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Beth Anderson, Joint Strike Fighter pilot?
"Lockheed folks let us play"
that has a good ring, don't you think?
or how about this - FA/22 Raptor pilot?
I wish!
the 99s section I belong to had a guest speaker in December who was a fighter pilot (300+ carrier landings) and is now on the JSF team at Lockheed. (99s are the international association of women pilots http://www.ninety-nines.org/ )
he invited us all to play on the Lockheed SIMs. today was the day.
anyway, the mind boggles at the number of buttons to push in these things. ("I wonder what this one's for.")
The throttle is on your left (I pushed it way up into afterburner! and was going 800 KTs at 200 feet MSL!) and the stick on your right. Buttons to track air to ground missiles, air to air, etc etc. it's also a stealth fighter so you can avoid being shot at too.
you find your targets, lock onto them.... and cover ground. closer and closer and when you are in range the little heads up display sensor tells you - and BAM! a few seconds later BOOM smithereens. tank gone! (or enemy aircraft etc.)
what is so cool is that when you are approaching the ground, two sideways Vs appear in the heads up display... and they are about "yay" far apart. as you get closer, the Vs get closer to each other... you DON'T want them to meet at the point and thus make an X.. if they do you are pretty damn close to the ground and it tells you to pull up.
mostly what I did was shoot bad guys out of the sky.
when I had shot them all I did a victory roll - hard right - whee!!!
http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm
that was my day January 17, 2005! Many thanks to the men and women at Lockheed for letting us come in to visit that day.
