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Blue Angels’ Transition To The Super Hornet Will Make Airshows Look A Little Like 1973
EDITORS' PICK|Jun 1, 2020,01:45pm EDT
The U.S. Navy Blue Angels are getting new airplanes in preparation for the 2021 airshow season. While the team has been flying on a limited basis, saluting emergency workers during COVID-19, it has also been working on transitioning from the Boeing F/A-18 Hornets that it has flown for the last 34 years to the newer F/A-18 Super Hornet.
Since the Navy no longer flies the earlier F/A-18s (often called “Legacy Hornets”), moving to the Super Hornet will again put the Blues into a front-line fighter jet. But it brings an earlier era to mind.
In the early 1970s, the front-line fighter that equipped the team was the McDonnell-Douglas F-4J Phantom, an iconic fighter-attack airplane that gained fame in Vietnam. The Phantom was big, with a 63 foot long fuselage and over 38 foot wingspan. Two General Electric J79 engines with afterburners generated a total 35,800 pounds of thrust and a ton of noise. Crowds loved the burly Blue Angel Phantoms.
Though initially designed in the late 1980s, three decades after the Phantom, the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is another large twin-engined, carrier-launched fighter with a crew of one (E model) or two (F). With a 60-plus foot fuselage, a wingspan over 44 feet and a pair of General Electric F414 engines producing a noisy 44,000 total pounds of thrust in afterburner, the Super Hornet is essentially a 25 percent larger, updated version of the Legacy Hornet the team flies now.
Nicknamed the “Rhino,” the F/A-18E/F is a bit heavier than the F-4J which means that both have a similar thrust-to-weight ratio. So it’s not a stretch to observe that when the Blue Angels start performing in Super Hornets next year, there will be a bit of a Phantom-like quality to their airshows.
“There are going to be [maneuvers] where those airplanes in the [six-plane] Delta formation are going to blot out the sun with their big wings overlapped,” says former Blue Angels leader, Navy Captain Eric “Popeye” Doyle. “It’ll look like those big F-4s. Then you’ll have times where it’ll look just like the Legacy Hornets performing.”
Transition Team
While the Blues have been doing flyovers and anticipating the resumption of the 2020 airshow season, they’ve had a second team at work on the transition to the Super Hornet. Doyle, who led the Blues during the 2018-2019 seasons has stayed aboard to lead a smaller team which is overseeing the transition.
Along with four others, all former Blue Angel pilots and maintenance officers, Doyle has been planning for the acceptance of the first Super Hornets to the Blues’ base at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida in late June. Eleven aircraft will be delivered this year.
They are the oldest F/A-18E/Fs still in the Navy inventory, early production (Block 21/22) aircraft that the first Super Hornet squadron (VFA-115) used for training Rhino pilots in the early 2000s. Doyle flew Super Hornets in 2003 during their first carrier deployment aboard the USS Lincoln. “We’re going to be flying jets that are smidge older than those,” he reflects.
First they’re being refurbished and modified for the Blue Angels’ airshow-specific requirements in Jacksonville, Florida at Boeing’s Cecil Field facility. The airplanes will have special fuel pumps added to allow them to fly inverted for longer than a stock Rhino as well as a 40-pound spring linked to the control stick which resists movement, helping pilots to make smaller control inputs. Tanks for airshow smoke chemicals, a stopwatch for timing maneuvers, and civilian-friendly avionics will be added as well as the requisite blue and gold paint scheme.
Lieutenant Commander Garrett Hopkins, who was the Blues’ maintenance officer during the 2018-19 seasons, is now on the transition team too. Blue Angel maintainers have Legacy Hornet maintenance down to a science. But they’ll have to learn what the Rhino needs and how it wears and tears over a show season.
Moar at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2020/06/01/blue-angels-transition-to-the-super-hornet-will-make-airshows-look-a-little-like-1973/#7c221b436989
About that Hussein portrait. Green is considered a holy color by muslims. Also, showing someone the bottom of your foot is considered an insult.
I first saw them in the F-4. To that point in my life, I think it was the loudest noise that I had ever heard. I was instantly hooked.