Blue Angel FA-18 Walkaround

my name is lieutenant commander jerry darin my call sign was jd which is pretty boring just my initials i did have a few other call signs along the way but those are classified i had the opportunity to fly and serve as a naval officer and naval aviator for 13 years and nine of those 13 years were flying variants of the fa-18 hornet i flew the a through d models which is the legacy hornet and then i also have about 100 hours in the enf models which is the super hornet the successor to the legacy hornet a total of about 2 000 hours flying hornets 325 or so carrier arrested landings and the last three years of my active duty time i had the honor and privilege of flying blue jets as both left wingmen and slot pilot for the united states navy blue angels so today we're going to take a little walk around take a look at the blue jet i'll talk a little bit about mission capabilities and some of the systems also try to point out some of the unique aspects of the blue jets and some of the modifications and then some of the some of the tools that we used as blue angel pilots to affect a really impressive air show so we'll start uh here behind this panel i won't open it up it's not too exciting it's just um it's a series primarily of circuit breakers uh the only time i really use this was if i was on a cross country before i left it uh at an airport or a base i'd always pop this open pull the canopy circuit breaker so no one could come in and get inside the airplane let's talk about the landing gear for a little bit right now again this is a navy and marine corps airplane and as such is designed for carrier operations so if you compare this sort of side to side with an f-16 and f-15 and f-22 the first thing that probably is going to jump out at you is the landing gear this is big beefy landing gear okay i mean this thing look at the size of this strut and and this trailing support it's massive uh if you compare this again to say an f-15 or 16 their strut would probably be about the same diameter as this launch bar so and the reason that is is you know you're coming in at max carrier approach weight of 34 000 pounds your approach speed is 141 knots and so your closure is pretty significant and your rated descent is about 700 to 750 feet per minute on descent it is a controlled crash okay there is no flaring right there is no flaring and so the amount of pressure and stress that this gear not only the nose gear but the main main mounts have to take is uh is significant so it adds a lot of weight adds a lot of heft to the airplane but it's a prerequisite for carrier operations if an f-16 tried to land an aircraft carrier the gear would probably just shoot right up through the wings and it'd be done so so let's talk a little bit about carrier operations for the launch one of the most critical components is this piece of gear called the launch bar so that's controlled inside the cockpit by a switch and once the aircraft is positioned following the taxi director's signals they will give you a signal this is the signal and that means extend the launch bar so you reach down extend that they'll have you taxi up a little bit further and then it just drops down into what's called the shuttle the shuttle is connected to the steam catapult and that's your primary source of propulsion to go from zero to anywhere from 160 to 180 knots in about two seconds so it is an e-ticket ride it is the greatest thrill of a lifetime and it never gets old nighttime's a little different because you're getting catapulted into the abyss it's like jumping into a black bowl of ink but daytime cat shots are the bomb they're the best so this is the launch bar really critical component to carrier operations this is also critical this is the angle of attack indicators or lights and it's used externally for the landing signals officers which is a group of pilots that are stationed on the port side of the aircraft they're in in the aircraft carrier they're in communication with the pilot most of the time nothing is ever said it's called ziplip most uh aircraft operations around the ship are done without anyone saying it a single word during the daytime night time's a little bit different so the lsos who are stationed on the port side of the ship have the ability to see these lights and this gives the lsos an indication of whether or not the airplane and the pilot are flying an on speed approach so navy pilots fly on speed angle of attack as opposed to indicated air speed and the reason that is is in the f-18 8.1 degrees angle of attack is is the optimum it gives you two advantages number one uh at that airspeed at angle 8.1 degrees angle of attack you're you're in an optimal uh air speed regime for control you're not so slow that you're close to stalling but you're not so flat and fast that the hook has a good chance of skipping the arresting gear so 8.1 is the is the optimum angle of attack so if the if the airplane and the pilot are flying at optimum aoa this center light this amber light is going to be lit up and the pilot has the same series of lights just to the left of his periphery so as he's flying and scanning lineup and scanning the meatball which provides glideslope information out of the corner of his eye he wants to see that constant amber light if he sees a flicker of green he knows he's getting a little slow if he sees a little flicker of red he's getting a little bit a little bit fast so that information is is critical for the lsos as they're judging his approach both his glide slope his uh his lineup on center line uh as well as his optimum angle of attack so once in a while you know you get a little too slow you get a flash of green if you don't fix it right away lsos are probably going to come up and give you a little power call just just to help you hey you're getting a little slow the hornet is great though it's super stable great at capturing 8.1 degrees alpha you can actually cheat a little bit on that because you can pull up a maintenance sub page on the multi-function displays and you can uh it's really not designed for this but once you pull up the right page you can set your trim to 3250 as the magic number hands off and it's going to perfectly capture 8.1 degrees alpha so it's uh it's really pretty easy in the hornet to maintain on speed aoa all right uh you know again big beefy gear you've got two two nose uh nose mounts max tire speed here is 190 knots typically won't see that in carrier operations if you're doing training up in you know fallon nevada high hot summer day big loadout of of maybe mark 84s you might be seeing 185 at nosewheel liftoff so you get pretty close to 190 in the right conditions but 190 here 210 on the main mounts all right moving around this is the canopy door canopy access so up and down um you know real nice for if you're on a cross-country and you just need to have access to the canopy uh most of the time the crew chiefs are handling this ecm antennas uh you've got pedostatic here obviously that's got pedo heat as well here's your angle of attack indicator uhf antenna uh more uhf or sorry more ecm antennas i overshot the the gun access door uh we're not gonna open it up right now in in the blue jets the gun is actually removed uh and it's replaced with a smoke tank so it's filled with linseed oil which is uh biodegradable and then that pumps into the exhaust we'll take a look at that here in a little bit and that's what creates that nice plume of smoke during the air show has no tactical reason at all it's just for uh for show and that's activated inside the cockpit i'll show you that a little bit later with using the chaff flare switch so it's replaced to uh to to make the smoke come out the back end so that's the gun uh the gun bay we'll talk a little bit more about the gun in a second all right moving around uh this is really important right here this screw holds the entire airplane together take that thing out it's history obviously not um okay you can see the uh the cannon there the vulcan cannon uh holds 578 rounds of 20 mic mic it can be shot in both low mode and high mode and that's selectable in the in the cockpit low mode 4 000 rounds per minute high mode 6000 rounds per minute typically in an air-to-ground mission you'll use the low mode in air-to-air missions typically high mode 6000 rounds per minute so do the math on that you know you really only get five or six seconds of trigger squeeze but when you're when you're throwing six thousand rounds a minute downrange doesn't take too long to tear up a wing or take someone out so housed inside the the nose cone is the the radar the apg-65 later versions where the apg-73 slightly improved slight improvement over the 65. terrific radar the f-18 was designed from the ground up to be a multi-mission both fighter and attack and the radar does a terrific job of supporting all those missions air to air it's phase array radar it's great at detecting long long range threats can support a variety of of missiles air-to-air missiles that we'll talk about in a second talked about the gun earlier the air-to-ground mode of the gun is is incredibly accurate radar-guided not guided but radar solution is provided and and you can throw some some pretty tight shots downrange in air ground mode it's also got a great uh air-to-ground mapping mode for picking up targets especially in hard to locate areas especially before uh the advent of gps and the incorporation of gps we had to use that air-to-ground mapping capability to you know maybe find a bridge and then and then know that you know from the end of that bridge 1.2 miles at you know a certain degree was your actual target so easy to find the bridge on the radar and then you input the offset and then all of your systems the radar the forward-looking infrared would slew over and pick up the uh pick up the target so the air ground mapping capability was was really important especially before we had gps also has a very good surface search capability to detect surface threats ships primarily and you know the mission incorporates so many different weapons we'll talk about that in a second but again the radar is designed for multi-function air-to-air air ground anti-surface close air support all kinds of great missions uh moving back here again another another aoa probe pedo tube more ecm here's your fuel access panel so that's typically handled by either the you know the ground crew or when you're on the aircraft carrier a lot of times during initial carrier operations we would do what's called a a hot seat and so you know if you hadn't been to the ship in you know two or three months you're a little bit rusty it's a very perishable skill you go out you knock out your arrested landings you leave the airplane running shut down the right engine or correction shut down the left engine so you can drop the ladder and then they would plug in the hose top it back off and then swap out the pilot so that way the maintenance crew didn't have to do a turnaround inspection and you just kept the thing running the whole time so gas is gas is good all right fuel doors hf antenna this is the holdback i didn't talk about that earlier and this is again part of the carrier operations that plugs into the the holdback which is on the aircraft carrier itself and once enough thrust is applied both with full power or afterburner plus more importantly the the shot of the catapult it actually breaks the holdback fitting and that's what sends you down down the catapult stroke so it's a it's a little piece of i'm not sure what's made out of some sort of alloy but it's perfectly designed and engineered so that once the right stress is put on it it breaks in half and it's obviously one time use only uh and then as soon as the airplane launched you see those guys throw the the unused porsche or the used portion over overboard all right moving back this is your obvious your intakes we'll talk a little bit more about the engines later again big beefy gear here suitable for carrier landings you can see how you know with this offset trailing gear like this a lot of the shock from that impact is going to be absorbed through a rotation and then you know this snubber is going to going to pick up a lot of that sort of a shock absorber 210 knots max speed on the on the main mounts um again the speed that you pretty rarely see you've also got incorporated here uh these tie-downs so this is you know really important on the on the aircraft carrier for tying and chaining this thing down on the deck of of the aircraft carrier you've got pad eyes everywhere so no matter where you park you can hook a chain up to this thing hook it up here and there's points all around the airplane that do similar things and sometimes when you know you're facing a really serious sea state and you're taking green water over the bow of the ship well you got to strap these airplanes down because they're not inexpensive and so having all those hook points or correction all those tie-downs is critical to securing the airplanes on the flight deck this is uh this is what we call the cheek mount so there are nine stations on the hornet for a combination of air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles uh external fuel tanks um and uh and targeting pods so starting from the left to right you know station one is is the wingtip and then you've got two internal stations on the opposite side of the airplane you've got a similar cheek station typically is going to be your forward-looking infrared pod their targeting pod normally the center station is going to be an external fuel tank and then this station typically is going to be used for an air-to-air missile if if it's used at all an amram can slide up in there an aim seven sidewinder and then you'll have other hard points here typically again this is a blue angel air show jet so you know no fuel tanks no pylons it's it's slick it's waxed it's uh it's a it's a g machine but in a normal mission or training configuration you typically have at least one or two pylons that would be mounted here and here and on those pylons you could have anything from dumb bombs to air-to-ground missiles air-to-air missiles you name it all the various ordinance i think the hornet carries more different types of ordnance than any other aircraft in navy marine corps air force so because it can do pretty much every mission about the only mission you can't do is anti-submarine warfare um even air-to-air tanking is now capable of the new version of the super hornet it's not a real exciting mission but it's nice to have that organic capability to refuel um then walking all the way out here this is this is station nine uh this the only thing you really can put on here is a an aim nine sidewinder which has the ability for uh using the helmet mounted cueing system so you can literally be pointing that direction look this direction using the helmet mounted cueing site you can force the heat seeker of the missile to follow your basically your eyes and you can lock off lock up a target off bore sight you don't have to actually turn the nose and point it to him and get the the seeker on it like i had to do back in the day and so you can do that slew the seeker there lock it up pull the trigger and then off she goes so it's it's pretty pretty effective so on a carrier at sea there's always um there's always a shortage of space right you always need more room on that flight deck and uh especially when you've got 15 or 20 airplanes that are getting ready to come down and land you got to get these airplanes parked off the side clear the the landing area and so you need to stack these things up like cord wood and by having this ability to fold the wings so right here this is the seam where the wing folds up so that buys you you know about another five feet on each side so another 10 feet so it reduces the the lateral displacement by about 10 feet that's controlled inside the cockpit just to pull and rotate and then the wings fold up obviously when you fold those things down you want to make sure that that's properly seated there's actually we call them the beer cans it's an indicator that pops up so that when you extend the wings the the beer can still sticks up but only until you you know completely seat and lock the wing fold mechanism then the beer cans are are hidden so it's always one of the last checklist items as you're taxiing up to the catapult double check make sure those beer cans are down that those wings are locked because taking off with unlocked wings not be a good thing these are the trailing edge flaps you know this is a fly by wire aircraft so there's no direct mechanical linkage between the control stick and the flight control surfaces there is a direct linkage to the stabilators but only in an emergency mode so primarily as a pilot you're sort of a voting member right so you say okay this is what i want to do with the airplane the two flight control computers then analyze okay what are you trying to do here okay based on stick throttle rudder inputs okay you're trying to do a 6g aggressive turn to the left and so the flight control computers then send the signals through hydraulic actuators to the flight control surfaces to deflect and to affect the the maneuver that the pilot is trying to uh to achieve so it's fly by wire it's a little different but what it does is you know this airplane is designed to be incredibly unstable and what that does is it allows it to be a lot more maneuverable and it's incredibly maneuver maneuverable very sensitive to control inputs terrific in a dogfight scenario but if without those flight control computers constantly making those fine-tuned corrections uh it'd be a much less stable uh and unpredictable airplane so kind of an interesting design behind it and that's why when you have a full degrade mode of the flight control computers mission's over and you're just trying to get the thing on deck in mech mode which i've done in the simulator it's just very sensitive and touchy and you really just want to set yourself up for a nice you know 10 miles straight in drop the tail hook and take an arrested landing so it gets a little bit tricky i don't think anyone has ever landed on the aircraft carrier in mech mode it's a real emergency thankfully the flight control computers are really reliable they're redundant so if you lose one the other one picks up the slack so very capable flight control system so on the blue jets this is a night formation light and there are several lights along the side and it's a great airplane at night as navy marine corps pilots we spend a lot of time flying at night flying with nvgs we're well ahead of the air force in terms of adopting that technology obviously flying with the blue angels we're not gonna fly with ng nvgs we do very little flying at night um this this was a little bit of a challenge once we came back from an air show typically would come back on on sundays and a lot of times we're coming in at or sometimes after sunset and the boss decided let's come in you know it's getting pretty dark but we can still come in in formation we'll do our standard pitch out to land and we realized really quickly how hard it was to see the airplane without without these lights because they're super dark to begin with and the light was you know the sun was setting fast and i can't remember how we handled that i think we just loosened things up really really loose definitely not blue angel formation standards um and it was a debrief item boss we can't really fly formation at night with uh without these these formation lights it's just not very safe so big vertical stabs you've got the rudders here and you know there's actually a lot of rudder authority with this airplane especially in slow speed flight these are the stabs or the stabilators pilots just refer to them as as stabs the entire thing moves so it's not you know just an elevator with with a control surface and back the entire thing moves and that really gives you a lot of pitch authority especially in slow speed flight so the stabs are really important same thing with the rudders you know the hornet in terms of air-to-air capabilities if you find yourself in a 1v1 scenario in a dogfight scenario with a bad guy a lot of people i think think well it's whoever can turn the fastest whoever can sustain the most g's whoever has the most thrust to wait sometimes it's who can fly the slowest and most flights or fights boil down to two scenarios you either have a rate fight or a radius fight and the hornet loves a radius fight because we can slow down and get into this radius fight which ends up being sort of a scissors type scenario and if if you can be the guy that can fly the slowest and the other guy sort of flushes out in front of you now you align fuselages and drop in for a raking gun shot and a kill so flying slow sometimes is really important in the uh in the blue angel demo pilot number five does a high alpha pass high angle of attack pass and he comes by i think his indicated airspeed is probably around oh 110 115 knots and there's actually a margin of safety there i think he's only at 25 alpha we can sustain 35 alpha but the margin of safety there is in case he loses one motor he can still fly out of that which is just one motor and full afterburner but if there's a pretty good left to right headwind and he's flying at that angle of attack it almost looks like he's just you know just about to fall out of the sky it's pretty impressive also up here you've got the fuel dumps those two pods on top are our ecm pods but below that is the the dump for the fuel and the hornet you know is always kind of thirsty that's one of the probably one of the drawbacks and it's part of the reason why they came up with the super hornet which is about 30 percent bigger has a lot more payload capability a lot more fuel so the horn is always kind of thirsty but when you're flying at the ship um when you come aboard a lot to land your max allowable weight is 34 000 pounds and so especially at night usually you like to have a little bit of gravy because you don't want to be low on gas at night in the middle of the ocean so typically pilots will leave a little bit of extra gas you sort of build what we call a fuel ladder so you've got checkpoints every 15 minutes you can kind of check in see how you're doing once you get to a certain point you say okay fun's over no more mission training let's just either hit the tanker or i need to just max conserve right and then you come in and hopefully you can make up a little bit of gas by being in that max conserve kind of mindset and then as you come down on the approach at night once you get inside of about 10 miles you can set your bingo bug turn on your dumps and this is where the fuel comes out maybe you've got you know an extra thousand pounds of gas or so and dump it down so that when you make that ball call you're right at 34 000 pounds that way if something happens you get waved off there's a foul deck you bolter meaning you land long and miss all the wires you got a little bit of extra gas for hopefully at least two more looks before they send you up to the tanker if there is a tanker so gas is good yeah here you can really see the kind of the surface area of the stabs and again this entire thing moves together uh obviously either side moves independently for increased roll rate uh and responsiveness but a lot of surface area here great engines uh ge400s or 402s in the enhanced performance version which picks up an extra 2000 pounds of thrust in afterburner total you're looking at about 36 000 pounds of thrust in full afterburner basic weight of the airplanes around 24 000 pounds so depending on configuration and loadout usually you've got you know greater than a one-to-one thrust to weight sometime in the first part of the mission okay critically important part uh of of gear here piece of gear is the tail hook uh obviously this one's painted nice and blue uh for the blue angel jet but this uh again you're coming in at roughly 140 knots and uh you go from 140 to zero in about two seconds maybe a second and a half so this thing has to take a incredible amount of stress i talked a little bit about the the hook and how effective it is at grabbing the resting cable this hook point can be replaced i can't remember if it's every 10 or every 50 traps but they can remove this and replace the hook point because this is what takes the majority of the stress the rest of the hook typically stays on a lot longer you know this is not only used for carrier operations if you've got an emergency shore uh just doing regular training and you've got an engine fire you've got you know flight control problems um you might want to just drop this hook most navy marine corps bases have the short field resting gear uh is rigged up and of course uh carrier pilots are real comfortable with taking a trap whether it's on the ship or or on land and so you know if you lose your hydraulics you've got degraded flight controls whatever the situation is dropping the hook and taking a trap is nice this can also be used if you have to do a high speed abort we talked about that scenario you're up you know high hot fallon with a big heavy loadout if you have to do a high speed aboard at you know 160 knots you go idle speed brakes you're not going to slow this thing down in time to stop from going over the end so drop the hook about a thousand feet prior and you're going to catch that over run gear and that's going to keep you from going off into the tumbleweeds so apparently they've removed the oil system for the museum but normally you'd have a tube extending out from that port dropping along the top of the afterburner and then ending here in the port engine exhaust that's where the linseed oil that's again housed up in the gun housing the linseed oil is is uh is fed into the exhaust and just the heat of the exhaust basically turns that oil into that really pretty white smoke that's used in the air shows one thing that's kind of unique is if the pilot for some reason has to select full afterburner it becomes so hot back here that it actually completely vaporizes that oil so if you see the the blue angels are watching the show and especially on one of the crossing maneuvers where everyone's trying to cross at the center point one guy's a little bit behind he may go to full afterburner and you'll see the smoke will actually disappear until he deselects afterburner and then the smoke will come back on even though he's not actually turning it on and off it's just the afterburner vaporizes the the oil and again that's linseed oil they say it's biodegradable so moving around here uh again you know this is painted up as the number four jet so i'll just explain real quickly the various positions and the numbers associated with the blue angels number one is is the flight leader he's also the boss the commanding officer so he's kind of the old guy right here i am 51 boss is usually in his early 40s post command tour has had a stellar uh a stellar career so far very strict and competitive selection process one of the things that's interesting is that in the history 75 years of of the blue angels there have only been a few bosses who were formerly wingmen who later in their career became the flight leader of boss i think there's a couple reasons for that number one a two or three year tour on the blue angels is really challenging the flying's really hard the pace is is super hard it's kind of like being a rock star in terms of the you know the constant time on the road uh again the flying is incredibly difficult hardest flying i've ever done after two years usually you're like this has been really great glad i did it but it's time to move on and so maybe that's part of it is guys that have done it sort of check that block there's no reason to try to do it again the flat the low and the high are the three different sort of sequences that we fly and you've got to take that those three sequences and that template and you got to take it to a new show site and there might be you know they're going to be completely different checkpoints while the new jets have gps the blues still rely 100 on the eyeball and visual physical check checkpoints whether it's a you know street crossing a you know a building a water tower and so you've got to learn this new show site every time you go somewhere else it may have different terrain uh you may be different elevation which drastically affects performance of the airplane roll rate and then obviously you're going to have different environmentals day one you know first day you get there you might have a headwind the next day you might have one that's from crowd right to crowd left the next day make me calm the next day might be windy and so the boss is trying to constantly adjust not only take this template and perform well and consistently at a different show site but now he's got to adjust for all the changing environmentals and you may have a situation where we start out and we're going to do a high show and then a layer of clouds rolls in boss let's transition to the low show roger that low show so now you're flying a different show he's got to make that transition in the middle of everything so the boss has a really hard job that's why he's the most experienced pilot has the most hours and has the most responsibility number two is the right wingman typically number two flies that position for both years it's typically a two-year tour and it's in an opposite rotation so when you've got a first year number two you've got a second year boss so what he's trying to do that year is not only learn how to be a good number two but the next year his primary role as a second year number two is training a first year number one so that's where he spends all his time is in the debrief it's one on one with him and the boss as they go through every maneuver number three is the left wing win that's the position that i flew both my first year and my third year number three is is the left wingman most of the turns and the sequence in the blue angel show is left turns navy pilots love left turns the pattern at the aircraft carrier is the left is the left pattern and the blue angel air show is designed primarily around left turns what that means for the for the number three pilot is most of the turns are into you right so you're looking up into the sun you're looking up into the blue sky harder to sort of judge the roll rate of of the boss that's where it's incredibly important for the boss to be really consistent with the pace of roll pace of of onset because a lot of times is number three especially if you're looking into the sun you're just going off muscle memory and when he makes his call you just go even if you can't see perfectly your checkpoints so that's number three number three then his second year slides into the slot and the primary role of the slot pilot is to be the training officer during the the winter season which is about two and a half months long out in the desert and because he has the best seat in the house underneath the boss and he can see the wingtips of two and three uh and also quickly look down and cross check airspeed altitude other parameters uh and he's a second year guy so he knows you know kind of knows how things are supposed to to be playing out he's also the safety officer right so he can call no maneuvers he can call a knock it off he can tell either wingmen to clear if they're moving too much or he sees they're out of parameters so it's really important to have that number four position be a second year guy second year pilot five and six are the opposing solos uh five is the lead solo six is the opposing solo five is a third year uh pilot typically the narrator is seven uh and after his narrating year he becomes six then five so six always moves into five opposing solo becomes lead solo so the lead solos as the name suggests is in charge of the two solos he's leading the comms uh and and the coordination between the solo maneuvers and the diamond maneuvers so he's listening to what the boss is saying he kind of knows where they are on the maneuver [Applause] and then he calls in the solos for the next maneuvers so he's really leading the five and six show then at the end usually for the last three or four maneuvers five and six join up with the diamond which is one through four and that forms the delta which is the six plane uh formation that finishes up the show for the last three or four maneuvers so that's kind of the numbers and the rotation again number seven is uh is the narrator he's also a pilot um he flies with an air crewman in his back seat flies to the show site a day early so typically on wednesday and he's checking for everything from airspace briefing rooms rental cars hotels he also does three media flights it's a really long day meanwhile the the the backseater what we call the seven geek who flies with number seven he does all the media briefs he handles a lot of the prep for the maintenance make sure all the spare parts are there all the support equipment that they need all the space that they need for for spare parts etc uh is available so that crew they typically start their wednesdays at about five in the morning and they don't wrap it up until about 10 at night it's a really long day and sort of the reward for number seven is after that really difficult year he gets to be a solo pilot because those guys just go out and rock and roll and really bend this thing around whereas you know the diamond pilots were kind of it's kind of like a prison sentence without parole you're locked in there you know for 45 minutes for the most part so all right so i'm going to give you a little bit of perspective of sort of the building block approach that the blue angels take to flying really precise and and close formation which is really the the signature of the blue angels um every pilot that comes to the blue angels navy marine corps has spent a lot of time flying formations everybody knows how to fly formation pretty well but we're trying to take it to a whole new level of precision and to that end we use some different checkpoints on the airplane very different than what we would use in the fleet and it allows us to be a lot more precise we call it flying paint because while all this paint looks really pretty and says blue angels and advertisement for boeing hornets it actually serves a terrific purpose so this piece of gear is called the lex fence and i'm not going to go into the aerodynamics of it but it serves a purpose to help with stability and airflow but the way the blue angels use it is we'll use the top of that lex fence so the yellow line across the top and we'll put it underneath where it says hornet so that sort of defines how deep or how flat you're going to be so if you're perfectly the right depth you're going to have that yellow top yellow line is right underneath hornet then we're going to triangulate that and we're going to cut off the tail end of hornet so all you can see is the h okay you can only see the h just above that yellow line you want to try to get an angle on it so you should only see the h you shouldn't see a o-r-n-e-t and that defines your bearing line and then you're going to follow that bearing line all the way down here and this is this is a starting training set so this is kind of you know week one as as a new blue angel you're gonna follow that bearing line all the way down until you're flush with the aft end of the afterburner cans so your actual position is probably about 15 feet that way okay so it's not a very tight set okay you're pretty loose probably not too dissimilar to how we fly in the fleet so it's pretty comfortable what's different is when we start going out there just building blocks basics turning the smoke on and off together right and now the boss starts doing some turns turns and reversals that's the first thing that we do and if you're in that position and you get to a point where you're deep enough that you can't see that h anymore or you're flat enough that there's another letter or so of depth beneath it so that's your flat and deep or if you're a letter forward or a letter aft you're out of position those are the tolerances and if you're out of position you call clear and that lets the slot pilot know lets your wingman know guys i'm not flying up to blue angel standards in this in this maneuver typically this you'll turn off the smoke typically the slot pile will take a look okay you're stabilized now you're clear to rejoin okay and if you can get to where you're flying at those tolerances where you can keep that letter exactly where it's supposed to be now you start moving it up a little bit okay now we're going to go to ho and we're going to move up to the forward burner band and then the next week we might step all the way up to the aft end of the bureau number and now we see hor and then later in the season well you get to a point where you just fly as close as you can to the wing tip without touching so the checkpoints sort of go out out the window later in the season i want to show you another checkpoint and it's not painted on this airplane they must have painted over it just for the museum but this bolt that holds on helps to hold on this lex fence is normally painted yellow and the reason that's painted yellow is because that bolt is the checkpoint for the number three pilot for the diamond 360. so normally uh and i flew the number three slot uh number three position normally the objective is to put that bolt right here in this corner so that all you can see is that bolt right so that's your bearing line follow it down here my head is probably going to be well we typically don't go inside the wing fold so on a real calm smooth day later in the season this is probably five six months into the season if you've got a nice calm day you're going to tuck it in right here it gets a little bit dark under here because you're under the wing and typically in this set if the team is really gelling the number three's right wing tip will be about a foot to two feet from the number two pilot's left wing tip and you come back and watch in the debrief and say that looks pretty good let's do that again you know to that end paramount safety is paramount for the blue angels one of the missions the team agrees upon every year is guys we want to put on a great show this year we want to be safe and we want to fly really tight sets over the course of time in a really safe fashion but we never want to trade paint we never want to touch so butch boris who was who was the the first boss and flight leader of the blue angels one of his wingmen asked him boss how tight do you think we should fly he said well if you never touch we're not trying hard enough but if we do touch it's a little too close i didn't point this out on the other side but this is the the port nav light red on this side green on the other side and again you've got nvg lights various strips along the fuselage so for the of the nav lights this part of the airframe is is referred to as the lex lex not exactly sure what that stands for but it's it's part of the aerodynamic design of the hornet adds to the stability and maneuverability it is a little bit of a detractor sometimes if you're you know you're trying to look down and pick out a target but thankfully you can just roll up and pick out your target but it does block visibility a little bit looking straight down also stored inside this is the ladder and pretty easy to pop this baby down so it makes it easy to climb up the challenge sometimes is if you're on a cross-country and you land it maybe an fbo where the ground crew isn't familiar with it there's no button you can push to extend this ladder so you have to sort of coach these guys into how to open this thing up and sometimes that's a three or four minute process but it's nice to have the built-in ladder here okay we're going to take a little look inside the the cockpit here but before we do i want to explain the story behind the name on this jet so lieutenant commander pat walsh callsign is sponge and now he's never given me the actual story of sponge but this is my interpretation he he is a sponge of knowledge he doesn't forget anything he's one of the smartest people i know he's got a phd from tufts and when he was on the blue angels everyone knew he was going to be an admiral and sure enough he ended up being a four-star admiral retired his last command was commander of the u.s pacific fleet largest geographic command of any military command pat is from dallas originally and he retired from the navy he came back here to live in dallas in his hometown and when the dallas tail hookers decided and were able to to get this blue angel jet here we they thought it was only fitting and i agree with them that lieutenant commander pat walsh his name be on the side so it was a great event and uh ceremony honoring him and his accomplishments not just with the blue angels but in the navy pat was on the team he was on the first team with the f-18 so he actually uh flew the a4 skyhawk the last two years of the skyhawk and they what they did was they froze the team and then transitioned to the f-18 so they kept all the same pilots there were no no newbies on the team they had a bunch of experienced pilots the thing that was challenging was he was the only one that had in the f-18 time because it was such a new airplane he had been an instructor in the hornet for a brief period of time and he tells some great stories about you know they're basically blue angel test pilots because they're trying to take this new airframe that has never been through you know these these paces and these types of maneuvers and they're trying to figure it out so uh there are a lot of a lot of lessons learned probably a few close calls but they did it safely they did it the right way and they passed down a great turnover to the next team as as they kind of slowly transitioned to uh to future teams the the legacy hornet ended up flying from what was it 19 i think is 1985 or 86 and then this last year was was their last year so the longest serving platform by far of any platform uh on the on the blue angels so pat walsh is uh he's the man all right now let's take a little tour inside the cockpit as you can see it's it's primarily a glass cockpit with the multi-function displays that allow the pilot really to select and manage all modes everything from fuel transfer to systems troubleshooting your radar displays ecm all your stores page your radar most of the time your navigation information is is down below so that's where the pilot spends a lot of time where his eyeballs are scanning in addition to the heads-up display a lot of pilots f-18 pilots are accused of being hud cripples it's because there's so much information available in the heads-up display not only in instrument flight or approaches to the carrier but in air-to-air air-to-ground missions and what it allows the pilot to do is spend a lot more time with his head up and out of the cockpit we say you know get your head up out of the drill bucket and uh and get your eyeballs out because that's where the threat is so the heads-up display is incredibly capable the pilot the pilot's hands of course spend most of their time on the stick and on the throttle and there are a lot of controls on on both the stick and the throttle it's a system called hotaz which stands for hands on throttle and stick so i'll try to walk you through if i can remember some of the functionality of these various control switches this little castle switch is primarily used for selecting various modes of the the radar both air to air and air to ground mode locking up targets etc this this switch is used primarily for trim really this airplane doesn't require the pilot to trim much at all only in primarily in dirty configurations for approach and landing also lateral trim sometimes is used if you have an asymmetric load on the wings if you've got maybe an extra fuel tank on on the starboard side that requires you to trim it to the left so that when you take off the airplane maintains level flight this button primarily is for weapons release air-to-grounds weapons release both dumb bombs smart bombs air-to-ground missiles etc this rocker switch is used for weapon select so down is gun aft is heat seeking sidewinder ford is aim 7 sparrow and then to the right is aim 120 amram and then we've got you can't see it from there you've got the the nose wheel steering switch which is used for various modes of the radar also when you're on the ground if you push and hold that it engages high gain nose wheel steering so you can turn that nose wheel up to 60 degrees which is really important as you're trying to maneuver you know right up next to the scupper on the aircraft carrier trying to get into a really tight parking spot there's also a paddle switch this has used various functions turning off the autopilot a couple other administrative functions and then the trigger which has been removed on the blue angel jet obviously we're not going to be doing any real missions in this but i'll talk a little bit more about the stick and then why there's tape on the control stick continuing on the functionality the hotel's functionality on the throttles you know you've got two throttles one for port and starboard you've got a finger lift that's for going through the idle stop when you want to shut down or in flight if you need to shut down a single engine you can lift that and shut down a troubled engine a couple buttons here on the outboard this outboard button not used too much selects a couple different modes of the the flear center button is for auto throttles both in cruise mode and approach mode a lot of pilots like to use that coming aboard the ship this little toggle switch is it's kind of like a mouse it controls the cursor on your radar primarily it allows you to sample different targets of of interest see you know altitude airspeed vector information so that controls primarily the the cursor here's your chaff flare switch which on a blue angel jet this is smoke on and smoke off normally it's chaff and flares there's your comm switch com1 and com2 you've got your speed brake switch you pull that aft and hold it out that extends the speed brake which is you know big a big surface between the vertical stabs primarily used just in landing just helps slow the airplane down or in an abort scenario not sure what that does i forgot and that's pretty much the the throttle so you know between the stick and the throttle uh a pilot can execute probably 90 of any mission just using the the hotaz capabilities it's a little bit like playing a musical instrument right if you're a musician which i'm not you can look at a scale you can look at a series of notes and your fingers just kind of move and and go where they need to go very similar for a hornet pilot obviously it takes time but we call it doing the piccolo drill so you know you're trying to execute a mission lock up a target shoot a missile drop a bomb you just your fingers just know where to go and there's very little reaching up and touching the screens to actually execute the mission so it's pretty interesting let's see couple other things uh here you've got an emergency jettison switch that jettisons all external stores most likely scenario is you're going off the front end of the aircraft carrier for some reason you get a soft uh catapult or they dial in the wrong weight which very rare that that happens but if it does you don't have enough end speed you start swinging it sinking toward the uh the blue water you punch this and it's gonna get rid of all your stores you know anywhere from uh four to fifteen thousand pounds of stores immediately um this is the extension for the launch bar talked about that earlier here's your flap switch taxi light uh this is an emergency canopy jettison um if you have a you know fire around you or fire in the cockpit you need to get that thing open now pull this and the canopy is going to get launched up you know 20 or 30 feet up in the air hopefully clear the aircraft so this airplane has been modified slightly normally in a blue angel jet and they must have taken it out but normally there's a kind of an old school track and field stop watch mounted here very securely mounted it's got brackets around it and that's that's used by the solo pilots number five and six and they use visual checkpoints at three miles two miles a mile and a half and one mile and they use that stop watch and flying specific ground speeds to try to affect a perfect hit or cross right at center point so i won't go into the details but it's it's old school it's the same way that uh solo pilots have been trying to affect that cross for the blue angels for the last 75 years so it's it's it's true piloting and flying airspeed and using visual checkpoints the other thing that's missing here uh back to carrier operations normally you would have the the angle of attack indicator here as i mentioned you know normally you're looking through the hud kind of to the side to see your lineup and then the periphery you can see whether you're on speed they're looking for that nice amber donut for on speed indication uh let's see moving around you've got all your standby instruments here here's your tail hook this is where you drop this so if you're hanging out overhead the ship and getting ready to go land that's the first item on the checklist this is where you safe the ejection seat if you happen to eject over mountainous territory and the normal parachute opening schedule isn't going to work in a high terrain environment you can go to the manual override and that's going to deploy the chute a little bit earlier everything else here is primarily warning and caution lights generator controls you've got instrument panel lighting etc got a kind of a fun story about this this is this is called the grimes light and really it's just used for emergencies in case you have a dual generator failure some sort of total electrical failure this thing is always able to be powered up so at least you can turn it on shine it on your standby gyro and at least you have an attitude indicator and hopefully you can get it back on deck typically u.s pilots will leave this stored and secured where it is um but i had the opportunity to get to know an australian exchange pilot and there are a lot of other countries that fly the hornet uh australia does spain flies it switzerland malaysia i think there's four or five others in australia they have a procedure for flying at night and that is to clip this grimes light in a position that if you were to lose total electricity and turn it on it's going to shine directly on your standby instrument so you're not fumbling around and trying to get this thing up there well uh the other thing that's one thing that's different about the aussie airplane and it's probably a lot of things that are different i know they don't have all the bells and whistles we have but their canopy switch which is right underneath the starboard rail ours is is somewhat easy to access you have to sort of reach up and around and there's no way you would accidentally bump it in flight but it doesn't have any it's not a guarded switch so if you were flying along at 400 knots and you decided for some reason to reach under and pop the canopy this thing would be gone in a heartbeat right the aussies actually have a guarded switch over their canopy so they've got to flip up the guard and then they can access the switch well mick was out on a training flight we were doing a night bombing training run with some new f-18 pilots out in fallon and as was his habit pattern he rigged up the grimes light right where it's supposed to be according to the aussie standard operating procedures and we rolled in on the first dive and he dropped his bombs and per procedure did a real aggressive 4-5 g pull out max power climbing away trying to get away from the frag pattern but in doing so the grimes light was perfectly positioned in the wrong location it rotated forward and the trailing edge edge clipped the canopy switch and as soon as that thing the seal broke and hit the wind stream it was gone so he was in convertible mode very loud very dark couldn't say anything hear anything he was effectively nordo he did a great job of getting it back aboard but uh needless to say he had to alter his night flying uh procedures for the grimes light okay let's talk a little bit more about the the control stick uh again you've got a lot of tape here which is unusual this is this is something you'd only see in a blue angel jet so if you were to talk to any military pilot or any pilot that's done any significant formation flying they would tell you that one of the first things you learn in flying formation is you want to be really light on the controls right you don't want to squeeze the black out of the stick because then you're going to be real herky-jerky you're not going to be very uh precise with your controls and it's just not it's just not doesn't lead to smooth flying and that applies for pretty much any any phase of flight um the challenge with with flying blue angel formation where you're trying to fly you know a couple feet away from each other typically you know low to the ground typically you know a little bit of bump in the air some we call it texture because you're flying in the afternoon usually in the midwest somewhere so it's a little bit bumpy um and so you know having those real loose light controls aren't great for precision formation flying what pat walsh and and his team did in the a4 and predecessors is they would just roll in full forward elevator trim so that you're working against the aerodynamic forces of the elevator and that created sort of a positive feel so that allowed you to be a little bit more precise yeah you had to sort of squeeze the black out of the stick but you put your forearm on your on your thigh use a little bit of a fulcrum and it allows you to be really stable and precise it's a little bit like you know if you think about threading a needle if you if i asked you to thread a needle you wouldn't just take the needle and thread and just sort of eyeball it and and go for it you would probably push your palms against each other give a little bit of positive force and that's going to allow you to be really precise so similar idea here where you've got your forearm resting on your thigh you get that fulcrum and now you're you're really squeezing that stick and being very precise with with your inputs the challenge with the f-18 is because it's fly by wire you couldn't the pilots pat walsh and his team couldn't just roll in full trim it just it didn't have the same effect so what they ended up doing was coming up with a spring system and it's been most of it's been removed for the for the museum but the spring actually comes out of the the ecm control panel and hooks onto this little tab and it pulls the stick forward uh there's no hydraulic power here so i can't move the stick but it typically will pull the stick forward three or four inches and when we start the training with with the new pilots typically it'll be about 30 pounds of force uh and then as as the strength in the forearms build up and as the team is flying closer and closer we'll add the tension on the spring we'll get to about 40 pounds of tension and that just allows the pilots to be really really precise um you know we always kind of joke the diamond pilots especially end up having you know forearms that are about three or four inches in diameter bigger than their left arms because you're just constantly squeezing the black out of that stick and making those precise inputs so this leads to another sort of unique aspect of the blue angels and why the the team doesn't wear g suits which most fighter pilots are going to wear on any mission the way a g suit works is it's effectively a series of bladders that start from below your calf move up through your thighs and across your your abdomen and then it plugs into this system back here which provides conditioned bleed air to uh to the g suit so when the airplane senses its under g's and it usually starts as soon as two or three g's it starts to add air to the to the g suit it inflates those bladders and it squeezes and compresses uh around your your muscles of you know from your abdomen down and that helps to push the blood up from the bottom of your extremities up to your brain it's kind of like squeezing you know a tube of toothpaste from the bottom you want all that pressure and force coming from the bottom pushing the blood and countering the g-forces that are being induced by the airplane it's just to give you a sense of what it feels like it's a lot like you know if you go and get your your blood pressure taken you know they you know put that collar on there and pump it up very similar but it's all throughout your your legs and your abdomen the challenge for the blue angels is you know if you're sitting in here and you've got your rudder pedals pulled back and you've got your forearm resting on your thigh to create that fulcrum if you've got a g suit on and now it starts inflating and deflating that's inevitably going to move your arm which is going to move the stick and when you're trying to fly a couple feet apart it's not a good thing so no g suits for the blue angels we train for that we prepare for that as we start the season everybody new new members old members everyone goes out to the centrifuge does a full 8g spin up with no g suit just to make sure you've got excellent technique and you're able to counter those forces without it without a g-suit it helps too that you know we're typically flying uh six days a week and just like anything if you're a runner if you lift weights the more you do something the more you build up a tolerance for it so you get to be kind of a g monster after a while one one blue angel story i want to share with you too is so that the team typically has 10 or 11 sometimes 12 jets assigned just depending on availability typically on a road show it'll be just the six planes in the delta plus number seven uh the narrator will go a day in advance but we do have a couple two-seaters um and so when the new guys join or gals join the team they'll travel with the team for typically the last six or seven weeks of the year just to soak everything up listen to the briefs and and one of the things that the new folks get to do is get a back seat ride typically two with the diamond and two with the solos so you throw the two-seater into the formation and i still remember my first ride in the back seat and usually it's with number four the slot pilot so you know you're you're right there under the boss with the two wingmen and it was a beautiful day we were in el centro california and we took off and slid i mean we were three feet off the deck and four is putting in a full boot or left rudder and driving into that slot next thing you know two and three comes sliding in and i look up and i see you know two's left wing tip three's right wingtip and my first reaction was to reach down to the ejection elevation switch and lower the seat as low as i could because it was so uncomfortable to have two wing tips right above me i felt like i could reach up and grab them and next thing you know we're going up into a loop and my third first thought was you got the wrong guy you know i can't hack this there's no way there is no way um but again through that building block approach uh as we always say you know you could you could teach a monkey to do this stuff so so i've got another story for you this is when i was an instructor two or three years before i became a blue angel and um we were doing a low-level strike it was kind of a graduation exercise for a strike class that was going through and and i was my role was to be the the safety pilot so i was a sort of tail end charlie it was eight of us doing a low level probably 150 mile route uh minimum altitude was was 200 feet so we were down pretty low and doing anywhere from 480 to 540 knots ground speed so really a fun flight and then as we got close to the target the mission objective was to pop up to about 12 000 feet roll inverted acquire the target roll in and drop all of our bombs go home and have a cold beer so everything was going great but it was a late afternoon flight and the last leg had us flying west kind of due into i wouldn't call it a setting sun but the sun was at a pretty low low angle i was offset a little bit to the north of the of the strike package i can see them on my radar but i wanted to try to visually acquire them before we went into this dynamic maneuver so i was looking a little bit to my left and then out of nowhere i see this tower shows up and it wasn't on the charts we briefed all the obstructions and you know this last leg was supposed to be clear unfortunately the person in charge of updating the chart didn't do his job and so next thing you know i'm staring at this 299 foot tire tower with guy wires coming out from the very top i rolled the plane immediately tried to match the the same angle as the guy wire and just put the stick in my lap seven and a half g's and just try to get after it well i missed it with my nose i missed the wire with my nose is how close it was but my left wing still caught the wire and in doing so it took out probably a two by two chunk out of my left leading edge flap and i think what happened was the cable snapped wrapped around and also took a big chunk out of my trailing edge flap so immediately pulled the throttles to idle leveled the wings started climbing cleaned out my drawers uh you know told the flight leader that i was heading home and uh you know this is a testament to the the f a-18 and i was missing a pretty good chunk of my wing and airplane flew great it's the flight control computer's kind of figured out hey there's extra drag here put in the right inputs and other than sort of a loud buzzing sound that i could hear from the aerodynamics airplane flew flew great set up for just precautionary arrested landing and uh yeah no no other major damage but that was a close call you know if i had seen that maybe a hundredth of a second later uh who knows maybe that cable would have gone right through the canopy so it was a close one no but everybody every naval aviator every marine corps aviator probably has you know three or four stories like that it's a dangerous business thankfully you know flying with the blues um we had we had three great safe seasons [Music] you know it's it's helpful when you're flying with the same six pilots every day you get to know each other your habits you can tell someone's having a good day or a bad day you know if the team is gelling that day or not and you know you're constantly communicating with each other and because of that i think and and then the building block approach that we take to you know leading up to those really tight formations and tighter air shows i think that combination of that leads to you know a very safe history of safety for the blue angels so my military experience was it was tremendous i think it's one word to summarize it i think a lot of like a lot of things that are hard whether you played sports you did something competitive it's really easy to over time to forget the sacrifice the close calls the lost friends although you never forget those and you really just remember the good things and there's so many good things about service i think i've met so many other veterans and with very few exceptions regardless of what branch of service what their specialty was whether they were officer enlisted whether they served four years or 34 years uh everyone i've met that has served really loved their time and again you forget the bad stuff but i think a lot of it is is just feeling really good about doing something that's meaningful being part of something that that's bigger than yourself [Music] operating in a very close-knit team environment and in doing so really creating some of the greatest friendships that you'll ever have in your life just yesterday i was texting with old you know squadron mates and airwing buddies to let them know that i was doing this and asking them you know told them what the bureau number was and i probably have six or seven texts already from old wingmen from 15 or 20 years ago chiming in giving me a hard time telling me not to screw it up so you know those friendships are are really they're the greatest friends and i know that if i ever need something i've got a lot of friends but i know that if i call my military buddies uh they'll drop everything and they'll be there for you so the friendships being part of a really important mission um and then lastly and selfishly you know i got to fulfill a childhood dream i saw the blue angels when i was 14 or 15 years old and i decided that's what i want to do i didn't think i'd ever become a blue angel but i wanted to be a navy fighter pilot and you know most days walking out to whether it's a gray jet or a blue jet walking out to that airplane and knowing that i was going to get to climb into it and take you know 30 or 40 million dollars of taxpayer assets and go out and light my hair on fire that was awesome and then you know the blue angels were the icing on the cake didn't think that would ever happen and things just lined up and and it was it was something else it was the ride of a lifetime you

Channel: ErikJohnston

Views: 172,962

Rating: 4.9237766 out of 5

Keywords: Aviation, Aircraft, Airplane, Flying, Airport, Runway, Taxiway, Hangar, Walkaround, Tour, Pilot, Aviator, Wings, Prop, Propeller, Veteran, Interview, Trent Palmer, Flight Chops, Just Plane Silly, Aviation101, Mike Patey, Mark Patey, Baron Pilot, Flying Doodles, In The Hangar, Blue Angels, FA-18, F-18 Hornet, Fighter, Attack, NAVY, Marines, Military, Jerry Deren, Frontiers of Flight Museum, Love Field

Id: -w7oc0LczBE

Length: 66min 34sec (3994 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021