On Mon, 8 Jan 2007 10:00:26 -0600, "Danny Deger"
wrote:

What is your favorite "lost" story?


Every IP knows that you have to let the students go a little bit, so
that they can see the outcome of their errors and then the lesson is
reinforced. The difficult judgement call is knowing how far to let
them progress and still be able to make the recovery without damage to
the airplane or the landscape.

I was watching a student doing a VFR low-level nav in a T-37 across
the desert of Southern Arizona. We'd headed outside of the Williams
AFB local training area and SW of Tucson into the area south of I-10.
He'd gotten overwhelmed with flying low and still trying to keep up
with map-reading and dead reckoning, and I was dutifully urging him to
ease it down just a bit more so that he could successfully penetrate
the fictitious enemy defenses. I knew we weren't going to be running
out of gas--we were headed generally north bound and we could easily
make it back to Willy.

What I didn't know (but should have) was that we were entering the
Gila Bend gunnery range and just over the next ridge ahead of us was a
conventional air-to-ground gunnery range. We crested the ridge, I saw
the target array, run-in-lines, strafe panels, control tower and a
flight of four Phantoms in the box pattern doing 30 degree dive bomb
drops.

"I've got the airplane..."

"Yessir, you've got it..."

"We're going to go a bit lower now, and watch how we use this ridge
line for terrain masking."

"Wow, sir, we're really low."

"Not really, this is about five hundred feet."

"But, sir, it looks closer to about fifty. That saguaro was higher
than we were."

"That's just an optical illusion caused by our speed."

"Don't you think we should climb now, sir?"

"No, not until I hop over this semi, and we get north of the
Interstate here. Ahhh, that looks good. You want to tune in Chandler
VOR now and get ready for an instrument approach when we get there?"

"Is my low-level over, sir?"

"Yep."


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
www.thunderchief.org
www.thundertales.blogspot.com