{"id":9817,"date":"2012-04-29T18:33:23","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T01:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=9817"},"modified":"2023-02-01T07:09:58","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T14:09:58","slug":"air-minded-air-to-air-in-the-f-15-eagle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=9817","title":{"rendered":"Air-Minded: Air-to-Air in the F-15 Eagle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my day, the only video cameras we could use to film our own air-to-air flying were hand-held devices. &nbsp;USAF pilots weren&#8217;t (and aren&#8217;t, AFAIK) allowed, for safety reasons, to use cameras or video recorders in single-seat cockpits. &nbsp;If you were flying a two-seater, which you might do once a month or so, and you had a fellow pilot for a back-seater, maybe then &#8230; but pilot-produced cockpit videos were a rarity, and there aren&#8217;t that many good ones out there.<\/p>\n<p>Until now, that is, thanks to the availability of small video cameras you can position here and there around the cockpit and operate hands-free. &nbsp;Like this cockpit video, produced by members of my old unit at Kadena Air Base in Japan.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/40935850\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"\" mozallowfullscreen=\"\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/40935850\">2012 Raytheon Award Video<\/a> from <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/user11387660\">Jersey<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>People are always asking me what it&#8217;s like to fly air-to-air combat in the Eagle. &nbsp;Minus actual missiles in the air, this is what it&#8217;s like. &nbsp;This is what it looks like, this is what it sounds like. &nbsp;This is just what it&#8217;s like. &nbsp;And I&#8217;m proud that pilots and airplanes from one of my former squadrons, the 44th FS Vampires, are featured here, along with the 67th FS Fighting Cocks, our old Kadena rivals. &nbsp;There&#8217;s even a shot of one Eagle I remember from the early 1990s, the one with the mismatched radome &#8230; you&#8217;ll know it when you see it.<\/p>\n<p>The only thing here that&#8217;s less than realistic is the pilot&#8217;s view through the HUD, the head up device. &nbsp;In the two brief HUD shots you see in the video the only thing showing is a standby gun reticle, not the array of performance and weapons information the pilot actually sees. &nbsp;That&#8217;s because the USAF has classified most of the information projected onto the HUD and we can no longer share it.<\/p>\n<p><strong><i><font color=\"red\">Update (4\/30\/12):<\/font><\/i><\/strong> New to me are the odd-looking helmets with the protruding visors, which I learn are JHMCS (Joint helmet mounted cuing system) rigs, which project weapons aiming and some flight information onto the visor in front of the pilot&#8217;s eyes, bypassing the HUD, though to what degree I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>Everything else in the video is &#8230; as I may have mentioned earlier &#8230; just like what it&#8217;s like.<\/p>\n<p>If this video doesn&#8217;t explain the concept of Shit Hot to you, nothing will.<\/p>\n\n\n<p><em>\u2014<a href=\"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?page_id=14450\"><strong> back to the Air-Minded Index<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my day, the only video cameras we could use to film our own air-to-air flying were hand-held devices. &nbsp;USAF pilots weren&#8217;t (and aren&#8217;t, AFAIK) allowed, for safety reasons, to use cameras or video recorders in single-seat cockpits. &nbsp;If you were flying a two-seater, which you might do once a month or so, and you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1960,3,14],"tags":[758,45,760,759,761,39],"class_list":["post-9817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-air-minded","category-flying","category-military","tag-eagle","tag-f-15","tag-fighting-cocks","tag-kadena-air-base","tag-shit-hot","tag-vampires"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9817"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32777,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9817\/revisions\/32777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}