fighter jets in independence day

Fighter Jets In Independence Day - Did the unlikely hero of Independence Day really learn how to fly a fighter jet overnight?

Fighting aliens is no small task, but the F/A-18 jets are impossible. So we asked some military pilots: Did Russell Casse really save the world?

Fighter Jets In Independence Day

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The 2020 summer blockbuster season is on hold due to the pandemic, but that doesn't mean we can't celebrate the movies of yesteryear, freed from sunlight and air-conditioned. Welcome

Many great literary and historical moments come from a single hero who volunteers for a difficult task: young David responds to the challenge of Goliath, armed only with a sling; Brandi Chastain scores the decisive penalty kick in the World Cup final; Theseus is on his way to the labyrinth to destroy the minotaur. Same thing

, a 1996 film in which aliens threaten to destroy humanity, only to be repelled by a small team of engineers and pilots. plot of

As with many real military conflicts, there were several major turning points, from the discovery of an alien pilot to the counterattack at Area 51 to Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson infecting an alien mothership with a deadly computer virus. But one of those moments is especially poetry.

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On the night before the film's climactic Fourth of July battle, Major Mitchell (Adam Baldwin), the immediate commander of the 51st Air Force, stands in front of a crowd of refugees coming out of the desert and shouts in his bullhorn, "We want everyone with flying experience to come.. Military training is preferred, but anyone who can fly an airplane will do."

Stepping into this offense is Russell Casse (Randy Quaid), an alcoholic Vietnam veteran whose farm is in the dust, a single father of three who survived an alien abduction 10 years ago. With a long beard and a Hawaiian shirt on his chest, he tipped his glass of brown liquor at Major Mitchell and said, "I can fly. I'm a pilot."

Early the next morning, Russell found himself flying in the cockpit of a Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet destined to determine the fate of mankind. ("Mankind...that word must have a new meaning for us today...") Finally, as the alien ship is about to destroy Area 51, its last missile fails to fire, prompting Russ to send his fighter to the sky spins and crashes. alien ship's main weapon, suicide, but shot down the enemy ship. His self-sacrifice saves the day, and indeed the world.

But can Russell, who has 20 years of jet experience and only one night's teaching experience, get the F/A-18 into combat?

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"70 hours in a jet, then 200 hours in a single-engine jet. After that, you'll make your first flight in the F/A-18," said US Navy pilot Lt. Commander Matt Langford. He simply describes the time in the cockpit - pilots receive extensive instruction in the classroom and simulator before landing. “Basically, it was about five years from graduating college to my first combat flight.

"I can teach you to fly a plane in 30 minutes," Langford said. “It's very similar to driving a car, only in three dimensions. But the F/A-18 is a great complex."

Now Russell would have received much of this training before going on combat duty in Vietnam. The film directly mentions the type of aircraft Russell flew, but local reports of Russell's arrest early in the film include a file photo of a young Russell standing in front of an F-4 Phantom. , a two-seat jet that served as America's primary fighter aircraft in the 1960s and 1970s. So it seems safe to assume that he had a lot of experience with jet-powered fighter planes.

"I think anyone who flew an F-4, even with a little rest, had what we call air feel, which can move your body in a strange way in the sky. Think about where the plane is going goes and what you want to do," said California-based Navy said US Navy Capt. Doug Peterson, commander of Air Force Station Lemoore. Peterson has flown the F/A-18 since 1999 and has more than 3,000 flight hours and 750 sorties on his resume.

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"Flying the F-4 would have [the Russians] ready to fly at speeds that a supersonic aircraft like the F/A-18 can do," Peterson said. “I don't think the crop particles will help much. It's a completely different type of flight, and if he didn't have jet experience before, it could have been very destructive."

There is a big difference between Russell's Boeing-Stearman Model 75 crop duster and the F/A-18, but the F-4 and F/A-18 are supersonic fighter-bombers built by the same manufacturer. doing one thing to another is no small task. The F-4 had a crew of two men: a pilot and a so-called radar interception officer (RIO) who controlled the weapons and sensors. (This setting should be familiar to anyone who has seen it

.) Although there are two-seat versions of the F/A-18, the one depicted in the film is the single-seat F/A-18 C, which must have been difficult for Russell to adapt to.

"I went through the exact opposite," Peterson said. "Most of my career has been single-seater and I never flew with an NFO (Naval Flight Officer, current rank of crew member) until recently, which is a big change for me. I used to do everything myself, so it's difficult for me to delegate tasks and move on. And the opposite will be true. It's a bit difficult to do a task you're not used to, but it can be done."

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Weapons, avionics, and instrumentation would also change dramatically from the Vietnam era to the mid-1990s. The Navy's first Peterson jet was the T-2 Buckeye, built around the same time as the F-4. "The joke we used was 'steam gauge cockpit,' and everything had dials and needles and mechanics and big knobs and old switches," Peterson said.

When the F/A-18 C was introduced in the 1980s, Navy fighter jets featured a "glass cockpit" that replaced the old analog instruments with digital ones, with displays that projected critical telemetry in ' the pilot's line. view

To bring someone like Russell up to speed overnight with classroom training alone, a teacher would have to reduce everything to the bare minimum. Or as the film's Major Mitchell puts it: "You'll have to excuse the expression, but you're about to get a crash course in modern avionics." It would have been a huge pedagogical challenge, but Peterson seemed to like thinking about ways to solve it.

"The first thing I do before I get in a room with all these guys is make a list of bullets and give them as many as they can stick on their knees," he said. "One page that covers every step I'm going to teach them, so they have all that time. I'm going to teach them how to start the jet, which for the Hornet will be very different than the F -4."

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After doing that, Peterson will proceed to some important tools and observe the actions taken in the event of damage or breakdown of the aircraft. "We call these emergency measures and there are procedures you do to handle them," he said. “I would probably pick two or three that could absolutely kill them and say, 'Okay, keep that in mind.' Then I would teach them how to take off and land, because I want them to plan and land. "

I admire Peterson's optimism, but the inexperience of the pilots and the implacable enemy before them makes it unlikely that many of them will learn this new skill. Finally the pilots came in

Three different weapons systems were seen in use: a gun, a heat-seeking missile and a radar-guided missile, but Peterson said he would only teach his pilots one for simplicity's sake. Not a bad idea considering Russell's most effective weapon is the jet.

Russell gets his chance to save humanity only through dozens of unexpected conspiracies. Of course, genocidal aliens are unlikely to show up on our doorstep, and Peterson points out that even if they did, the US military wouldn't pose much of a threat either.

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