The formation here is not really tight. I had to tell him to move it out to get a good shot. If he was flying in the formation on the picture while going through a dense cloud he would loose sight of me.
Normal fingertip formation is with three feet wing tip clearance and if you are in really bad weather you sometime have to drop low and move it in so you actually have overlap and the other airplanes missile seems like only a few feet from you. Sometimes the only thing you see is the missile and the outer part of the wing. Then it gets interesting.
For training we normally don't fly with real missiles. The one on his wing is a training AIM9L (Seeker head is real, but no stearing fins or rocket motor) The one on my wing is a Dummy all the way ;o) On the other wing I had one like his.
Normal fingertip formation is with three feet wing tip clearance and if you are in really bad weather you sometime have to drop low and move it in so you actually have overlap and the other airplanes missile seems like only a few feet from you. Sometimes the only thing you see is the missile and the outer part of the wing. Then it gets interesting.
For training we normally don't fly with real missiles. The one on his wing is a training AIM9L (Seeker head is real, but no stearing fins or rocket motor) The one on my wing is a Dummy all the way ;o) On the other wing I had one like his.
Do you guys always fly formations taht tight? The Guardsmen around
here would need a 200mm lens to fill the frame with their wingmen!
Also, I notice your plane has AIM-9's mounted on its wingtip rails,
but your wingman has another missile mounted. Being a properly
ethnocentric US aviation fan () I'm not as familiar with non-US
missiles. What is your wingman carrying? Do you guys often
carry a variety of short range missiles?
Great shots, by the way!
---
http://www.pbase.com/ckrueger
