Everything You Didn't Know About The Blue Angels

for more than 70 years the blue angels have carried out their mission of showcasing the us navy's teamwork and professionalism and during that time they have delighted millions of spectators and influenced hundreds of thousands of young americans to pursue a career in naval aviation the blue angels were given the green light right after world war ii by none other than admiral chester b nimitz who had been the commander of the pacific fleet during world war ii following the war he was the chief of naval operations and he was concerned that the american public might forget about naval aviation so he thought a demonstration team would be a good way to keep naval air power in the public eye the team was founded in 1946 flying the f6f hellcat the first team lead was lieutenant commander butch voris so they performed their first demonstration in june of 1946 flying the hellcat but a couple months later they transitioned to the f8f bearcat and then by the end of the 1940s they were flying their first jet the f9f panther then something interesting happened in the early 1950s because of the korean war and the demands on naval aviation the team reported to the uss princeton as sort of the nucleus of fighter squadron 191 the satan's kittens then in 1951 the team reformed again under vorus reported corpus christi once again flying the f9f except this was the dash 5 version of the panther and then in 1954 the team relocated to pensacola which remains their home to this day and they transitioned to the swept wing cougar then in 1957 they transitioned to the f-11 tiger which was the airplane they were flying the first time i saw them in 1965 when my dad was stationed at marine corps station el toro and he was flying the a4 as a captain then in 1969 they transitioned to the f4j phantom 2 now the phantom 2 was a lot of airplane for any demonstration team and the blues had considerable issues while flying the f4 during the f4 years the blue angels had a number of mishaps starting with one of them inadvertently going supersonic over a city in british columbia which shattered glass and actually sent some people to the hospital that city still remembers that day and the pilot who inadvertently went supersonic later ejected twice once over the san francisco bay and then another time over el centro he survived both of those ejections and then later there was a midair where three of the airplanes were destroyed and the slot airplane wound up being able to recover and as a result of that mishap the team leader was found to be at fault so he was replaced by a pilot who had been on the team previously he was the lead solo blue angel number five so he came back as the team leader now he was lieutenant commander skip umstead and four months after he got back he was killed in a mishap it was the arrival show at lakehurst new jersey they were joining the diamond in the vertical and they had another midair umstead and captain mike murphy number four who had petty officer first class ron thomas in his backseat were killed and a second crew member chief gerald harvey ejected from umstead's plane so the blue angels were shut down that season and the decision was made to reform using the a4 so this was the a4f which had the p408 it's a more thrust than most of the other a4s but it's not a supersonic airplane the other thing they did is they changed the blue angels from a flight demonstration team to a flight demonstration squadron and the first no lie commanding officer was commander tony les i happened to work for vice admiral tony less when he was the commander of naval air forces atlantic in the mid 90s i was his aide and he would tell stories about this era and he had some leadership challenges let's just call it because the team before was sort of a flying club it really didn't have a command structure meaning the team lead wasn't really exercising authority attitudinally over the other members of the team and that was part of the problem you know flight discipline was an issue and that's what caused a number of the mishaps that they had during the tiger and the phantom era and so when they reformed the team the chief of naval air training and the cno and the other cognizant authorities said okay we're going to make this a squadron and so on one day mls used to tell a story that when he took over as as co he called everybody together and sort of read them the riot act and a couple of them walked out you know sort of these uh you know prima donnas that thought they were the the show and and therefore they didn't want to really be disciplined by a commanding officer so he he called these blue angels on the phone and basically said hey if you don't come back like immediately i'm going to throw you off the team and both of them came back and sort of got their attitude squared away but uh mls used to you know used to say that it was a it was a challenging era so they flew the a4 for a number of years including they did that van halen video meanwhile the thunderbirds a rival demonstration team if you will the air force demonstration team had transitioned from t-38s to f-16s now the reason they transitioned was a dubious circumstance the entire team was killed when they all flew into the ground at once because the flight lead had miscalculated where he was in a loop something to understand is in in a number of the regimes particularly when they're flying in the diamond the only guy who's looking out is number one everybody else is looking at another airplane so in this case of the thunderbirds the lead was looking out but everybody else was looking at the lead and when the lead realized he had mismanaged this loop it was too late at that point the air force decided to transition to the f-16 so the f-16 is a supersonic airplane cutting edge the blue angels are flying the a4 which is not cutting edge in terms of their recruiting mission and the other things they wanted to do they were towards the end of the history of their time with the a4 not happy with flying an airplane that was so old so in 1986 end of the show season they unveil their legacy horns their f-18cs and their first co flying the hornet is a guy named gilrood and i met gilrod when i was working my first job out of the navy at the v-22 office down at the naval air systems command gil had a job as the boeing tech rep and so we had a lot of conversations and at that time punk's fight had just come out and gil and i were chatting one day and he said hey you should you should fly with the blue angels they'd probably be up for it you know since you're you're now known as a novelist for these books about the f-14 i said you know i'd love to do that how do i make it happen and he said well don't talk to the pao the invite needs to come from one of the team one of the six and at the time i didn't know anybody on the team and i didn't have any any entree or anything but the other thing that gil said if you get to fly you don't want to fly lead or opposing solo it says that's like getting punched in the stomach for 45 minutes those guys are moving the airplane around and that would be really a challenging reintroduction to tactical jet flying not to mention the blue angels so he said i recommend if you're allowed to pick um that you you know fly in the diamond somewhere this is about 2003 2004 time frame so fast forward to 2011. now i've left navair and i'm working as the editor of military.com and i met the blue angel commanding officer who they what they call the boss uh at fleet week in san francisco and this was captain greg mcwhorter and we were at a reception we struck up a conversation he was familiar with the punk series and i said hey i would like to to fly you know with you guys but i don't think it would be of any value to you guys or me for me to fly just a single airplane sortie and blue angel number seven so the blue angels do demo flights generally in blue angel number seven in whatever location they are for the show they'll fly the local weather girl or the sports guy and take them up and you can see these videos on youtube you know it's people throwing up or or graying out or blacking out because of g those kinds of of things but it's just to give novices a taste of what it's like to strap in and you know sit in an ejection seat pull g's go inverted so forth and so on and so i was talking to boss mcwhorter and i'm just sort of thinking hey i have 2800 hours in tactical jets there's no value really to to me or the team in in flying a solo f-18 hop so i asked what are the chances that i could fly in the actual routine you know practice show day he said well you know based on your background it's it's possible so let's let's check it out so this was september of 2011. we keep in touch the final part of the planets aligning towards me getting to do this flight was that the approval authority is the chief of naval air training it's it's an admiral who's in charge of naval air training sinatra is what it's called and that admiral was an old squadron mate of mine serendipity he's the guy who approves guest flights in the blue angel so you know he knew what my background was and he figured it was a safe risk to let me fly in the show because the thing about it is if you're incapacitated because you're throwing up or you've completely blacked out then they're going to have to stop the show or whatever position you're in has to land and you'll have to have medical attention so they don't want to do that for somebody who's never flown before so it worked out that i was able to fly with the blue angels out of naval air station oceana which is basically virginia beach in mid-september of 2012. show up for the brief about two hours prior um meet the guy i'm gonna fly with who's major brent stevens he is the slot pilot and just go into the brief so as amazing as flying in the demonstration itself was so too was being exposed to how they brief and how they debrief so their attention to detail is amazing even by fleet standards i've been in certain deployed scenarios where the flights can be pretty repetitive like when we're flying operation southern watch you can get into what we call complacency where you're like okay remember that thing we did yesterday let's just we'll do it again today and you maybe leave out some details because you've done it over and over again and you figure everybody knows what they're doing so in some cases you can get away with that in other cases you get bit by that now the blue angels do not have that problem they brief every demonstration as if it's the first time they've done it by the time i flew with them in that season the 2012 season they had flown the demonstration literally 200 plus times so they're going over the details with great great fidelity this day it turns out the weather was beautiful so we were going to do the high show the blue angels have three different variations of the show high show you've got to have no less than 8 000 foot ceiling the medium show is no less than 4 500 foot ceiling and then the low show is no less than 1500 foot ceiling you've got to have at least three miles visibility and that's because the boss has to be able to see not just show center but the far point of the show almost without warning they go into chair flying the event and so now they all push back from the table and they kind of get hunched down in the position that they're going to be in and the boss goes through this he's got this sort of chant that he's doing and this is what it sounds like in the airplane too he's like little pull up we go he just goes through that and everybody's seeing it in their mind's eye and they're actually maneuvering as if they were doing it and the right wing is looking to the left and the left wings looking to the right and slots looking up a little bit and they do the entire routine like that and then when they're done they pull back up as if they come out of this trance and they continue to breathe it's really amazing to see it's like you know you're watching uh some sort of hypnosis you know but they're getting completely focused on what it is they're gonna do so brief ends they say okay mooch you go early jumping blue angel number four i strapped in my crew chief was a marine sergeant cool guy and he straps me and gets me comfortable and i watch them march the airplanes like like that like they do in that van halen video you can see how they do that it's a level of precision from that moment until they're done major stevens gets in the airplane canopy comes down make sure we have ics everything's great taxi one by one one through six to the runway waving to the crowd giving them the thumbs up giving them the fist pumps it's very cool all right let's go to the training aids now take the runway four four breast and boss says let's run them up smoke on off breaks now burner's ready now so we're headed down the runway liftoff gear's coming major stevens is right here in this airplane as soon as we get airborne he drops into the slot and we pull right up into the vertical and do our first move which is a diamond half cube and eight and then we go through the routine so the blue angels don't fly with g suits and that was the first time i'd ever flown a tactical jet with without a g suit so the reason that they don't want to have g suits on is because g suits will blow up and contract based on the g on the airplane and the blue angels don't want their arm to be moving their forearm to be moving because of that they depend on having really strong core strength and having very good anti-g techniques now they redoubled their efforts with respect to g-induced loss of consciousness after a 2007 mishap that killed lieutenant commander kojak davis so he was rendezvouing as you can see in this slow-mo footage here on the diamond and he put on a lot of g trying to make the turn and blacked himself out close to the tree line and could not recover the airplane in time and he died in the crash that mishap caused the blue angels to take another look at how they do anti-g training and so it's top of mind to them at all times since then so the first part of the routine you're you're flying the diamond formation maneuvers you start with the four plane half cube and eight and then that's followed by what we call a squirrel cage which includes a diamond 360 the roll where simultaneously when the bus says hit it everybody does an aileron roll and then there's the dirty which means geared down loop and then the double farvel you can see in the footage here that i shot that is pretty intense how close dash 4 gets to the boss basically putting the canopy almost against the fuselage and then the boss jets away before they get back right side up i also discovered at this point that i wasn't strapped in tight enough because my head just about hit the canopy and then we did the diamond pass which you can see the footage here the other thing you'll notice is uh there's a lot of movement that that is more or less imperceptible what looks really serene from the stands is actually i don't say chaos but there's a lot of work going on everybody's working very hard to stay in formation and to maintain their sight picture and you can see how close they are so as we joined up for the diamond pass major stevens said to me this looks close because it is the other thing to note here is see how the right wing blue angel number two is closer than blue angel number three the left wing and that's because of the parallax to use a technical term with the eye line from the spectators to the airplanes if they flew a symmetric formation meaning two and three were equidistant from blue angel number one it would look like blue engine number two was too far away you know after that number five joined the formation and we went into the line of breast loop you can see the image i took here at this point there had been some g maybe three g's on some of the moves but nothing very taxing so that's about to change in the maneuver when we start to do some what they call the breakout moves so that's the low brake cross fleur-de-lis the loop break cross which all involved the diamond separating crossing and then quickly rendezvousing back to the diamond the beginning and end of that means a lot of g and major stevens had said okay we're going to work hard to fight the g and i will tell you when we're about to put the g on and we'll keep encouraging you to fight the g until we're done with the maneuver so you know you'll have a heads up work hard use proper g technique and it was a challenge i will tell you not using a g suit makes it harder because a g suit is designed to keep your blood from pooling in your lower extremities but you know got through it so come in for a delta pitch up break it's kind of cool coming coming low and then everybody pitches up in order land you know major stevens through flew a nice centered ball to touchdown just like a good fleet pilot roll out pull into the spot shut down the show isn't over yet canopy's coming all together everybody gets out together i just sat there and waited and they rendezvous in front of the center jet one final salute and then shake hands all around and finally the show's over at that point and strapped got out and joined him for some high fives and hugs all around um and i was a sweaty mess and i was talking to captain mcwhorter and just thanked him for letting me fly this great bucketless day but the flight still isn't over so now you debrief and the same rigger that they use in the brief they use in the debrief so they go around the table each guy says happy to be here boss and they kind of tell on themselves their their attitudes are completely zero ego contrite you know and again it struck me that they were acting as if this was the first time they'd ever flown this event so they have a lot of video that they're looking at and and each guy has control of the video player like a coach's clicker it looks like you know an offensive coordinator debriefing alignment after a game and they'll stop and they'll go backwards they'll stop and so they're talking about okay you know on that leading opposing solo on that one my roll rate was a little too slow and they'll freeze it and you'll see the wings are a little bit you know different etc i mean they're they're seriously um critiquing and that's asking themselves in a way that again i'm thinking that fleet standard it's like not quite good enough but wow you guys are really into the details so that was an eye-opener this is the culture of the blue angels and this again was a lesson to me why just not any fleet pilot can be a blue angel you know you've got to be totally dedicated day in and day out every day matters you've got to get it right not just some of the time for all of my time in tactical airplanes this day was remarkable and i remain very grateful to commander greg mcwherter for inviting me and hosting me generally people want to know how do you become a blue angel well it's not like you just call your detailer and say you know hey for my next orders i i'd probably like to be on the blue angels so it does start with the navy puts out a message that says we're looking for new pilots for the blue angels for the upcoming season there's specific information you have to put in your application to join the blue angels and so the the blue angels look at who's applied and some people are eliminated because they don't have the right experience or they haven't met the requisite number of flight hours and so they narrowed down the list and do some due diligence on people and you know in the fighter community and fighter attack community your reputation is pretty well known by the time you finish your first tour you have to have at least 1500 hours in tactical jet airplanes so that usually takes you you have to have one full tour the other thing that is is a subjective part of becoming a blue angel is you have to kind of rush them in the old days that would be take a squadron jet on a cross country and go to wherever they are there's some of that still but it's not quite as mandatory on unofficially as it was you know back in the day but still they need to be comfortable with you not just on paper in what they call beach week which is july of the season where they return to pensacola they will sit down and make their final choice and generally they'll be filling two or three slots a year it has to be unanimous between one and six the boss is picked in a different process he's picked by the commander of u.s naval air forces the air boss three-star admiral the boss has to have had squadron command so that makes him usually a senior commander or even a captain if you get thumbs up around the table then you're in so the ones who are selected are informed the ones who are finalists are also informed they didn't make it and thanked for their efforts and so now you get official orders the new selectees show up in late summer and they start to just hang out with the team wherever they are they will be wearing khakis and not the blue flight suits i've met some of these guys when they're in that phase of the process so the end of the season show they do at their home base at naval air station pensacola then the new selectives become blue angels and the old guys are now former blue angels it happens on the spot so these are normally two-year orders and the progression is you show up as number three and the next season you'll be number four number two stays number two for both years and then the three-year tour for the lead and opposing solo so lead and opposing solo will serve one year as the narrator flying number seven and narrating the shows their second year on the team they will be the opposing solo and their third year on the team they will be the lead solo so those guys get three year tours everybody else gets a two-year tour the boss gets a two-year tour and obviously he's number one for both years now just because you're on the blue angels doesn't mean you will stay on the blue angels and there is a history of of aviators that didn't last for their entire tour it can be for a number of reasons some of it is what we call human factors or conduct in one case there was an inappropriate relationship between one of the marines on the team and the public affairs officer and so for the balance of that season they actually only flew a five plane routine because they didn't have anybody to come back they've also had in the middle of the season guys who just weren't hacking it in terms of flying the show in in some cases they were having many midairs not bad enough to cause anybody to have to eject but you know swapping pain as they say is not a good thing if that happens too many times you're asked to leave and i knew an a6 pilot that had that happen to him and he was back in the fleet and did great and in some cases i know actually two cases where the boss wasn't hacking it in fact when i flew with the blue angels greg mcwherter the boss was back for his second tour because the guy he relieved wasn't hacking it and the way that captain mcwhorter put it is the boss of the blue angels has to keep eight buckets filled at all times and only one of those buckets is fly the routine safely the others are be the ceo of the blue angels and all the commanding officer stuff dealing with the troops the public facing piece the other deal with sinatra and the air boss so he said the guy that he relieved was maybe keeping five of the eight partially full and one of the ones he was not keeping full was flying the routine safely so in this case the boss actually told on himself he did the right thing and said okay i don't i think i'm i'm not hacking it here and went to the air boss went to sinatra there's also a graybeard you know sort of tribal elders former blue angels that advise the team at any given time and so generally what happens in those situations instead of canceling the show season will bring the previous boss back and that's what they did in the case of greg mcwhorter that this happened before in the final straw was the boss who had had trouble with where he was orienting the routine he was losing track of his ground references so ultimately this boss landed at the wrong airfield out in the midwest there's two airfields that are kind of aligned and they came out of the routine and he got disoriented and landed at the far airfield which was a civilian airfield and not the base they were operating out of very embarrassing and unsafe at that point he voluntarily left the team making the team is one thing staying on the team is another thing so you know this is again why the vetting process is very rigorous and some of that process is subjective you know the rest of the team that you're going to be with has to decide whether not just do they trust you as a guy who's going to be inches away in a formation for 45 minutes at a time but do they trust you as a guy who's going to be in public situations or who's going to be in hotels with you on the road from march until november every year and then the other thing that blue angels do is they leave pensacola in january right after the holidays and have their winter training at el centro california until they start the season so while this is technically short duty you don't spend a whole lot of time with your families while you're with the blue angels really you have from basically mid-november to early january is when you're home and then during the week if you're close enough they will fly home after the show and then leave again on tuesday so you get a little bit of time at home at pensacola during the show season but if you're flying in the pacific northwest or southern california or hawaii or wherever there's not enough time to go home so it's not really sure duty in that you're spending a lot of time away so the other members of the team want to make sure they can trust the way that their new members are going to conduct themselves in these environments because the reputation of the blue angels is at stake as well as that of the navy and the marine corps so we're not going to hazard that now this year for the first season ever the blue angels have transitioned to the super hornet now this has been work for about five years they started thinking about it 2015 2016. so the blue angels have 11 airplanes they take seven on the road so that doesn't give them a lot of depth in the event that an airplane isn't working and they can't have airplanes not working they have to do a six airplane show so that's a lot of maintenance pressure which also should be mentioned that not only are the six aviators awesome so are the maintainers that they have on the team these folks are best in class as well and they work very hard everything from the air framers to hydraulics to the corrosion guys to the crew chiefs to the videographers and the public affairs team big part of the blue angels is public affairs so those folks are all working very hard around the clock to make sure that the show comes off each and every time you remember the summer of 2020 they were doing these sort of wings across america stuff some of them were with the thunderbirds but it wasn't the full up show routine so they had a lot of time on their hands they used some of that for goodwill visiting hospitals and and going out to communities and spreading the good word about naval aviation in the u.s navy and marine corps but they were not being tasked as they normally are so that allowed them to sort of take action on the transition in a more deliberate manner and so they made it made it happen now the three concerns basically that they had with going from the legacy hornet to the super hornet were paint springs and smoke so paint is not so much painting an airplane blue but it's removing the paint of a fleet asset that's the haze gray color and in the process they were afraid they would discover corrosion and that corrosion in some cases would force the airplanes that they'd identified to go into a rehab that can take a long time to get that airplane into the shape it needs to be in and so paints number one number two is springs so the blue angels have to have seven pounds of forward stick pressure on the controls at all times and that's so they can fly smoothly so in the f4 they used to trim down so they would have that forward stick pressure the f-18 doesn't have that much nose down trim so it has to they had to actually put a physical spring on the stick it's a bungee that goes from the bulkhead in front of the stick to the stick it's stick itself so when they're flying level flight the pilot is pulling back with seven pounds of pressure just to keep that airplane stable so you need great arm strength and this is why the blue angels work out so much great core strength to fight the g without a g suit on and great arm strength to make sure you can hold that airplane for 45 minutes with seven pounds of forward pressure where that bungee is on the legacy hornet there's a duct a cooling duct on the super horn so they couldn't put it there so they had to do an engineering investigation to find out a place to secure that spring on the super hornet the third is smoke so the blue angel as anybody who's ever seen the videos of the show or been to a show have smoke coming out the back of the airplane right it's not fuel dumping out of the dump mast it's smoke that's coming out of the back of the airplane so you have a smoke canister so on the legacy horn the real estate that is needed to have a smoke canister was an easy thing to solve because they pulled the gun out of the nose and that's where the smoke canister went but as they started to investigate this for the super hornet they found out two things first the subcontractor that manufactures that tank is no longer in business and part two is they discovered the size of the old one won't fit into the super hornet's nose so they had to have new ones made so the other thing about the super horn is it's 33 bigger than the legacy hornet which is good in that it holds more gas so you can do not a longer show but a more powerful show you can use afterburner more you can you know have tighter turns go faster higher obviously not supersonic they also designed a mission computer for the blue angels that allows them to hit their targets so that when they do those crossing maneuvers they know whether they're behind or ahead and allows them to hit their numbers better than if they were just doing it the old way which is basically time distance or uh you know eyeballing it so now the hud helps them solve that and they're real happy with that i saw the new show recently it's as good as the show has ever been the airplanes are bigger which gives you a lot of sort of blue as they fly by the show is definitely louder the super hornet engine is more powerful than the lakes the hornet and you can hear it so as we get back to normal part of that is air shows are back so look for the blue angels air show near you this summer you won't be disappointed all right that'll do it for this episode as always if you're a first time viewer please ring the bell and if you're a return subscriber like this in every episode likes matter a lot for the youtube algorithm comments are great as i say almost every episode i love this community you guys are smart and savvy and as you've seen i like to interface with the commenters as i can and if you want to help us take this channel to the next level please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com ward carol also we have t-shirts available so check out the link below and purchase one of our official t-shirts summer season he or she who has the coolest t-shirts wins and we're here to help at the ward carol youtube channel i look forward to talking to you again [Music] soon 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Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 444,004

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F/A-18 Hornet, F/A-18 Super Hornet, Blue Angels, flight demonstration team, flight demonstration squadron, U.S. Navy, naval aviation, aircraft carriers, military, DCS, DCS World, F-14 Tomcat, Top Gun, Thunderbirds, T-38 Talon, F-16 Fighting Falcon, aviation mishaps, GLOC, G forces, airshows

Id: _VV2XzFjzmk

Length: 37min 53sec (2273 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021