Never heard of Tornado
 

A while ago I was in conversation with someone who had been in the US army for four years and who had never heard of Tornado.

Okay, fine, this particular individual had been involved with CBRN stuff and had spent two tours directing some sort of helicopter operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so no direct involvement in allied air activity, but even so. How can you be a US Army captain and never have at least heard of something I've seen referred to as the most important combat aircraft in europe for the last 25 years?

Is this normal?

P

Never heard of Tornado
 

Many of them have never heard of Julius Cesar and the Roman Empire, think that you can drive from France to NYC and wonder whether we have running water and electricity in continental EU...

Go figure!

DK

To be fair, you can drive from Paris to NYC.... may be where the confusion arises from

Nimrod crew met up with some USN submariners in the Intercon bar in Seeb a few years back.

One of the Sub lads said


“Well, Turkey is sure a lot different than I expected” !!


Wouldn't beleive that he had in fact missed Turkey some days ago.


:rolleyes:

Are we saying that all RAF Flight Lieutenants would know what a FH70 or an AS90 was?

What? No? How can that be?

Big whirly thing, Dorothy, red shoes, or the MRCA?

Well, to be fair, I could have told you that one of those was a towed gun and one was a self-propelled gun, and I'm neither in the military nor particularly an enthusiast of the genre.

So yes, I'd personally expect the average NATO officer to be at least as informed as me, no?

P

To be fair to the cousins I met some pretty dumb folk in the UK military as well.

Phil,

I would say that you are well informed - bravo - but I doubt that all RAF Flight Lieutenants are...but we have no way of proving this because a) you aren't one and b) even if you were one you wouldn't be all of them c) it'll take a while to ask them and d) if we do it via this forum they can scuttle off to google and find out.

You will of course note that I chose systems in use with our own army to make the task ever so slightly easier.

Perhaps the answer as to why this fellow had never heard of the Tornado was i) he was/ is American ii) the Tornado only had (approximately) four users which didn't include the USAF iii) he was/is a soldier and iv) if there were only (give or take) 3 European users of the Tornado then it can't really have been that important.

Anyway - it seems you are surprised and I am not - but that doesn't mean we have to fall out. (Not that we were falling out).

I think his reaction tells you more about the information source than this particular individual's knowledge. If he's only been in 4 years and already done 2 tours of Afghanistan/Iraq, you can be sure his thinking is not quite "Euro" centric yet. He could probably tell you about the 4,500 F-16s that have been built though...

Spams arrived at 18Sqn Gutersloh just before it closed and "some" of them wondered what that "Vee-hi-cle" was?...it was a Hard-Top Land Rover.

Not the first time that US Army personnel have not known what a Tornado is. Last time the results were rather more tragic.

Now who was it, in a Nimrod in G.W.1. , who allegedly read out the lettering on the stern of an American battle wagon crossing the Atlantic as " O ...H...... Ten.".....:) ?

A squaddie lobbing 'faulty' IR Cylumes ("these aren't working, I've tried loads and when I break them they're not glowing") into the GIFA near a FARP is one of many accounts of UK mil stupidity I can recall off hand.:ugh:

Surprised nobody's bitten yet. I know what you mean. 1465 miles according to G**gle Earth

Here you go!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbr3MDI1QLc

I'll leave someone else to post "New York, New York" - if they must.

That might as well have been in Mandarin for all it meant to me Stacker, so I guess that makes me pretty dumb as well!

I remember a Harrier pilot ( a graduate) using his F95 PFO camera going Gütersloh to Wittering, where the undeveloped film was popped in a tin by the photogs to bring back to Gütersloh for developing.
The film was totally fogged.
He subsequently admitted he had peeped into the tin "Just for a second" to check that the film was in it.

Herod,

I guess most of knew that he meant drive from Paris, Texas to New York! :ok:

Tankertrashnav,

Infra Red chemical glow sticks, only observable with night vision equipment!

On a joint exercise in Holland back in 92 our Buccs were parked up next to F14s from the JFK. Unsurprisingly, something broke, so a spare was to be flown over from Lossie. This was the opportunity to wind up the spams with tails of the new top secret Brit stealth fighter.

They still believed the story when a matt black Hunter taxied onto the pan a few hours later...

Sorry TTN, I'll translate.

'faulty' IR Cylumes' = Infra-red Spectrum Lightsticks. Only visible using night vision goggles, therefore not 'faulty', just not visible with said squaddie's Mk.1 eyeball.

GIFA = Great Iraqi F**k All, ie: the middle of bloody nowhere in Iraq.

FARP = Forward Arming and Refuelling Point, used in support of helicopter operations for, well as the name suggests.