[CLUE-Talk] Humor: Things you never knew department (HTML only)

[Kevin Cullis]

dJohn,

Somewhere in my photo collection is one of an F-4C in England during a
light raining Airshow day which I took while stationed over there. Very
similar pattern under very similar circumstances.  BTW, what is shown is
an F/A-18, not an F-14.  We Veterans are particular about being
accurate. especially since we were in the aircraft business ;-)

Kevin

John Kottal wrote:
> 
> This is how the Navy gets new F-14 Tomcats, its premier fighter.
> 
> They are hatched out of large eggs in the sky. Here is a picture of
> one emerging from its shell. Notice that it emerges fully armed, ready
> to fight. Also notice that it emerges so quickly that it is out of the
> shell before the shell can break.
> 
> For the real story of the picture, read below.
> 
> [Image]
> 
> 
> Through the viewfinder of his camera, Ensign John Gay could see the
> fighter plane drop from the sky heading toward the port side of the
> aircraft carrier Constellation. At 1,000 feet, the pilot drops the
> F/A-18C Hornet to increase his speed to 750 mph, vapor flickering off
> the curved surfaces of the plane. In the precise moment a cloud in the
> 
> shape of a farm-fresh egg forms around the Hornet 200 yards from the
> carrier, its engines rippling the Pacific Ocean just 75 feet below,
> Gay hears an explosion and snaps his camera shutter once.
> 
> "I clicked the same time I heard the boom, and I knew I had it", Gay
> said. What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of the sound
> barrier being broken July 7, 1999, somewhere on the Pacific between
> Hawaii and Japan. Sports Illustrated, Brills Content, and Life ran the
> 
> photo. The photo recently took first prize in the science and
> technology division in the World Press Photo 2000 contest, which drew
> more than 42,000 entries worldwide.
> 
> "All of a sudden, in the last few days, I've been getting calls from
> everywhere about it again. It's kind of neat," he said, in a telephone
> 
> interview from his station in Virginia Beach, VA.
> 
> A naval veteran of 12 years, Gay, 38, manages a crew of eight assigned
> 
> to take intelligence photographs from the high-tech belly of an F-14
> Tomcat, the fastest fighter in the U.S. Navy. In July, Gay had been
> part of a Joint Task Force Exercise as the Constellation made its way
> to Japan. Gay selected his Nikon 90 S, one of the five 35 mm cameras
> he owns. He set his 80-300 mm zoom lens on 300 mm, set his shutter
> speed at 1/1000 of a second with an aperture setting of F5.6. "I put
> it on full manual, focus and exposure," Gay said. "I tell young
> photographers who are into automatic everything, you aren't going to
> get that shot on auto. The plane is too fast. The camera can't keep
> up."
> 
> At sea level a plane must exceed 741 mph to break the sound barrier,
> or the speed at which sound travels. The change in pressure as the
> plane outruns all of the pressure and sound waves in front of it is
> heard on the ground as an explosion or sonic boom. The pressure change
> 
> condenses the water in the air as the jet passes these waves.
> Altitude, wind speed, humidity, the shape and trajectory of the
> plane - all of these affect the breaking of this barrier. The
> slightest drag or atmospheric pull on the plane shatters the vapor
> oval like fireworks as the plane passes through, he said everything on
> 
> July 7 was perfect. "You see this vapor flicker around the plane that
> gets bigger and bigger. You get this loud boom, and it's
> instantaneous. The vapor cloud is there, and then it's not there. It's
> 
> the coolest thing you have ever seen."
>