Fifth Avenue Forum

Which ones aren't on the cool wall?

VFA-25 "Fist Of The Fleet". We don't need that kind of imagery from our military.

Also the F2A Buffalo was dumb.

Are you talking about the patch logo or something they did?

Looking through the Corsair stuff led me to this interesting factoid on Wikipedia.

Boyington began his military training in college as a member of Army ROTC and became a cadet captain. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Coast Artillery Reserve in June 1934, and then served two months of active duty with the 630th Coast Artillery at Fort Worden, Washington.

In the spring of 1935, he applied for flight training under the Aviation Cadet Act, but he discovered that it excluded married men. Boyington had grown up as Gregory Hallenbeck, and assumed his stepfather, Ellsworth J. Hallenbeck, was his father.

When he obtained a copy of his birth certificate, he learned that his father was actually Charles Boyington, a dentist, and that his parents had divorced when he was an infant. As there was no record of any Gregory Boyington had ever been married, he enrolled as a U.S. Marine Corps aviation cadet using that name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pappy_Boyington

Which ones aren't on the cool wall?

VFA-25 "Fist Of The Fleet". We don't need that kind of imagery from our military.

Also the F2A Buffalo was dumb.

Are you talking about the patch logo or something they did?

Haha, I was just referencing your proclivity to use 'fisting' to, ah, make your point here at times.

Oooh. I was gonna say that's a pretty cool logo.

If I knew how to link tik tok, I'd share something grotesque, so here's a close link:

https://m.facebook.com/terminallance/

There was shooting at 29 palms this morning, can't really find any answers except that nobody was killed.

Dust pop.

Local reporting is that there is one victim with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Wow. The USS Bonhomme Richard has been on fire at Naval Base San Diego pretty much all day, and based on a live feed it doesn't look like the fire is under control, or will be any time soon.

This has been on local news here today, and it's kinda nuts. Something like 20 crewmen and civilian staffers have been taken to hospital. I have not yet seen an explanation for source/cause yet.

One of my Coastie buddies will probably be CO of that hunk in 5 years.

Don't forget, my first underway assignment was on the ACUSHNET, which received three battle stars during World War II

My uncle had 2 at-sea deployments aboard older LPH vessels (similar to the Bonhomme Richard). He said the Marine berthing areas had 'portholes' thanks to rusted out hull plates.

That ship will be on fire for weeks.

Boat is basically already a $1.5 billion future reef.

Agreed. I can't imagine that ship ever sees service again. There are holes burned in the superstructure, and the island burned enough that at least one mast collapsed. There are a couple of decommissioned Tarawa-class ships in reserve, and if necessary one of those could be temporarily reactivated to fill in for the Bonhomme Richard until a new America-class ship could be built to replace it.

I spent some time on the Belleau Wood. Sad to see it was sunk for target practice.

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/ ... o-pacific/

The damage to the Bonhomme Richard has been extensive from stem to stern, engulfing the well deck, the super structure and the living and working spaces up forward. The forward mast has collapsed onto the superstructure and Expeditionary Strike Group Three commander Rear Adm. Phillip Sobeck told reporters Monday temperatures inside the skin of the ship have reached 1,000 degrees, a point at which steel is losing significant structural strength.

It sounds like temperatures got to the point where it really wouldn't be possible to trust the structural strength and integrity of a whole lot of the ship. Unfortunately, the article also mentions that this fire came pretty much at the tail end of two years of upgrades and refits designed, among other purposes, to support the operation of the F-35B. So not only is the ship likely lost, but two years of upgrades will also be wasted.

Do they have any idea what set it off?

Not that I've seen.

They are reporting that the Halon system had been deactivated for maintenance. Ugh.

When underway, the compartment where it is believed to have started is normally used by the embarked Marines for all their, uh, Marine stuff (?), but while at dock it was apparently being used to store other supplies. Whatever was in there, 1,000-degrees is insane, what would burn that hot? Or is that just a function of it being a giant steel oven?

An oven.

When I was on the Bellau Wood for like two weeks they made us take a fire safely course and I remember the dude saying something like "if you're caught below deck and a fire breaks out above you find someone to slit your wrists. That's going to be better than cooking like a turkey."

I've never served, and it's been a long time since I was on a naval ship for a tour or anything like that, so I'd have to defer to those who would know better. It seems to me, knowing the age-old saying that fire is the greatest risk for a ship, that as much on a military vessel as possible would be designed to not be flammable. Maybe @shafnutz05 would have a better idea?

The deck is clearly covered with shipping containers that are probably holding supplies/parts for the refit, so maybe the rest of the ship was similarly packed with materials? I have no idea.

In less fiery related military news, the USAF officially ordered the first batch of 8 F-15EX variants of the venerable old Eagle.

I am very excited about this aircraft. It is the most successful air superiority fighter in history, with over 100 air-to-air kills and zero defeats... and we are approaching the 48th anniversary of the original A-model's first flight. We more or less reached the maximum dynamic maneuvering capability of manned aircraft with the advent of this generation of fighter, so most improvements since then have been to electronics/software, powerplants, etc. To that end, this new variant will have a 0.9:1 thrust-to-weight ratio at its MTOGW, which is just a farcical amount of power, and is more than the F-22 Raptor in the same condition. Fly-by-wire, glass cockpit, passive sensor arrays out of Star Wars, it's gonna be a beast.

Long may the Eagle soar.

I've never served, and it's been a long time since I was on a naval ship for a tour or anything like that, so I'd have to defer to those who would know better. It seems to me, knowing the age-old saying that fire is the greatest risk for a ship, that as much on a military vessel as possible would be designed to not be flammable. Maybe @shafnutz05 would have a better idea?

The deck is clearly covered with shipping containers that are probably holding supplies/parts for the refit, so maybe the rest of the ship was similarly packed with materials? I have no idea.

Because of their very design, small fires tend to be handled quickly on modern ships. Whenever all of your bulkheads are steel, there is only so far a small fire can go. Obviously, something catastrophic happened on the ship out in CA. I remember doing damage control drills in flash gear repetitively, but because of how much steel modern ships have there's only so far most (small) fires can go. And the fire suppression systems on modern ships are crazy, I remember marveling at the DCC (damage control center) on the Healy, a 420 foot icebreaker and the largest ship of the fleet. It's insane.