[AT] OT. Grouse hunting

[John Slavin]

Spencer:

When I was a kid, fighter jets used to go over my house nearly every day.  I think they were on a training run out of Des Moines and learning to evade radar.  I’d hear them and have a few seconds to get to a place I could see and they would fly over just a couple hundred feet off the ground (if that).  I could clearly see the pilot in the plane.

Several years ago, my son-in-law sent me a video of an F/A 18 pilot somewhere in the northwest.  Apparently there is a regular training run like you describe where the pilot follows along valleys with the hillsides level or above the pilot.  Pretty intense.  One thing I thought interesting is that there are a couple instances where the plane flies over a hilltop to get to the next valley.  The plane will invert  at the hilltop crest and fly over the hilltop upside down.  I asked my son-in-law if the pilot was hotdogging and he said “not at all”.  He said when the plane crests the hill, and abruptly dives to the next valley, it’s less stress on the plane to pull up when inverted as he crests the hilltop.

John S.


> I did hear one request for my story, so I'll pass it along:
> 
> Those of you from North Carolina may be familiar with the Clinch Mountain and Elk Knob area of the state in the very extreme north west corner. You can almost spit into Tennessee.  I mention it because it is now a state park, but in the early 1980s it was simply land leased as game lands by the state of North Carolina. So only hunters came there. 
> 
> Anyways, rumor has it that the city nearby I lived in, Boone North Carolina, was an electronic target for the Air Force. I'm sure it was just a rumor based on the number of aircraft we would see from time to time.   We would usually see bombers fairly high, but every once in a while they would be accompanied by a fighter jet consort at lower elevations.
> 
> Anyways one brilliant fall day shortly after the  grouse season  opened my dog and I were working up the side of the Elk Knob.   The gap is barely over 3000 feet but Elk Knob is over 5000 feet. So I was probably a good thousand feet above the gap.  It's steep land, so I probably wasn't more than 1000 feet from the axis of the gap either though. I was working  the edge of a clearing  that had been cleared by an older gentleman in the 1920s with a mule  and sweat(as I mentioned in a previous post). Suddenly I heard a plane. It was fairly loud so I kept looking for it. 
> I couldn't see it but it just kept getting louder and louder then all the sudden this fighter jet came flying the carpet at low speed, passing through the gap between Clinch Mountain and Elk Knob. I saw that pilot turn his head and look at me - level on. He was in the gap at the same elevation I was.
> 
> One weird feeling.  I'm sure he wondered what the heck a guy with a gun was doing looking straight at him too though :-)
> 
> Spencer Yost