Message posted by gary on September 14, 2002 at 23:42:44 PST:

This Red Flag was very low key. The early afternoon session (1:30PM) was replaced with a late afternoon session (after 5PM) except on Fridays, when the show got started a bit earlier. The night bombing was about 1% as good as the one Joerg, Bill and myself witnessed on Tikaboo. The night bombing was done to the north (range 74 I believe). For the exercises, there were numerous delays as they got all the "pods" online. In fact, technical difficulties were very common at this flag. So many that I wonder if a new contractor was involved.

What was different at this Red Flag was the abundance of sonic booms, thanks to the B1Bs. The only thing more fun than one sonic boom is two or three at a time as the "bones" flew by.

It seems everyone's most photogenic planes were the Italian Tornadoes. They did nice slow fly-bys at Coyote Summit as the entered the range, and often flew low as they RTBd.

One rather confusing incident occurred over Coyote Summit. Usually you see planes enter or exit the range. However, this time there was traffic in both directions over the summit, similar to those head-ons you see the T-birds do, though with much greater separation, i.e. nothing dangerous happened.

The contractors left a SA unit on Cedar Pass unattended, so I managed to get some good photos of the unit. I never realized they have TV cameras as well as radar. Bill W. told me an interesting story where one of the SA operators told him that they spotted him photographing a plane, turned their cameras to the same area of the sky, spotted the plane and got the "kill", which they credited to Bill.

I had an interesting "situation" near the ranch house on Cedar Pass road. While driving down Cedar Pass, I noticed that there was a SUV trail to the top of the hill behind the cattle watering hole. It was a pretty easy climb in my truck and it had a nice view. Getting out of the truck I noticed the top of the hill was littered with shotgun shells and cigarette butts. I suspected hunters had used the hill, and soon was met by two guys in camo with shotguns who were there to rid the world of a rather dangerous bird known as a "dove". It seems I ruined their hunting spot by driving on their hill, but we managed to come to terms since they soon agreed it wasn't their hill but everyone's hill. Anyway, I waited on the hill, hoping to spot the Russian helicopter. I heard a funny noise behind me, which turned out to be a C130 coming towards the hill and shooting at me. I didn't notice any smoke, so I guess they just run the gun and pretended to hit the target.

For non-flag related stuff, there were only two interesting events. One was watching the B2 bomber get refueled over the Cedar Pass Ranch at a bit after 6AM. I didn't have the camera ready, so I watched with the binoculars. The other event was a nightly parade of lights around the valley. Once the moon was set, they would launch either one or several planes from the pass near Bald Mountain. On one ocassion when they launched a single plane, it flew in the airspace north of the powerlines. Sometimes it had a flashing light, sometimes the light was solid, and on a few occasions the light flashed upwards only. That is, you could see the clouds being illuminated. When multiple planes were launched, they kept a perfect separation. That is, the distance between all three lights was constant, though the planes were not always at the same altitude. Discussing this with Bill. W., he belives that they are flying UAVs on a programmed course, which would explain the constant separation.

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