The Flight Deck

NORTH ARABIAN SEA (December 25, 2009) Lt. Jon Sunderland dresses in a Santa suite while directing aircraft operations aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68) Christmas Day. Nimitz Carrier Strike Group is on a routine deployment to the region. Operations in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations are focused on reassuring regional partners [...]

This is a follow on to “Event Four” and “Event Six“… Again, most folks are real, one callsign and one real name are changed for obvious reasons. Enjoy.  If my grammar is poor, please don’t tell my mother.  Thanks. —- Event Nine We lost two events recovering from the emergency pull forward.  If it were [...]

My daughter graduated from Navy Boot Camp on February 27th.  For those occsional Readers who’ve been around for a while, you may know that this is a journey that started way back in the days post 9-11, when a 12 year old asked the question, “Dad, could I go to the Naval Academy?”  The rest [...]

I really liked it when this place was humming, and I’m disappointed at the scarcity of posts these days.  Makes you appreciate how hard Lex works to keep us entertained. I’m gonna try to do my part… I started this a long time ago, after posting a story about Event Four.  I have one request [...]

While posting about agriculture I remembered a tidbit of information from my youth, that the most dangerous job in the world was on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.  Taking a fairly distand second was being a farmer.  Which, I was, in a youthful and immortal sort of way, so naturally the Navy seemed [...]

Sometime this summer an orange and white jet that bears a passing resemblance to a guppy or bullfrog, will drop out of a white-hot Arizona sky to the scorching pavement at Davis-Monthan AFB – aka the Boneyard. It will be the final flight, at least in Navy colors, of an aircraft that almost all of [...]

I thought a sea story might be appropriate to my first post here on The Flight Deck. When I finished my apprenticeship training, I had orders the the Vinson.  She was already underway.  I proceeded to travel from the US to the Philippines. Was bumped off a flight to Singapore and instead ended up on [...]

I went over to the Midway Museum early on Friday for the Vets for Freedom event and found one of the best parts of a visit to the old girl–a docent who served on Midway when she was active. And this one was an aviator. Bookmark to: Hide Sites

“…everybody’s going to make it.” – Thomas K. Jones, 1982 Counterveil vs. Countervalue… Decapitating strikes… Winning a protracted nuclear war… Nuclear calculus… These, and other topics were points of not just mere discussion, but deep, serious study and analysis in the early 1980′s by, among others, a small cohort of graduate students at the Naval [...]

Being, like all good denizens who inhabit The Flight Deck, a loyal fan of Rhythms, I was just wondering …  How much would you pay for what appears to be the civillian version of a Barney Clark?  I dunno …. looks a little pricey to me. Too bad, so close and yet so far away… Bookmark [...]