
Posted:
Wed Aug 12, 2009 11:22 am
by Ian Warren
Cheers Don

, I knew you played with the weather in the back end off one of those for many years .... Cooling those
Reds off ... once i get me damm pc airborne again i reply with a few shots myself


Posted:
Wed Aug 12, 2009 12:51 pm
by ardypilot
Sweet shots - is this the storm thats knocking down the buildings in Taiwan at the moment?
Also, does your weather addon simulate the severe up/down drafts noticable in this sort of tropical depression? I'm surprised with how low you've been flying through those clouds that the Connie didn't end up like Air France flight 447!

Posted:
Thu Aug 13, 2009 1:10 am
by dharris
I am not using a weather addon. That is fsx's real time weather. The clouds are from FEX which does not have a weather engine yet. The storm wa the tropical storm just east of Hawaii. As far as flying low, wayyyyy back when, we used to do alot of how should I say, "different" ways of flying. I can remember being on a SAR flight looking for a downed aircraft and we got quite low several times. Also, back in the day, they used to have a person in a little shack at the end of the runway at Barbers Point, called him a wheels watch, that would report that wheels were down and locked. I can remember that most of the time the guy would be taking a nap, from bordom, I am sure, so the pilots would sometimes be doing touch and goes and after a few passes the guy would nod off abit and the pc would fly out a ways and come in at wave top height and scream along right over the shack to wake him up. More than a few guys had to go back to the barracks and change their underwear. This continued for quite some tiime until one pc grazed the top of the shed and we were told not to do those kind of things again.

Posted:
Fri Aug 14, 2009 1:42 pm
by ardypilot
dharris wrote:Also, back in the day, they used to have a person in a little shack at the end of the runway at Barbers Point, called him a wheels watch, that would report that wheels were down and locked. I can remember that most of the time the guy would be taking a nap, from bordom, I am sure, so the pilots would sometimes be doing touch and goes and after a few passes the guy would nod off abit and the pc would fly out a ways and come in at wave top height and scream along right over the shack to wake him up.
I googled Barber's Point to find it was a Naval Air Station in Honolulu- so I guess by 'pc' you would be referring to the P3-C Orions?
Sure sounds like a lot of fun- although I've never heard of the Wheels Watcher. Did that mean that every aircraft did not anticipate to touch down unless they got a call on the radio from him at 50 or so feet from above the threshold? And didn't the Orions have the three green 'down and locked' lights on the panel?

Posted:
Fri Aug 14, 2009 6:35 pm
by TVACGCEO
Barber's Point HI is also a huge USCG CGAS operating the AS365, C-130J and 3 combat ready HITRON Helos and several classes of Cutters. Basically in a nutshell the USCG has more personal and hardware there.

Posted:
Sat Aug 15, 2009 1:50 am
by dharris
Yes Barbers Point ( John Rogers ) is now left to the Coasties. In the sixties, I flew on WV-2's out of there. The base was home to several VP and VR squadrons at that time. If you notice the large hanger out past the fuel farm, that was AEW's hangar. Aewbarronpac was the largest squadron in the Navy at that time with over 4000 personnel. Based at Barber's Point and Midway Island. The aircraft in the pictures above was one of our aircraft, checkpool 16, which crashed on landing at Midway Island.