PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - T-45C Crash Report
View Single Post
Old 16th Apr 2018, 13:09
  #9 (permalink)  
gums
 
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: florida
Age: 81
Posts: 1,609
Received 52 Likes on 15 Posts
Salute!

Before it was legal to go lower than 500 feet I got down one or two times low enough to experience ground effect! I was stoopid and very young.. Never did it again after realizing how stoopid it was.

In combat I would routinely get down to about 200 to 300 feet but that was for weapon delivery and not nav. Escorting a Jolly for a CSAR we would usually be about 500 or 600 feet in a race track about the Jolly. Ditto when escorting the Ranch Hand spray birds, you know the guys....
" Only we can pervent forests!"

After we changed things circa 1974, I was cleared to 200 feet legally, although sometimes you would have to get closer to the rocks when clearing a ridge or such.

At Red Flag when our flight defeated the SA-6, they showed the tape from the missile site at mission debrief for all to see and we never got lower than 200 feet but used the intervening hills and "beaming" maneuvers to break missile lock.

Coming out one day we spotted a Canadian F-5 that was so low his shadow was almost his size. Trouble with being that low is you can't fly a formation and you can't look around. So wingie and I joined above him and escorted him out. He was startled, and we saw a sudden wing dip, then an obvious wing rock and he came up a bit.

Gums sends...
gums is offline