That is very true MBot, Having air assets ashore is something that is important to Marines. But it doesn’t need to be a world war type situation.
Any creditable threat to the landing ships or the carrier group, whether land, sea, or air based encourages naval forces to employ standoff or mobility, both of which require sea room. When the Gulf War kicked off, there was serious talk of having the Navy wait outside the gulf, rather than enter it.
Of course, supplying a forward base or bases is always a challenge in this scenario. Attack aircraft, whether fixed wing or rotary, can really eat through some ordnance, fuel, and expendables…especially when those aircraft are rotating through once an hour or less!
Considering the effort Russia and China have put into “carrier killer” missiles, I don’t think the USMC mindset is at all wrong. Sure, it hasn’t been needed lately, but we’ve been fighting mostly nomads with stolen equipment, not a true trained and effective state military.
No that is fairly accurate.
Flying home at night over the desert, if there is no moon it is darker than you can possibly think. So dark that the NVG’s only make the ground a pitch black blob, with no stars, as opposed to the pitch black blob above you with no stars. It is literally darker than closing your eyes in a dark room.
It is very easy to get disoriented looking outside, because you have absolutely no references and you cannot trust any references you do see, because lights on the ground start to look like a horizon or stars and then your inner ear starts telling you things that aren’t true.
Night strafe is even worse, because you are going downhill in this aforementioned black hole and other than your symbology you have no idea at all where the ground is, and usually a pilot cannot see the target even with NVG’s, so they just strafe symbology.
The night is dark and full of terrors.
Also, the FLIR image on the HUD, in the strike eagle it is now rarely used, because the pilot is wearing NVG’s, and you can’t see the FLIR image clearly (or at all) through the NVG’s. We still turn it on, because it is great for the WSO in his HUD repeater.
Issues with it are alignment. the FLIR pod is offset from the HUD itself, so your image is also offset, and most of the time pilots don’t align it. You can have things being quite far off from your symbology (parallax errors) which can make things rather interesting (are we going to hit that aircraft that the FPM is on? or is it offset? Are we landing on the runway or 300 Meters to the left?) Combined with the lack of resolution in the HUD display, NVG’s are honestly superior.
The advantages of FLIR are that it sees on a different wavelength than NVG’s so if you combine the two you can get some interesting effects. Heat sources of course light up quite nicely in FLIR in a way they don’t in NVG’s, and they both can see through different types of clouds. Overall, for a pilot, once you have decent NVG’s the FLIR is not particularly useful except in some edge cases.
Doesn’t diminish the coolness factor of it though.
Agreed. I shot an ILS out in Bermuda a few nights ago (well, my FO did)…and part of the missed approach and takeoff brief was…“and we will not get spatial D over the ocean if something goes wrong”. Dark nights are dark. Scarily dark. Mountains at night are the same way…or large expanses of wilderness. Anything less than no clouds and a half moon can put you in a bad way if you aren’t paying attention. Carrier pilots have it the worst. Lots of sources of vertigo inducing problems…
ya mountains are terrifying at night. You see pitch blackness everywhere and subconsciously realize there is a giant pit of even blacker black out there that you can’t see and that part of it is above you… But you sorta can see it, but not really.
Some of the most terrifying flying is low levels at Nellis at night. Some of the routes we plan will go 500 feet running parallel along a cliff edge, below the cliff. The TF is telling you OBSTACLE to the right, but without the NOG’s you can’t see anything. but you know there is a thousand feet of cliff right next to you, zipping past at 450 knots. And all you can do is trust that the TF is doing its job, and that you will be just fine…
Good Desert Storm night mission for the F-15C linked on this page. Have any of you flown it and lived through the takeoff the first time out? Hint: resist the urge for a displaced threshold departure I’ll edit it for the AV-1B to be in the strike package when released. Fun mission.
Huh. I had to look this up. For other aircraft the solution is to just turn up the HUD brightness so you can read it with NVGs, this setup sounds interesting. I don’t think I’d want it unless the FLIR footage was displayed on the HUD, however, as losing NV capability out the front to look at the HUD seems like a bad idea. I’d be curious to get a dude that flew Harriers to give his perspective on the system.
[quote]The “Cat’s Eye” is a Type II (projected image) Gen III NVIS made by GEC-Marconi, and is standard
in the AV-8 series of Harrier aircraft. The weight is slightly over 1 lb. The two optical combiner lenses
have the image displayed for out-of-the-cockpit viewing. The combiner has see-through capability
to view the aircraft’s HUD. When the pilot is looking at the HUD, the imagery is automatically
turned off to allow visibility of the HUD symbology. [/quote]
It is kind of neat that some of this tech has filtered down to the civilian world… Just the other night I shot an ILS into Boston using a HUD with EVS (FLIR)…
Some of the tech in those corporate planes is incredible…and miles ahead of the steam gauges still in the airlines. I only saw EFVS in the sim, but it was awesome.
It’s kinda weird, one would expect the HUD to be just incorporated into a projector system that has a composite image for the pilot. Much like a HMS. It would solve this whole problem, albeit at a higher cost.
I really think there is no technical barrier to solving this right now(or 20 years ago for that matter).
I suppose I don’t understand. The NVGs are something of a projector. They just don’t operate on the FLIR wavelengths.
And HMDs are still pretty new technology. You can certainly have made a projector helmet in the '90s. But it certainly wouldn’t have been very fun to fly in. Even the earlier NVGs made for a heavy helmet and it was advised to remove them before you ejected, due to the weight.
Much like VR. The concept is simple. The execution, well not so much.
If you aren’t sure what the Guam is, it’s a member of the Iwo Jima class LPH (Landing Platform Helicopter). Something along the lines of a jeep carrier specifically built to carry troops, their helicopters, and deliver them to the shore. These are the oldest class of US Amphibious “carriers”, and don’t have a well deck. They were initially commissioned in the early 60s, and were pleasantly long lived with most surviving into the 90s in some form or another.
Gators for the Gator God, Phibs for the Phib Throne.
