Saturday, May 24, 2008

Everybody's an expert . . .

. . . and half of them are idiots. I've mentioned before that Naval Air Station Oceana is nearby, and the pilots based there fly FA-18 Super Hornets. The Navy is looking for an outlying landing field (OLF) so the pilots can practice aircraft carrier launches and recoveries.

Because the airplane is so loud, nobody wants an OLF in their county. So, our local experts dimwits are making suggestions.

First, it was "anchor a retired carrier in the ocean, and let them use that." Yeah, right! Lets have our pilots execute what is probably the most difficult maneuver in military aviation in real time with no practice, and no room for error. Thanks for the suggestion, dumbass.

Now, another deep thinker lamebrain suggests that our pilots don't need to fly airplanes to learn. "Let's just let them learn in simulators. After all, that's how airline pilots learn." Sure. That's the ticket. I'm just raring to hop on a 747 with a pilot who learned to fly a computer, and who's never been off the ground. Sign me right up.

Question of the day: Where do these people generate the number of synapse firings to required to walk and breathe at the same time?




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think many people don't understand that to a plane travelling "quite fast" an aircraft carrier is a very small target indeed and, despite it looking HUGE when you're standing on or near it the deck area is a very very short length of nothing to land on, hopefully grabbing a hook and relying on Isaac Newton to save yourself from becoming a statistic and a very expensive one at that.

Trying that for the first time, live in the middle of an ocean can't be good. No matter how many hours of a simulator you could go through it's never going to be the same as approaching, for real, hard solid turn-you-into-a-deadman ground. You get to step out of a simulator after screwing up and no matter how hard you pretend you always know that. Some form of halfway-house training has to be essential.