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 quiet countryside of Gloucestershire was reverberating with the sound of jet noise in July, as the annual Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) got underway in spectacular style at RAF Fairford for the biggest military airshow in the world.
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.
This year’s Australian International Air Show was hot and hotter. The previous air show in 2017 had the focus on existing assets of the Australian Defence Forces with the Boeing EA-18G Growler and Lockheed-Martin’s F-35A Lightning II just being integrated at the time.
Deep into central Turkey, with the seasonal hot summer weather in full effect, Konya sits in the southern part of the Central Anatolia Region. A major city, being the seventh most populous in the country, this vibrant economic and industrial bastion in the massive Konya Plain, which gives the city its name, has another noise to add to the soundscape – jet noise.
