With TOP GUN: MAVERICK hitting the movie theaters, and with Pixelsniper’s recent visit to NAS Fallon – the home of TOPGUN – notice the different layout of the words – yeah it is important – we thought it is a good time to write an article on “a day at Fallon”.
Think of the 168th Air Refueling Squadron (ARS) of the 168th Wing of the Alaska Air National Guard (AKANG) as the last gas station of the last frontier. With a fleet of nine KC-135R Stratotankers, the 168th ARS serves not only the guard units but also the active-duty Air Force units as well as any allied nation’s units as they transit to and from the Indo-Pacific and Arctic regions.
Once again Gando air base on Gran Canaria reverberated to the sounds of fast jets as the annual DACT (Dissimilar Air Combat Training) exercise Ocean Sky opened on October 19th 2021. Pixelsnipers were there to witness the action.
With COVID restrictions affecting the Global aviation industry negatively at unprecedented levels the airport of Las Palmas on Gran Canaria is a mere shadow of the usual hive of activity it normally experiences from the holidaymakers seeking sun and sangria on the Canary Islands.
For nearly 50 years the silence in the area surrounding Hyakuri air base north of Tokyo has been broken by the sound of the twin General Electric J-79 engines of the locally based McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms (known locally by the nickname ‘Samurai’) starting up for their daily tasks.
Imagine a couple of F/A-18 Hornets flying in close formation, with afterburners screaming through a valley, vapor forming over the wings and fuselage, dispensing flares, with snow-capped rugged mountain in the background. That is one image that was etched in my memory for a long long time – after seeing it for the first time on an online watering hole for aviation photographers called Fencecheck.com. I never imagined myself traveling internationally to air shows around the world, but I had put that on my bucket list anyways.
The goal of the US Air Force is to have an effective fighting force of 5th generation stealthy, hyper-situaion-aware, and data-linked fighters. With the strength of the F-22 Raptors as it stands today, and delays in the F-35 Lightning II program, and given the taskings of the various deployments going on world-wide, the US Air Force is forced to come up with a synergistic approach between the 4th and the 5th generation fighers it wields today.
Exercise Iniochos takes place at Andravida air base, in the Northern Peloponnese region of Greece, and the 2018 edition was visited by Mark Rourke.
Deep in the Negev Desert in Southern Israel jet noise permeates the harsh but beautiful landscape, for it is here that the huge Israeli Air Force (IAF) air base of Ovda is located.
Guam, a name that symbolises World War Two and the Pacific conflict in modern history, which reverberated to the sounds of heavy bombers again the 1960’s and 70’s, with the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress launches towards Vietnam, is now a modern vibrant holiday destination where east and west collide, not surprising when you consider the islands location in the middle of the Pacific.
