A U.S. Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet shoots down a Syrian Su-22.
An Su-22??!? :eek:
I’m guessing it wasn’t much of a fight.
Let me expand on this sentence a bit. Balloon fabric has a coating to help keep heat in. Balloon fabric can degrade from a number of reasons:
[ul]
[li]Heat - especially flying hot/overtemping, or just cumulative flying hours; they don’t last forever.[/li][li]UV - baking in the sun either by flying hours or just being laid out & sitting on the ground before a flight (esp. at festival where there can be ‘real’ time between someone laying out & inflating/flying).[/li][li]Moisture - laying out in some morning dew isn’t so bad because the balloon is inflated/heated/flown which helps dry it off. OTOH, if the ground is wet*/dewy when you land & you deflated into that & then put it away, maybe for a week, or more until the next time you bring it out of the bag; not so good. Deflating onto a large tarp helps prevent this.[/li][li]Time - there’s a reason you don’t see pristine, 30-y/o low-flight hours balloons, only owned by a little old lady who kept it in her garage. ;)[/li][li]Other - the dust in the Southwest US supposedly never comes out. Not my part of the country, though.[/li][/ul]
- Winter flying tends to be crew flights, not passengers. Being up there when the ground is white is very pretty & if landing time temp is cold enough, say < 25° the snow isn’t ‘wet’ the way it would be closer to or just above 32°
Here’s a sweet tale of someone born on a plane becoming cabin crew which I’m sure Dopers will enjoy.
Piper Seneca makes nose gear-up landing in Bremerton, WA
Too bad he didn’t stop the props.
He wouldn’t have been able to go around if he had. He has to tear down the engines either way, and that’s what insurance is for, among other things.
N/M
Use most of your fuel trying to get the wheel down, then bend the airplane.
You willingness to bend the aircraft may vary
Nice story, but her mom was, not her.
Thought you’d like this one: The absolute best possible way to propose. 
I would have been shot on the spot upon getting down safely.
That was cute, but could have gone MUCH worse for the Pilot in Command.
Got to watch Matt Chapman take a rare passenger (sadly, not me) up in his work plane. While the (fixed) gear remained down the entire flight, I was told the wheels didn’t.
Nice. I guess the Extra must have a different canopy for flying with two on board?
Got to see the Thunderbirds last week while at work before the air show. They were right over my building at a very low altitude. Unfortunately the next day one of them rolled off the taxiway and inverted so they ended up canceling out of the show. The good news is no serious injuries.
Terrible luck. It was a demo flight with I believe one of the ground crew in their two seater. It was pouring like mad and the wind changed from 7 knots to 30 knots. The pilot landed fine but skidded turning off the taxiway.
I just got home (well, just after midnight this morning) from another camping-and-soaring weekend. As a pre-solo student pilot, there were a lot of “firsts” for me again.
Hastily arranged (in the last half-week), almost impromptu, group from my club went to Truckee (on the north short of Lake Tahoe). One club instructor, three glider pilots, and two student pilots. Plan was for the instructor to give the other pilots a local KTRK area check-out and some introductory mountain soaring instruction for us students. (We have two of our club gliders there for the summer, a single-seat Grob G102 and a two-seat Grob G103, there for the summer. No, those pics aren’t our gliders, but ones like them that I found on-line.) The region is world-famous for its fabulous mountain soaring conditions, not to mention the scenery! Separate from that, there were also two of our club members there with their private gliders. (ETA: and one guy I knew from the Hollister club. The whole event felt like a class reunion.)
KTRK has a glider port, on the back side of the airport almost out in the boonies. There’s a large grove of Ponderosa pine trees adjacent to that (on airport property), which they operate as a campgound. So people come to camp for weekends or weeks or months there. For me, this was just my second-ever (as an adult) camping experience, after that Gliderpalooza event last month. The weather was just marvelous for camping and soaring alike.
So, on Saturday the instructor did the area check-outs with the three pilots, then by mid-day he got sick. (Strep throat, maybe, he thought.) So one of the pilots (now able to fly there without an instructor) took me soaring in the G103 in the afternoon, with me in the front seat. He let me do some of the flying, and in particular he let me try my hand at working some of the thermals. I gained about 2000 feet in one of those! On Sunday, he went soaring in the G102 for most of the day, while the other pilot took the other student soaring in the G103. That ended quickly, as the student soon got a bit airsick from all the aggressive thermaling they were doing. (What a bummer!) So that pilot did another flight with me. This time I sat in the back and just went along for the ride. I, in contrast, found the seriously aggressive thermaling to be a blast, and didn’t get a hint of a trace of airsickness! This, definitely a non-bummer for me, was definitely not your normal tourist beginner’s glider ride.
Two flights (Sat. and Sun.) of 2 to 3 hours each, over Truckee and north shore area of Lake Tahoe. Great soaring weather! Got to altitudes of a little over 15,000 ft MSL (about 8000 to 9000 above KTRK airport). As with last month at Panoche, I got to try my hand at working some of the thermals (and there WERE thermals galore!), gaining about 2000 ft in one of them. Reno was clearly in sight just beyond the mountain ridge, and Carson City also a little farther south. Still some snow on the mountains in patches. For me, first flights anywhere near (let alone above) 10,000 MSL; first experience mountain soaring; first look at Tahoe area other than just driving through; first time flying with oxygen. By my count, I’ve had 8 good soaring flights so far lasting an hour or more, all in the last 4-or-so months; two of them were lessons with instructors, and the rest I was technically just a passenger, although usually in the front seat and the pilots let me do some substantial part of the flying and try my hand at thermaling. THIS weekend was totally awesome!
Some of the other pilots took some great photos. I’m not exactly sure how to get them to where y’all can see them. Failing that, I did find some web pages with some great pics from that area, including the glider port; some glider launch and towing photos; and some great aerial scenery:
http://www.swaynemartin.com/trips/airport-review-soar-truckee-at-the-truckee-tahoe-airport-ca-ktrk/
Note in particular this photo of the airport, which clearly shows the Ponderosa grove adjacent to the glider port, where the campground is. It’s that grove at the lower left of the picture, with the road running through the middle of it. The area between the road and the runway is the campground. (Farther down the page are some photos showing the glider port area circled and labeled with a paragraph on the back of each one describing what each one is.)
A bit farther down the page is this pic of a glider in free flight, above a mountain peak, which closely resembles our club gliders.
Here’s another page by the same blogger, describing his first glider lesson, which did there. It has a lot of the same pics, but also a lot of other pics too. Parts of Lake Tahoe are clearly visible in a few of these pics.
I had, like, a total blast there! Sorry if I’m gushing here (again!), but the adrenalin hasn’t totally worn off yet (again). If I can get some more pics in a place where I can link to them, I’ll be back with that. (I have my own web site, but they changed their authentication protocols and I haven’t been able to put pictures there for a while.)
In other related news:
While we were doing all this at Truckee, a few others in our club were soaring around Air Sailing, near Pyramid Lake, a bit northeast of Reno. One of our pilots remarked that he was able to talk with them on the radio while he was flying. (Once aloft, glider pilots use a common frequency, 123.30 – if you’re ever flying anywhere where there might be gliders around, try listening in!)
It wasn’t all marvelous news, it turned out. A few others in our club and from Hollister were soaring around Bishop and in the White Mountains to the east. One of them crashed somewhere up in the mountains there, on Thursday I think, or maybe Friday. This was the same pilot I flew with a month ago at Gliderpalooza, and the same pilot I flew with in that video I posted last December.
It’s astonishing how fast news like that spreads, faster than the speed of quantum entanglement.
It turned out, he wasn’t hurt – only some minor cuts and scrapes. Two other pilots spent a couple hours searching for him – in their gliders – and one of them finally spotted him. He was in radio contact with them the whole time, so they knew he was okay. They had to call in the Search and Rescue folks to come in with a rescue helicopter to haul him out. The glider, presumably, is a total loss. It was one of the Hollister club gliders, not one of ours. That’s what insurance is for!
The whole party, I heard, lost interest in soaring for the rest of the weekend and spent the time boating and fishing instead.
Must be; here are some shots I found online (though I got a couple myself) with a canopy large enough for a passenger in front. The “90” is gone as that anniversary was last year.
@Senegoid: Waaay cool. Thanks for sharing.
I did just enough soaring (back as a teenager) to know that I could get utterly hooked if I lived in the right area and had the right cash flow. Neither of which are true today.
@Magiver: That was always one of our nightmare scenarios. The F-16’s footprint is real small, so it’s a very top-heavy & squirrelly tricycle with any decent speed on. Guys have even rolled them on their back at taxi speed: drift off the side into muddy ground, one main gear snags in the soft mud and boom: you’re upside down.
If it does get upside down with you in it, it’s at least an hour-long job to get you out. Here’s hoping a fire doesn’t start. Those guys were real fortunate to get out almost unscathed.
Update: I saw this today.
At work yesterday I heard my very first HondaJet http://www.hondajet.com on the radio. We weren’t close enough to see it.