hey, good to see guys are still chatting away - i'm currently flying
with 416 squadron in cold lake- no flying for me but we did do a 4 v
unk DCA mission in
our new sim - i think it ended up being 4 v 12 mig 29 which was pretty
cool. the sim is great for bvr work and the idea is eventually to
network outside of the
existing 4 ship capability to sims on other bases in Canada and the US
for lfe type stuff. Our Hornet is basically upgraded between an A+ and
a C, in that
we had no need for the EPE engine in that we didn't incorporate the
airframe weight additions that the C model did. All I can say is that I
can't imagine ever
fighting in the legacy model - we kept some for NORAD work and the
capability difference is huge. your comments about getting into the
booth are pretty
true - guys tend to view a mission as a failure of red air gets inside
of decision range or abort range for sure (bogeys excepted of course).

Part 1 of the upgrade is complete for about 1.5 years. it consists of
OFP 19C, APG-73 radar, AN/APX-111 combined IFF interrogator/txpdr
(awesome
piece of kit) , GPS, AIM-120C5 (nice!). the jets are just starting to
go away now for part 2 which is colour DDIs/ digital moving map, JDAM,
Link-16 (huge
jump in capability there) and JHMCS. We are also picking up new flir
pods ( I heard today most likely litening 2 and most definitely not
ATFLIR, which
according to our marine exchange pilot, sucks. We were also on track to
get ASRAAM as our high off boresite missile but I think that is on the
back burner
for now.