Just remember, Obama HUSSEIN Obama finding $17B to cut from the budget is a pointless stunt. What’s saving $350K considered? A super-duper mega-pointless losery stunt?
Saving big money, bad. Spending little money, bad. Abdicating for the Alaskan Governor? Good!
-Joe
Ya know, Magiver you are completely right… There is no military training reason for an F-16 to go find a large plane in the sky and take pictures of it…
Oh wait…
List of Tupelev T-95 encounters since 2000:
An F-16 escorting a Bear bomber:
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/4999/russiantupolev95bearbomog5.jpg
Geez, now even the silly British are doing it:
Your argument doesn’t make sense. intercepting a T-95 doesn’t require any skill. What skill is involved? That’s like saying a policeman logged driver training time by responding to an accident.
Interception and formation flight is most definitely a skill. From what I understand, it is a bedrock skill of military aviation.
People in General Aviation do it all the time with their friends. But they usually don’t have training and may be unaware of the risks. I’m a professional flight instructor, and will not teach formation flight. It’s a specialized skill which I know a little about, but for which I’m untrained and unqualified to teach.
So to bring this around to our discussion, the formation aspect of the photo mission is relevant flight experience, IMHO.
It’s hard to put this in perspective but I’ll go back to cars as an example. People who aren’t race car drivers don’t understand the skills involved but acknowledge that they are different and more complex. Intercepting another plane is like a race car driving to the race track. It’s not a skill the driver needs to practice. I have all kinds of Russian Bear pictures from my brother when he flew in P3’s. Flying in proximity of another aircraft as an intercept is not formation flying in a skill sense (unless your a Chinese fighter pilot who thinks it’s a Blue Angels exhibition flight). You don’t fly close to the plane. In order to get a picture of a 747 you have to be quite a distance away.
The money spent making the picture is not the end of the world. It was just a waste of money. It’s the one thing Governments tend to do well.
I’m kinda surprised no former military pilots have chimed in here. I’m not one, but I work with several, and I can add some anecdotes here.
At my last job in ACC, we used to get “down days” when our wing met its monthly flying hours. That is, they had a quota for hours they had to be in the air, and if they didn’t make it, the entire wing (including comm people like myself) were “punished” by not getting our free day off. It was a recon wing, so yes, there were lots of RC/EC-135s that just took off and flew around the midwest just to get hours.
Now, F16s might be different, but from stories I’ve heard from working alongside F16 pilots for the last 4 years, I can tell you that they take lots of stupid trips just to get hours. I’m not sure what percentage of their training is “combat” and what is “fly around so we can log these hours and keep you green,” but I’ve heard stories about F16s being used like UPS.
Now, that being said, we have no idea who these pilots were, how many hours they had this month, if these counted for anything. But the idea that F16 pilots are either sitting around watching TV or shooting at targets in NV isn’t accurate. There’s plenty of in-between training that mostly just involves flying around doing pointless stuff.