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by Jake the Snake Paying homage to Pinch’s naval aviation past, here’s one to the few “retired” Tomcats on the east coast.  She rests at the Virginia Aviation Museum, adjacent to an SR-71 Blackbird.  The Museum is adjacent to Richmond International airport. Not a bad life, as opposed to the mothballed ones at Davis-Monthan AFB, [...]

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Firing up the scanner again!  I said a bit before that I’m starting to get close to the bottom of my box of F-14 pics.  I’m going to scan every dang one of them, bad or not. This one – I can’t remember if it was a cross country or out at the ship.  Either [...]

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Let’s get Tomcatty for a moment (I’m sure you won’t mind). I love these reflection images.  The color and the image as it is distorted and reflected by the canopy make for a neat effect. Even though I can’t remember *exactly* where this is (the highlands of west central Nevada and the Atlas Mountains of [...]

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A tough toy.  I caught this VC-12 A-4F Skyhawk on our wing as we returned to Oceana after some playtime in the warning area.  I was in a two-seat TA-4J.   The A4-F was an absolutely unbelievable airplane – small, nimble, fast – that J-52P-408 engine gave that little jet some movin’.  There was a [...]

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Posted these pics on the Tomcat Territory page of Facebook this evening.  As I look back on all these images and pictures and memories, I do so wish I had taken ten thousand more pictures than  I did.  I took my camera on almost every hop I flew on, but did not use it near [...]

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Our wingman as we headed back to Oceana from doing some field carrier landing practices at Bogue Field down Cherry Point way. RTB = “Return to base”

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Repost from Feb 11, 2006 In the sometimes arcane language we’d use while flying, that was the call we’d make to inquire of our air controllers where some gas might be. Not gas on the ground, mind you, but where the airborne tanker was so we could plug in and grab a few thousand pounds [...]

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Our CAG jet, designated such by the side number 100.  The two F-14 squadrons used 100 and 200 series side numbers.  There was actually a rationale for this, but I won’t get into it.  Suffice it to say that we were the 100-series jets, numbered sequentially from 100 up to how ever many jets you [...]

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Going through the boxes and boxes of pictures I have and scanning some that I haven’t scanned before.  Hopefully a few good ones may come out. 1987/88′ish, on board USS John F Kennedy, Camelot 111 and Ace 502 tied down just aft of cat 3 jet blast deflector after a stormy night that left the [...]

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Joined up in formation, enroute to whatever business that lay in store.  Probably out in Fallon, NV, based on the rugged deck and no tanks – the former meaning good flying with our minimum altitude being zero-feet and the latter  meaning  we were not flying from the ship – those 2 fuel tanks gave us [...]

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