I was an Aerospace major initially in college. Had a professor with lots of stories. He was on the first prototype Concorde flight, saw the first F16 flight, and a few others I can't recall. Definitely made class interesting.
I was told a great story regarding the F-117 many years ago. The company that I worked for bought a new Roland printing press and the installer was from California. He told me that he and a friend of his went on a hiking and camping trip in the Sierras and early one morning just as the sun was coming up they saw a black oddly shaped UFO flying low in the canyon they were in. He said that it was very quiet and only made a whooshing sound as it went by. It totally freaked them out and they picked up their stuff and hightailed out of there as fast as they could. They agreed not to say anything about it to anyone for fear of being labeled crackpots. Well, once photos of the 117 started being published, they realized that was what they saw. The one thing they couldn't understand is that the plane was almost totally silent and that fact was never brought up. The last time I saw him, he told me that he believed that fact was still labelled secret. He may be right about that because the one I saw fly at an airshow sure as hell wasn't quiet. Anyway, I got a kick out of that story and thought about how scary that would have been for those guys.
Jim
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"If you can't be a good example, then you'll have to be a horrible warning" -Catherine Aird
Posts: 9791 | Location: The right side of Washington State | Registered: September 14, 2008
A friend of mine who flew F-16s told a story after the F-117 had become public. He was flying over Las Vegas when he saw a pair of diamond shapes fly underneath him silhouetted against the lights of the city. He asked the controllers what the traffic was that just flew below him, and the response was, "There's no aircraft in your vicinity." He was going to push it but when he landed he was met at his plane, escorted to the base commander and told, "You Didn't See Any Traffic. Capiche?" (Or at least that was the gist, capital letters and all).
Only after the Stealth made headlines did he put two and two together and only much later did he feel comfortable telling the story.
______________________________________________ Aeronautics confers beauty and grandeur, combining art and science for those who devote themselves to it. . . . The aeronaut, free in space, sailing in the infinite, loses himself in the immense undulations of nature. He climbs, he rises, he soars, he reigns, he hurtles the proud vault of the azure sky. — Georges Besançon
Posts: 11502 | Location: Denver and/or The World | Registered: August 30, 2004
