airmet for moderate turbulence. The scenery- nothing like the views of California. Flat like a pool table through the heartlands.
Hey Lex,
When you do these trips, could you be so kind as to publish, after the fact, your flight plans so that we (I) might recreate your trips on my flightsims (XP9, FS10).
Thatd be a kickintheass….
Check out flightaware.com. Put the N# (217AF) in and you can see the route up and back.
AWC, As one who uses flightaware alot, I surely do feel stupid. Never occurred to me! Musta been a bad ice cube that numbed my brain…..
You guys don’t really know do you? I’m not saying that you’re not right, just that you truly don’t know how far we’ve fallen, perks wise.
My grandfather reported to his first post after graduating USMA in ’32 and he and his bride got one of those really nice houses that Colonels live in today along with the maid, the groom and the cook all provided by the army.
Even when my father was a battalion commander he had a driver who picked him up at home every morning in his jeep and drove him out to his battalion’s area and brought him back. When he got to be a general all of the Olde Army perks were gone. Congress was spending its time investigating FOGOs who used their aircraft inappropriately. There was one general who, after alighting from his plane, slapped his forehead and exclaimed that he’d forgotten his clubs. His aide sent the aircraft back to home station to bring back the general’s clubs. The Army COS removed the general from his assignment within the week.
I remember reading about the USAF Reserve or possibly ANG C-141 crew that took along an 8 passenger van on all their monthly cross country training flights so that after they landed they could drive to the basketball games of the NBA team they liked. That was probably late in the ’80s. I remember it because they got busted for doing it and I just couldn’t figure out why it mattered.
The good old days when we were fighting in Europe and Korea and Vietnam with a draftee Army and the perks were based on the pre-war army of Sam Damon and Courtney Massengale.
But I wouldn’t place the perks in the same category as flying hours or steaming hours. Those aren’t perks.
I was able to get back to Lemoore in January of ’06. When approaching from the East on 198, it was obvious that things had changed. I left there in March of 1989 to go back to VA-128 at Whidbey.
The most obvious was the new housing. I lived for four years at 182 Vigilante Avenue. It was a four bedroom, two bath concrete block mansion! 1,600 square feet. The most unique feature was the switch in the kitchen/laundry room. It allowed you to run either the dryer or the air conditioning, but not both. And the A/C was controlled to have certain shutdown periods during the summer, about ten minutes out of every hour. We put an umbrella clothesline in the back yard in the recepticle provided. By the time everything was hanging, the first duds up were dry in July and August! And board stiff!
I had a surgical procedure in the old Hospital but it was nice to see the new one and the Aviation Physiological Training Facility on the next block. At least the Jet Mart was still in the same place.
The new Exchange and Commissary were really sharp, though. I was back a few days later for a haircut. Regulation is still the order of the day and cheaper on station.
And I also made the trip to Armona to get the wife two large containers of Raven Seasoning. Goes well on tri-tips marinated in Bud or Heiniken for 24 hours.
As a Family, we enjoyed our stay at Lemoore. My kids still remember it fondly, ever though they were in grade school at the time. Eyes getting misty at this point.
Charter member, AIMD SeaOpDet 46964, 1987.