Feeling puny this morning, as I've learned the hard way that the Covid vaccine is no defense to the common cold. This is day three of coughing, sniffling, and generally feeling the need for a nap.
The NYT reports this week, as I think I mentioned previously, that someone is attacking our soldiers and diplomats all over the world with microwave weapons.
Some apparently suffer permanent brain damage, victims of a directed energy weapon with no scent, appearance, or even tactile sense of heat.
All of us old Eagle Drivers know a thing or two about getting irradiated.
There was an old quip about the F-15 that it was an airplane built around a radar, the mighty APG-63.
State of the art when it entered service in the early 1970s, the APG-63 was a pulse-doppler radar that relied on a massive amount of microwave radiation to paint targets up to 160 miles away. Unlike modern, phased array radars that scan their space electronically while the antenna remains fixed, the Eagle's radar moved left and right, up and down, covering a search field selected by the pilot. When things were quiet enough, you could hear and feel the "thunk thunk thunk" on the other side of the rudder pedals as the antenna swept left and right.
All that radiation just below the soles of our boots was cause for concern among some of the brethren. Even though the antenna focused most of the microwave radiation forward toward the target, there were back lobes that would bounce around inside the cockpit whenever the radar was awake. And we knew the most radar-reflective part of the jet was, in fact, the cockpit. Whenever during a training mission the radar warning receiver would warble and flash, indicating another jet had locked us with his radar, we figured we were absorbing enough microwave radiation to cook a small turkey.
Our worries about the effect of all this irradiating were magnified as we began to notice a disturbingly high number of testicular cancer diagnoses in our midst. The 49th Wing lost a thirty-ish pilot to the disease while I was on active duty, and everyone seemed to know some poor guy in the brotherhood who was walking around with one testicle after a round of, ironically perhaps, more radiation in an oncology clinic. No one ever really looked into whether there was a statistically significant correlation between flying the Eagle and losing a nut to cancer, but it became a matter of folklore in the tribe all the same.
At some point in the early 90s, therefore, we decided it was ungentlemanly to use single-target-track on a radar trail departure, out of concerns over the radar's power.
Let me explain.
If the weather was bad, and we needed to get four Eagles out to the range, we had the option of flying a radar trail departure. The jets would take off at twenty second intervals, giving us 2-3 mile spacing in the climb.
When I started flying the Eagle, it was common practice to lock the jet in front of you, and let the radar provide information regarding the other jet's speed, altitude, and range.
This is the vertical situation display of an F-15; basically, your radar screen. This guy is not in single-target-track, choosing instead to be in track-while-scan with a 60 degree scan and a cluster of targets out at twenty miles. The vertical line of hollow squares indicates that one of them probably has a jammer, or his own radar is trying to operate in the same bandwidth as this F-15.
You don't get that presentation in STT, because the radar is looking through a straw, scanning a space maybe two degrees wide, pouring radiation at the target in its gaze.
This is the reason we got away from STT on radar trail departures--a trailing aircraft might spend several minutes in STT depending on the weather, pounding the lead aircraft and its occupant with microwaves the whole time. If you stayed in search mode, or track-while-scan, the radar would sweep back and forth past the target, giving you a dot on the screen but not much else. It also subjected the lead aircraft to a lot less radiation.
When I was an instructor pilot, I'd chastise students, particularly once they'd flown a few months in the plane and should know better, for locking me on their radar on a departure. The warning tone from my RWR was always a dead giveaway.
To my knowledge, none of us ever got the symptoms the NYT is describing, although after attending a couple squadron reunions I think P might conjecture we all have a little brain damage. And although I do have a couple physical souvenirs of my time in the fighter community--a metal plate in my neck from one-too-many 9 G bat turns, and a respiratory system that never fully recovered from flying through those oil well fires in 1991--I sort of doubt there was ever anything to that whole APG-63 radiation scare. Watching P's community struggle with thyroid issues and cancers from years of unshielded x-rays at work, I know now what a cancer cluster really looks like. And although my Eagle Driver brothers seem to succumb to heart attacks, car accidents, and the cumulative effects of decades of alcohol abuse, we really don't see much cancer. I can think of two friends who died of cancer when we were in our forties, but I can say exactly the same of my law school class.
And apparently our puling about microwaves from the APG-63 led to a no kidding empirical study of the subject, which concluded we weren't being exposed to much radiation after all.
So I will have to find something else to worry on this morning. Plenty from which to choose, in this disorienting transition to the next season of post-pandemic life. Everything is late and over budget, cases lurch to life as the courts re-open, and I'm stomping these fires while this damn cold just makes me want to lie down and take a nap.
But that's not an option, Donk. Let's go try to make some money.
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