Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire B-52s over Estonia

Literally nothing. The US does this all the time. As does Russia...look into their bombers being escorted by US fighters off Alaska.

You are right, they look at us as a weak perverted country. Don't you agree?

Before You Close the Hah Hah Door ..

Please..

Turn Out the Lights..

I know you aren't talking to me but...
No I don't agree, Putin has a very good idea of what the United States is made up of. Because an old greedy bass-turd named biden was cheated into office doesn't mean the world now thinks we're all lgbtxyz/blm zeros.
Rest assured Putin knows more about what's going on here than the majority of US citizens.

Yep. I’ve spent many hours flying on the wing of Russian Bear and Badger bombers, Mays, Coots and even an Iranian P-3. They were testing us all the time. Here’s a good example that happened in the North Pacific in about ‘81 or so.

In a Phantom one night off the Midway, Strike advised us that they thought my wingman had lost his radio. While I was plugged in, taking gas off our A-7 tanker, he joined up with his lights were flashing as the signal that he was lost comm.. “Damn, we’re just going to be boring holes waiting for our recovery.” After topping off our tanks we started out toward our designated station and the next thing you know Strike comes up and says we have a bogey 330 at 100 miles, angels high, “signal gait” meaning full afterburner, go as fast as you can to ID it.

Now, I hadn’t heard “signal gait” since my radar simulator hops years before but I asked if we had more tankers airborne because we would need more fuel pretty quickly and Strike confirmed there was more sweet tankers. My wingman was a nugget (“Bowser”) and his back seater was my roommate (Tracker), again with no radio. I’m thinking “Bowser you’d better hang on dude ‘cause here we go!” I went to min-burner and when I saw his burners light I figured “OK, he’s got the idea.” We accelerated in full burner to 450 kts and climbed to 25,000 where we pushed over to zero G to reduce the induced drag and at 1.4M resumed the climb eventually going 1.8 Mach at 40,000’+ We got a radar lock out about 40 miles and it showed that the target was doing about the same speed. Range continued to close quickly with closure approaching Mach 4 and through it all Bowser was hanging on like a good wingman should 😁 This was going to be a really interesting conversion turn to join, particularly at night.

We were setting up for the stern conversion but at about 12-15 miles the radar showed the closure was beginning to drop off as the bogey turned around and headed back to the northwest. Strike then told us to knock it and return overhead. “Wonder what the hell that was all about?”

So we headed back, took on enough gas to make it to recovery then flew out to the marshall stack, holding until it was time to come down. We brought the wingman down to about a mile and detached them with flashing lights and they landed uneventfully. Marshall (Approach Control) took us back around and they worked us into a gap on final and we landed no problem.

After landing, the first thing we always did was go through CVIC (Carrier Intelligence Center). Bowser and Tracker were already there at the counter and as we walked in, Bowser turned and asked, “WHAT THE PHOOK WAS THAT ALL ABOUT?” 😳

“I don’t know, ask them!” meaning the intell guys.

Turns out that it was a Backfire bomber out of some Russian base and they were testing our response.

Bowser said, “here we were with no radio and the next thing we know is you lit the burners trying to run away from us,” 😁😳

No doubt about it. But Putin also understands that the American people have no ability to control events even if they *did* know what the hell is going on in America.

Everybody in the world has to deal with the power brokers. The people are just along for the ride.

The difference is, some leadership has the wellbeing of their nation in mind,...other nation's leadership are under the thumb of the power brokers.

This is the kind of [bleep] a guy like me can only read on the Campfire. Thanks for sharing that.

Always fun and games...
On one of our tracks flying a Silk Purse mission we'd enter the continent at Amsterdam, continue flying east into Germany and then turn right and fly south until we were perpendicular to Paris. Another right turn, fly west to the channel, turn north and head for Amsterdam to do it again. On a few occasions an Aeroflot jet joined us about half way through our southern leg, trailed our aircraft slightly behind us at the 8:30 position (close enough to get a good picture of it out of the pilot's #3 window). If French ATC would allow us to play we'd make a few minor course and altitude changes, the Aeroflot mirrored our every move.

Anyone think the Rothschilds aren't behind this and are making billions? It's what they do and how they amass and control 1/2 of the world's currency in one way or another. Hell, Hitler feared them and gave orders "hands off".

Their influence is great in Russia and Europe, but I'm not so sure about China. I have a hunch that China is their big competitor.

I am always suprised at the few anti America dead enders hoping for the end of the world here on the Fire.

Feel bad about their lives if the best thing to look forward to is nuke war.

That is NOT a nuclear blast.... that was a pic taken from the shore, of when Schtick was out on his boat fishing, and put waay too much fuel on the charcoal grill, and threw a match on it...

That is what happened, and is now the reason Schtick doesn't have any hair on the top of his head...

His dog Hutch told me that via a PM...when Schtick was drunk and passed out, face first in the cat's litter box...

Somewhere I have pics that the old man gave me back when I was in High School in the 60s... They were photographs taken by RF4Cs of Russian Bombers and Recon A/C intercepted over Alaska...off the coast of Japan, and at various spots in Europe 8 x 10 Glossies... in each of the photos you can see the other 3 F4Cs ( non recon) escorting the Russian bombers and Recon platforms, back to where they came from...

some of the pics were from when he was one of the pilots flying with the F4 intercept....

Love the B52, the 1911 of bombers.

I can remember seeing rows of them lines up at McCoy (?) in Orlando when I travelled there to visit my father.

The F-4 was my favorite USAF fighter, until the F-16 came out. My only gripe about them that we had to put alot of grease on the boom nozzel locking lugs if our tanker was going to do some air refueling with them. Otherwise they could damage the nozzel on break-away disconnect.
It wasn’t only the Russians...
We were flying a wire mission over the Bay of Biscay. When you've got approximately 25,000' of ¼" wire with a big orange basket on the end of it trailing behind you they close a big swath of airspace to ALL air traffic around you for a reason. The boomer goes back to the boom pod to watch that the drogue is stable as the last few hundred feet is being reeled in so that the aircraft tail doesn't get damaged. So anyways, the boomer comes running up into the cockpit, informs us that there is a RAF F-4 on our tail. Looking out the side window we see the F-4 fly come from over the top from right to left and parks himself even with the pilots window outside of the left wingtip. They were close enough to see that the GIB was wearing a helmet-mounted camera filming us the whole time. We didn't know it at the time, the Arc Royal was also in the area, guess they didn't appreciate us blasting them with 40k+ watts of VLF RF power.
It would have been ugly if that F-4 ran into our wire antenna...

Been there several times. Lots of blondes!

We were required to carry a Navy issue Nikon 35mm camera on every flight to get pictures of any aircraft we might intercept. The Intell weenies would examine the pics for any changes on the individual aircraft over time to see if there were any new antennas, etc.

I have a bunch of pics of Bears up close enough to recognize faces in the observation windows. I have one I took through the gunsight as we approached a bear from about 400 yards astern with a radar lock and the pipper is superimposed on it. 😊

If we were escorting one around any of our ships we always tried to be between the Russkie and the ship. That way there would be one of us in the picture frame so it wouldn’t be as useful as propaganda to show that they could sneak in unobserved.

Their bomber crews in WESTPAC were real buttheads. They would try to fly close aboard a ship and then turn into you trying to wipe us off on the mast or drag us off on the water. At night, they’d take their searchlight and zap us with it after we joined up.

On the other hand, Bear crews that I escorted in the North Atlantic were pretty professional about it. I followed one around in the goo for almost four hours one day off the northwestern coast of Norway.

The E-2 called out a contact of interest and I saw this guy 80 miles away because he was in the “cons”. The controller was a little shocked when I acknowledged him with “talley” meaning “I see him”. 😁 We joined up on the right side of the Bear in clear air and not long after, the co-pilot gave me a descent signal similar to the signal we use and we popped into the clouds at around 30,000’.

I told my RIO that if we got below 1000’, call altitudes by hundreds of feet and let me know if, when and which direction he turns so we wouldn’t get dragged off in the water. Shortly the Co-pilot gave me a signal sort of like a thumbs up, to the right and he turned right followed a little later with a point straight ahead and they rolled out. They were “rigging” ships in the battle group probably to get signals intell and correlate them to a ship type/number.

We were finally down at a little less than 500’ and at that altitude we were in and out of the clouds and I eventually got bad vertigo seeing clouds, water, clouds, water, clouds, SHIP, clouds. Holy spit! Even though my RIO was calling out altitudes, it didn’t really register how low we were until the helo pad on one of our destroyers went by about 300’ below.

At one point the Bear climbed back into clear air and one of our A-7s was vectored to us so we were plugged in with the tanker who was flying off the Bear. A little later it was back down into the goo. I was soaked after we landed back on the boat.