From Mountains to the Desert; Top Gun

We have turned The Bus east... yesterday was a very long driving day for us, about 300 miles from Mt Shasta in the Cascade Range of Northern California to the flat, dry desert landscape of northern Nevada. Here is one view from The Bus before we crossed into Nevada.

This highway sign gave us an idea of what awaited us in the Nevada desert... "The Loneliest Road in America"???? Gee, that sounds like soooo much fun.....

We miss the tall pine, fir and redwood forests, because the heat has returned. It was 104 or so when we arrived last night at our Navy campsite. We were glad to hook up to electricity and water and turn off the generator which we had run for seven hours to keep the big air conditioners going while we descended from mountains to desert. Unfortunately, a storm came through and knocked power out at 7:30 PM, and wasn't restored for over 12 hours... so we had to run our generator all night. The dispatcher said that it was a grid problem, but in my personal opinion, the contractor electrician who was supposed to come in to fix the problem was probably out drinking last night and said, "the heck with it"... the power came back on just before 8:00AM, right at shift change.

One of the neat things about being on base is the daily colors (raising the U.S. flag) ceremony. At 7:55AM, "First Call to Colors" sounds on a bugle, which is heard on loudspeakers all over the base. Then at 8:00AM, the National Anthem is played. All traffic stops, and if you're outside, you stand at attention until the bugle call for "Carry On" is played. Then at sunset, "Taps" is played as the colors are retired for the day. Of note, the Navy retires colors at sunset, much later than the Air Force, which carries out that ceremony at 5:00PM... guess there's nobody left on an Air Force base after 5PM...  ;-)  Both of us enjoy and appreciate the tradition of colors, but Suzanne found it a bit disconcerting this morning as she was just coming out of a peaceful meditative state to have a bugle blasting "First Call to Colors" from a loudspeaker right next to The Bus. 

We are having a lay day here in Fallon, Nevada. If that name sounds familiar, you may have heard of the Naval Air Station here, home of Top Gun, the Navy’s preeminent fighter weapons training facility. For movie-goers, Top Gun is where Tom Cruise, flying an F-14, met Kelly McGillis and her Porsche 356 in the movie. Top Gun was then located at the Naval Air Station in Miramar, Calif. It moved to Fallon in 1996. 

Fallon also is the home of the Navy’s Strike and Air Warfare Center and VFC-13, The Fighting Saints, an unlikely moniker for the squadron of “adversary” aircraft that are flown against our carrier aircraft to simulate enemy fighters. Their aircraft are recognizable by the red stars on the vertical stabilizers. The 14,000 ft airfield here is the longest in the Navy. About 3,000 Navy, civilian and contractor personnel provide the nucleus of support for the aircraft carrier air wings that rotate through Fallon for integrated training prior to a carrier’s deployment for 6 months or more around the world.  Being a weekend with no visiting squadrons, the base is like a ghost town.

There are several aircraft outside the secure area that visitors can inspect closely; here are some of them, both ours and “theirs”...  unfortunately, no training is going on while we are here for two nights. Darn, we are missing out on the jet noise!

US Air Force F-16 Falcon 

US Navy F/A-18 Hornet

MiG-29 Fulcrum (one of the bad guys, an Aggressor aircraft flown by VFC-13). It was designed partly to meet the threat posed by our F-15 Eagle. Many Russian aircraft look less refined and sophisticated when compared to US models, but they are generally pretty good aircraft; they are also generally much less safe than ours. This lack of safety consciousness can also be seen in their commercial air fleet; Russian-built aircraft have the worst safety records in civilian commercial aviation.

E-2C Hawkeye, the "eyes of the fleet", an airborne early warning aircraft with long range radar.

F-4 Phantom, a Vietnam-era fighter-bomber. Suzanne commented that this one looked a bit outdated.  I reminded her that I am also a Vietnam-era fighter.  She then did what we affectionately call in the Navy a "tap dance" right there in the desert.  :-)