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Post by LBer1568 on Apr 22, 2021 10:34:31 GMT 9
I missed the arrival but here is picture after it came into Museum Display area. PS We woke up to 3-4 inch of wet snow. Luckily it melted off by early afternoon. Lorinm
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Bullhunter
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318th FIS Jet Shop 1975-78
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Post by Bullhunter on Sept 18, 2021 9:11:45 GMT 9
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Post by Diamondback on Sept 18, 2021 14:06:05 GMT 9
SAC Museum near Omaha.
Holy crap that Bone's been beaten to hell! Stabs and rudder missing... Blackbird's reminiscent of how Hutchinson mounted theirs.
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Bullhunter
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318th FIS Jet Shop 1975-78
Currently: Offline
Posts: 7,374
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Post by Bullhunter on Aug 26, 2022 6:36:42 GMT 9
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Post by pat perry on Aug 27, 2022 6:09:12 GMT 9
Gary, great pictures! Since 2001 I have visited over 20 Air Museums in WA, CA, AZ, TX, OH, VA, DC, CO, AL, FL, GA, OK, and a few others.
Some I have visited more than once like Castle Air Museum 8 times. You might say I am a "junky" for Air Museums, especially for those where we held reunions or donated money to restore F-106s. I have thousands of pictures of them that were once on the F-106 Forum but the Webshots picture album company links were deleted when Webshots changed their business model.
Fortunately, a lot of these pictures now appear on Pat McGee's F-106 Association website here: www.f-106deltadart.com/
You can never have too many aircraft pictures! "Museums and hard work" is a great title for this thread! Thanks, Pat P.
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Post by pat perry on Oct 22, 2022 7:23:01 GMT 9
::)This past month, while on a driving honeymoon with Sandy, I had the privilege and honor to visit 2 museums and put my hands on2 beautiful SIXES.......But BETTER THAN THAT ,I got to meet four outstanding Sixers in person while on this trip....First was THUD- Ron Kollas in Fredricktown, Ohio, then on up to KI Sawyer where we spent the night with Lee Nellist...I attended an Air Force Association meeting and met Lani Duquette.....The following day they took us thru the museum and of course to the birds.......I was priveleged to receive a piece of metal from the missle bay of their SIX, along with a certificate of appreciation...... We then drove thru Wisc, Minn, S Dakota to see Mt rushmore and Crazy Horse Monuments.....Then down I25 to Colorado Springs and a meetin of ChiefO'The Facts Erv Smalley with a visit to the museum at Peterson Field.........Having met Pat Perry in June, I have now met 5 outstanding individuals that I never dreamed I would ever get to meet.............This afternoon, I received a phone call from an old 27th member that came out of the 4713th ECMSqdn and went to Loring with us....................Maybe some of you guys remember Pat Kyle a SSgt CC on 044....... We put on almost 5,000 miles and had a ball, wish I had a pair of navigator wings for Sandy ::)Next trip is planned for April when we go to Castle and to Sacramento, where there several more outstanding SIXERS that I want to meet. It is amazing what came from the old forum years ago and what Pat Perry and I did with one clock donation........................Thanks Guys, and by the way Sandy is almost as avid SIXER as I am.........The Old Sarge and Sandy...................MArv has promised me that he is taking Bridgette to the Grand Canyon- we have a 75 ft long driveway for his 5th wheel..........................................I will have plenty of green bottles with real beer in them for him.............................. I had to bump this from the Old Sarge Jim Gier (RIP). I had to add this next story about the history of the Boneyard in Tucson, AZ.
The World's Largest Aircraft Boneyard Is Located In the Arizona Desert by Clare Fitzgerald - 5h ago
Click Here
If you didn't attend the F-106 Reunion in Tucson, you missed seeing the last F-106 at the Boneyard and the F-106 at the Pima Air Museum just next door to AMARG. This story has very little reading and a lot of pictures of aircraft at the Boneyard. Here is some history.
Excerpt: "On July 31, 1991, US President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which aimed to reduce and limit the deployment of missiles and nuclear warheads by both countries. A section stated that the US military's fleet of Boeing B-52 Stratofortresses needed to be eliminated, something the USSR could keep tabs on via satellite and in-person inspections. This task was undertaken by the AMARC (now AMARG)".
If you have never been to the Davis-Monthan AFB Boneyard, you owe it to yourself to make a visit. We have thousands of pictures of aircraft there in our F-106 Forum posts. Just search on the Forum website using Boneyard.
Pat's Comments: While at Ubon RTAFB in Thailand in 1968, I saw an AC-130 Spectre Gunship with the name "Azreal" (Angel of death) over the crew door. The next time I saw that aircraft was in 2013 at the Museum of the USAF at Wright-Patterson AFM in Dayton, OH at our F-106 Reunion. That aircraft was taken off display and used in the Middle East during the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and returned to the Museum. I'd bet that Lorin knows some history on that aircraft since he spent time at Wright-Pat.
OK, I'm done posting for a few weeks. See you later! Thanks, Pat P.
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Post by Diamondback on Oct 22, 2022 8:17:36 GMT 9
And yet it never occured to any of the tards in the Bush League that the Russians wetting the bed at their existence was al the reason any sane person needed to KEEP the BUFFs. Damn Kremlinhumpers and their "peace" and "new world order" delusions...
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Post by LBer1568 on May 8, 2023 22:32:48 GMT 9
Nice little show of a few old airplanes. But, how did they get the MIG? It's amazing that with so few American Aircraft they have spent money featuring an enemy aircraft.
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Post by pat perry on May 9, 2023 1:54:32 GMT 9
Yes, the U.S. Air Force Flew Russian MiG-29 Fighters Pek described the wide-eye expressions he saw on the faces of pilots as they encountered a real, live MiG for the first time.
Here's What You Need to Remember: The U.S. came into possession of some real Russian MiGs. We exploited them, found out how they worked and what all the engineering details were. And the test pilots went and flew them. Found out how fast they would go, how high they would go, how tight they would turn.
From 1978 to 1988, a secret U.S. Air Force unit flew captured Russian MiG fighters in a dangerous effort to teach American pilots how to defeat the planes in combat.
The 4477th Test & Evaluation Squadron, also known by its code name Constant Peg, flew 15,000 sorties and trained 6,000 U.S. pilots, according to a new Air Force documentary.
Similar efforts continue today under different auspices.
Constant Peg was intended to train U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines pilots how to fly and fight against a real Soviet aircraft," Earl Henderson, a retired lieutenant colonel and Constant Peg commander in 1979 and 1980, said in the documentary.
It all kind of got started back during the Vietnam War, Henderson explained. The U.S. came into possession of some real Russian MiGs. We exploited them, found out how they worked and what all the engineering details were. And the test pilots went and flew them. Found out how fast they would go, how high they would go, how tight they would turn.
Hoyt Vandenberg, Jr., a general at Air Force headquarters, came up with the idea of organizing the MiGs in a squadron rather than assigning them to test programs. Gail Peck, a retired colonel who was the Constant Peg commander in 1978 and 1979, gave the squadron its code name, combining Vandenberg's call sign "Constant" with his wife's first name.
Peck proposed building an airfield for the new unit. He sketched the initial layout -- with a runway, tarmac and three hangars -- on an airline napkin. "The whole idea of building an airfield was an overwhelming challenge," Peck told the Air Force documentarians.
He selected the Tonopah test range in Nevada, as it was close to Nellis Air Force Base, home of the Red Flag war game and the Fighter Weapons School, where the Air Force trains its best fighter tacticians.
As soon as they got the hangars built, we started putting airplanes together, Don Lyon, a retired master sergeant and Constant Peg's assistant chief of maintenance from 1978 to 1981, said in the documentary. We had pieces ... we had airframes and wings and all that stuff, but they weren't flyable.
They took airplanes that had been pulled out of swamps and deserts -- and God knows where they got them -- we didn't even pre-flight them, Peck said. We had that much trust in our maintenance team. They didn't let us down. They were good."
It wasn't that difficult to figure out, Lyon said. It was a lot of reverse-engineering. But an airplane's pretty much an airplane.
Constant Peg operated dozens of aircraft. In 1985 we had 26 MiGs -- MiG-21s and MiG-23s," John Manclark, Constant Peg commander from 1985 to 1987, told an audience at the Air Force Association in 2012, according to legendary reporter Bill Sweetman. We had had MiG-17s originally but phased them out early, and by the end of the program we still had more MiG-21s than anything else.
According to Sweetman, Constant Peg also had at least one J-7, a Chinese MiG-21 clone.
Manclark said Constant Peg crashed an airplane roughly every thousand flight hours, an accident rate 30 times the Air Force average at the time. Pilots liked the speedy MiG-21 but feared the volatile MiG-23, according to Manclark.
It would accelerate until it blew up, Manclark said of the MiG-23. The limit was 720 to 710 knots, but guys would look down inside and see they were going 850 to 880.
Everyone who flew it spun it at least once, Manclark added. Although it was faster than anything we had, you weren’t ever comfortable.
Constant Peg helped to develop new technology. The CIA gave us a flare dispenser from an [Su-25] Frogfoot [attack plane] that had been shot down in Afghanistan, Manclark recalled. We gave it to maintenance – it was just a thing with wires coming out of it. Four hours later they had it operational on a MiG-21.
The flare dispenser allowed the Air Force to refine its weapons. The flying branch had designed the AIM-9P air-to-air missile to ignore U.S.-made decoy flares. But compared to American flares, Soviet flares were "dirty" and had different burn time, intensity and separation, Manclark said. The AIM-9P said 'I love that flare.
Based on Constant Peg's findings, the Air Force redesigned the seeker head on the AIM-9P.
Constant Peg took pains to remain a secret. It was so totally classified that it was strictly on a must-know basis, Peck said. Not a need-to-know, a must-know.
We were trying to be non-military, Henderson said. You'd look at these guys and they all had long hair and beards and certainly didn't look like an Air Force enlisted guy.
The Air Force declassified Constant Peg in 2006, decades after the unit had shut down and other organizations had assumed responsibility for flying Russian-made MiG-29s and Su-27s, among other foreign types.
It's one thing to fight an airplane, but one that you've never seen and don't know its capabilities is a whole different story, Lyon said.
Peck described the wide-eye expressions he saw on the faces of pilots as they encountered a real, live MiG for the first time. "He's never seen a Russian airplane in flight for real."
The comments we got from the pilots were the main indication that this was quite a program, Henderson said.
David Axe served as the former Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix, War Is Boring and Machete Squad.
This article first appeared earlier last year and is being reprinted for reader interest.
Image: Reuters.
Source contains all the text written above: nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/yes-us-air-force-flew-russian-mig-29-fighters-197126
Thanks, Pat P.
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Post by LBer1568 on May 9, 2023 3:13:58 GMT 9
We've had Migs at WPAFB for decades. The research labs, used to be called Foreign Technology Division (FTD) is now National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). We got a ton of Migs and SU aircraft following the six day war. Most came from Egypt by way of Israel. They went across the Suez Canel and brought back a lot of Egypt's Soviet made jets. Since Israel lost a lot of their American made jets during the war, they traded the Soviet made jets for a few Sq of F-4's. I remember seeing the Soviet jets as the were unloaded and trucked to hangers. There were too many of them to fit into existing FTD space. I worked with several guys who assisted with putting them back together. Wings were mostly removed so they would fit into C-141 aircraft for flight from Israel. Many of those were older MIG 17, 19 etc but they made their way to Tonapow AB to form first "Red AF" which were flown by Red Flad Instructors. They had to learn a lot about flying them, but I remember hearing a speaker at AF Museum talking about how he defected and became Instructor for the USAF instructors. Following the breakup of Soviet Empire we bought a lot of Soviet era Mig/SU from newly independent nations who were hard pressed for cash. I remember going to Nellis early after moving to Tyndall. We flew a few B-models out to help set up Red Flag and orientate pilots into Dog Fight tactics. The ADC equilivent was formed at Tyndall about the same time. It was called the Interceptor Weapons School and included a lot of Dog Fight training. Seems we lost too many fighters in Viet Nam because we had very little experience with dogfighting. I lost hearing for a while and moved into aircrew debriefing. I debriefed crews coming back from these missions and had to then evaluate WSEM and MSR tapes/film to see if weapon was successful. You could tell difference from basic F-106 students and IWS students. Following dog fights they made use of hands to show how engagements went. Lorin
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