I flew three times this past week, but always as Red Air. Oh, well, it’s better than not flying at all.
On one of the Red Air sorties, we got to use the practice jamming pod. That made life pretty interesting for our opponents du jour. They managed to deal with us fairly well. Our job for the day was to try to get around them and bomb a target while they performed defensive counter-air. We almost got through twice. Almost! Unfortunately the practice jamming pod doesn’t jam in all directions, and Blue Three happened to seredipitously be in one of the areas the pod wasn’t jamming as I was making my run for the roses. He managed (with the help of GCI) to find me with his radar and shoot a simulated AMRAAM at me, ending my opportunity to put a simulated crater in his runway.
On one of the other ones, I got to fly with my ol’ buddy Bender, and that’s just always a good time. We didn’t have jamming pods that day, so it was relatively easy work for the Blue force to find and schwack us at range.
On the third we flew in support of Toro (from the other squadron) as he tried to knock out a Weapons School Instructor Course spin-up intercepts ride. We didn’t get practice jamming pods for that one, either, although we did get to pretend to be unidentifiable bogeys and forced Blue Air to merge with us. This would normally have been exciting, but we were briefed limited maneuvering (the thrust of the mission was intercept geometry, merge acceptance decisions and execution, not intercepts to ACM). So we flew by Blue Air rocking our wings as our GCI called us simulated killed a couple times.
I suspect I’ll have more of this in my future. At least I’m getting to fly!