F14 Tomcat
- Thread starter Malo83
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It's called Steel Beach/Beer Day, every 45/50 days on station, it's a big picnic on the flight deck for the crew, on the USS Ranger they had big BBQ pits and they would cook up hamburgers, hot dogs and steaks. They would fill jet engine shipping containers with ice and cold beer and sodas, hence the lounge chairs and wading pools. we had a band that played some kicking jams.
Steel Beach- When US Navy Ships Throw Giant Beach Picnic Parties
As almost half the country watches their thermometers drop well below freezing this week, we can all take a look at how the Navy gets some warm rays without having any land in sight. 'Steel Beach,' as these events are called, evolved from your great grandfather's swim-calls. Since then they have...foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com
That looks like fun, but what I saw was just a few dozen people on the deck just kind of lounging, and not a massive event with the entire crew. Actually found it, although for some reason the subtitles are in Japanese. This scene starts at about 19:55.
At ease sailors, at ease. There's only so much awe and admiration one man could possibly take in one day. Thank you very much. Hey! Hey you maggots! Get away from my Ferrari over here. Really you boys have been flying those metal hippos to long to appreciate a man's machine.
Oh, oh really? You see that baby and me have hit Mach 2. All the time. Pretty hip hippo.
The series was kind of weird too. They had one scene a fictional Mig piloted by a Soviet defector that tries to land on the carrier at the suggestion of a former pilot sent there to try and get it to examine it, rather than just punch out. The plane in the scene was an F-16N painted in Soviet Air Force colors. The landing scene cobbled together a bunch of really disjointed different events from stock Navy footage. They showed an A-6 being trapped in a barrier, followed by an ejection that clearly shows two people in parachutes (but the plot involves only a single pilot). I know I criticized a similar scene in a Chinese fighter pilot movie, but they had one pilot blinded after a bird strike on the canopy and another pilot guiding her down by voice.
I tried to watch that series, but I saw that episode, and never tuned in again. Complete garbage. Silly plots, grossly stereotyped characters, utter lack of technical accuracy. Terrible writing makes for terrible TV, no matter how dynamic the setting.
Yeah it was a hot mess. Found out that it was optioned off of a nonfiction book, but the writer had zero say in what the series would be like.
The author even wrote an article about his experience with the TV series and the reality he remembered. He did mention the utter lack of women on board, although that's far different these days.
I like to think that this experience, which I loved, gave the book Supercarrier authenticity along with the drama. It could be a great movie or television show, I always believed, if it indeed showed life as it is really lived out in the middle of the ocean by men shorn of the support systems we take for granted on shore.
As it turned out, nobody making the television version asked me a single question of what life was like at sea or in the sky. And from what I have seen of the draft television episodes of "Supercarrier," at least some of those writers never read the book or went to sea on a carrier for even a day.
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In real life, Navy fighter pilots often are launched off a carrier to intercept Soviet Bear bombers. Their mission is to stay between the bomber and the carrier to let the Soviets know they would be shot down in a war before they could fire their antiship cruise missiles.
The U. S. and Soviet airmen who find themselves flying side by side as they act out this facet of the Cold War often exchange greetings across the gap of sky. Soviet fliers have warmed up the Cold War by pressing a Playboy centerfold against the plastic facing the American aviators. Toasts across the sky are common, with the Americans limited to their water jugs and the Soviets, at least in one instance, returning the toast with Schlitz. Vulgarities, such as flipping the bird, are not unheard of either. Somebody out in Hollywood must have read at least this part of the book because such an incident has been filmed.
