-
Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?
Go here:
Edit Account Details and Profile
USMC VMFAT-101 Syllabus
- Thread starter AircraftGeek513
- Start date
They divert. No joke. No “normal” ball flying in the F-35.
FA-18 is arguably about to enter the same realm HAL.
@ Slick, I read you. I'd say the few times here and there that I silently disagreed with a pass were far overshadowed by the times Paddles threw me a bone......or more commonly, read me the pass that I knew I had flown. But it was entertaining coming back to the boat for the first time post PLM, after having always been manual guy my entire career up to that point. Watching paddles adjust the eyeball as cruise dragged on was also entertaining. Too many 4.0 flyers, by the 4th or 5th line period, sometimes if you coughed, you got faired out
Love you guys though......the only real constant, PLM or not, is that when that deck is pitching, or the boat just drove into a fog/sandstorm, that voice is gonna get you into the wires and it doesn't lie.....unless it's a new squadron paddles doing MOVLAS for the first time, in which case you are either boltering or crushing the ace.
@ Slick, I read you. I'd say the few times here and there that I silently disagreed with a pass were far overshadowed by the times Paddles threw me a bone......or more commonly, read me the pass that I knew I had flown. But it was entertaining coming back to the boat for the first time post PLM, after having always been manual guy my entire career up to that point. Watching paddles adjust the eyeball as cruise dragged on was also entertaining. Too many 4.0 flyers, by the 4th or 5th line period, sometimes if you coughed, you got faired out
Love you guys though......the only real constant, PLM or not, is that when that deck is pitching, or the boat just drove into a fog/sandstorm, that voice is gonna get you into the wires and it doesn't lie.....unless it's a new squadron paddles doing MOVLAS for the first time, in which case you are either boltering or crushing the ace.
Last edited:
So no blue water ops?
No they still do blue water (as far as I know).
I wasn’t around for the sundown of the A-7, but I recall people telling me that there was a reason the Navy opted out of the single-engine jet game.
I would be shocked, SHOCKED if we had to re-learn some of the same lessons the hard way ALL over again.
We have tankers for that. Even pre-F-35 there were FA18 emergencies that would require a divert, blue water or not. I've heard stories of >1000 NM diverts in extremis with a little helping hand from the alert tanker force.....which most of the time should find you a place to land. But if for some reason the airplane 1) couldn't land based on failures and 2) wasn't tankable, I guess they would pull alongside and eject, much like would have been done in the Hornet/SH
Yeah I saw a picture on Facebook of one of my JO friends from my shore tour getting a Top Ten patch as a DH. He was a CAG Paddles. I immediately e-mailed him and gave him the treatment. He took it well.FA-18 is arguably about to enter the same realm HAL.
@ Slick, I read you. I'd say the few times here and there that I silently disagreed with a pass were far overshadowed by the times Paddles threw me a bone......or more commonly, read me the pass that I knew I had flown. But it was entertaining coming back to the boat for the first time post PLM, after having always been manual guy my entire career up to that point. Watching paddles adjust the eyeball as cruise dragged on was also entertaining. Too many 4.0 flyers, by the 4th or 5th line period, sometimes if you coughed, you got faired out
Makes me sort of sad though because we Hawkeye guys (usually) took a lot of pride in our ball-flying. I had some good line periods and was in the Top Ten a couple times but I fear now those days are over. He said every Top Ten was basically 4.0 and 100%. Some guys might’ve gotten an underline in there too to bump them even higher. He said some air wings were possibly going to give a top hawkeye patch/nugget patch now. Just bummed to see dudes fly really well and not get recognized by their peers.
My other pet peeve was seeing skippers, XOs, and DHs get a good line period going and then fly mode 1s from then on. I always resented that because I thought it resulted in an uneven playing field. My rule if I got a CAG Paddles gig was going to be you got one “free” Mode 1 per line period, but any after that, except in extremis, was opting out of any recognition at Follies. Fortunately for VFA/VAQ pilots everywhere, I never got that chance.
There was one LSO, two seat VFA team lead, I swear every. single. time. I flew on his wave day I got a fair. Fly a rails pass, come downstairs, “oh shit there’s xxxx, guess I’m getting a fair.” Sure enough. Wasn’t malicious, he was a good dude, but his wave team was always like that. I always tried to be the opposite of that in terms of giving dudes the benefit of the doubt if it was a tweener. I tried to spread as much love as I could, and I think in the end it helped with karma. But yeah, 3 out of 4 days on the boat, paddles is still a BPF. And then on the fourth day, YOUR day, they’re the angels in white.
In terms of cooking the books, that was only done in VT land, in my opinion, to get more booze or get a dude across the finish line.
Unless you’re on the MEU... then you are blue water, you don’t (ever) have a recovery tanker, and you dumped down to make hover weight so you’re not making it to a divert. Makes some limbic brain calculations simpler, in a way; “If I don’t get aboard on this pass, I am going swimming”. Harriers have done it for years and F35s have done it now since 2018. Granted - we have a much higher boarding rate than tailhook aircraft - but I have seen some terrifying wave offs at night due to deceleration mismanagement.
If the plane is so fucked up it can’t use the magic, it would be a divert anyway. It the plane is so fucked up it can’t use the magic, it’s likely an eject anyway.
PLM is extremely powerful and redundant.
Is there even a not-magic mode for an F35?
The ability to autonomously control things has absolutely exploded, and I expect humans not in the loop on shipboard landing (other a go-around decision) will be standard not too far in the future.
There is no way to land the F35 on the ship manually. PLM is not a button you press that says land and may fail. It is a fully redundant flight control system that decouples the lateral axis from the longitudinal axis. If it fails, the plane wouldn't be recoverable at the ship period. No amount of "awesome pilot" is going to land it.
In saying this I'm trying to explain that if it fails, the plane is so fucked up it would be unflyable, even manually.
In saying this I'm trying to explain that if it fails, the plane is so fucked up it would be unflyable, even manually.
Last edited:
PLM is not autonomous. You are still flying. Again: human flying. Man in the loop. Nothing really tied to the ship. Just a new fly-by-wire control law that makes the human flying vastly simpler and easier.
It is THEORETICALLY possible to stick-and-rudder an F-35 manual landing on the ship. The plane however was not built for that and that is never trained to. Ever. It’s not even a consideration in the back of the most creative mind.
In fact, both the hornet and F35 have two PLM modes (rate and path. Rate is known as APC in the F35), but the F35 exclusively trains to and uses path. An APC (rate) landing is a degraded mode and a circus pass in FCLP.
I personally watched VX-23 land degraded jets on the ship intentionally. Failed stabs, ailerons, single engine, etc while in PLM mode.
Rails passes. All of them.
You got some bad gouge.