CALL SIGN: SHIMMY: CHRONICLES OF A FIGHTER PILOT by C.W. PILGRIM

Author:C.W. PILGRIM [PILGRIM, C.W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

AUSTRALIA

I was very excited for my first deployment to Australia. We were heading to an airbase in the Northern Territory and it was in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t care. I knew it would be a great time. It was!

As usual, we had an in-brief to cover the standard airspace rules, airfield lay-out (which was an odd lay-out), safety precautions, approach procedures, and the standard operating procedures. When being briefed on pre-planned ejection areas, it was mentioned to us that if we were to eject and land in the water, get out of the water as fast as possible due to the alligators and fresh-water crocks. They said to get up a tree until emergency personnel arrived but while climbing the trees, watch out for the snakes since they are deadly as well. Great. Welcome to the Outback I guess.

As mentioned earlier, the airfield had a non-standard lay-out. The jets had their own revetments that were scattered all over the place. It required a map to navigate to the flight line. As I was heading to the runway on my first flight there, I was following my map to meet up with the other aircraft. Taxiing down this little two-lane road through the brush I encountered something very odd. As I rounded a turn, the taxi way was covered with these Kangaroo or Wallaby animals. They were just sitting in front of my jet staring at me. Well I didn’t know what to do so I called ground control and asked if they could get someone out there to run them off. I relayed my request and my position on the airfield and they simply told me to rev up my engines and they will scatter. I didn’t want to suck one down the jet intake so I was being hesitant to rev the motors up to much. The animals just hopped around, sat back down and continued staring at me. Well about that time the MP’s arrived and cleared the taxi way. I proceeded and finally made it to the runway. This happened to me several more times as my deployment progressed there.

The flying there is awesome. It is very similar to El Centro, CA. Clear skies, unlimited visibility and tons of bombing and gun strafing ranges to have fun at. Our squadron did have a few interesting hops at their bombing ranges.

We had one pilot that accidently slung a bomb well outside the bombing range. This started a brush fire in the Outback that burned the rest of our deployment. To this day I have no idea how he dropped a random bomb that far away from the target with all the advanced systems the Hornet provides. Thankfully there are very few populated areas in the area. Talk about an international incident that could have happened.

The Australians had plenty of ranges where we could drop bombs. One range was pretty unique. They built basically a fake town in the middle of nowhere. This range was to be used for inert bombs and Laser Guided Training Rounds (LGTR’s).

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