Realty Imagined

[Steve Dra 7,588]

Its been a while since my Naval career ended, seeing someone flying over the graveyard at Davis Month. in Tucson, Az in a recent post here made me recall that I saw an actual helo that I worked on in the Navy, in Google maps in 3d mode. 

Here is "723"....a G model in our squadron that I crawled all over in a vain attempt to keep her airworthy when she flew with us, hehe.

Here is her sister ship I worked on when I was station in the Persian Gulf back in '85.  That is me on the end.

Here is 723 in the sim....

Amazing.

 

Edited August 28, 2020 by Steve Dra

[SierraHotel 982]

Great story Steve, many thanks for sharing.

P.S. Will you be applying your painting skills to MSFS?

[Steve Dra 7,588]

5 minutes ago, SierraHotel said:

Great story Steve, many thanks for sharing.

P.S. Will you be applying your painting skills to MSFS?

Thanks, I was pretty psyched when I saw the old gal on Google maps and figured what are the odds that an actual bird I worked on would be one of the very few you can make out that clearly. There were many squadrons of SH-3s, and very many airframes back then...was pure luck they parked her on the end.  

Not sure about painting in MSFS just yet.  Looked at the maps and they are a jumbled mess for the most part....we'll have to wait and see what 3rd party devs give us as paintkits and/or normalized maps....painting the defaults will not be a good experience from what I've seen.

[HighBypass 2,339]

Outstanding bit of detective work Steve! 

[regis9 4,014]

That’s awesome!  My grandfather worked in aircraft maintenance in the Canadian Naval Air Arm (retired as a Chief Petty Officer in the 70’s)...the last aircraft he worked on was the Sea King.

I grew up under the pattern of a Sea King base and loved the sound of them up and about doing their thing.

More recently I played softball with a guy for years who worked on the Sea Kings up until their retirement and did a few cross country trips...many stories of field repairs on the way that featured duct tape on a few occasions 🙂

Edited August 28, 2020 by regis9

[P_7878 6,611]

Amazing find, Steve,....Congratulations....(the SIM is delivering many niceties)...!!

[Steve Dra 7,588]

Thanks guys!   Enjoying flying all over the world revisiting places I've been to.

In this case....seeing an aircraft I've worked on.....which reminds me...I have to go to Bahrain!   I should fly thru the Straights of Hormuz and see if the Chinese-made Silkworm missile batteries are shown on the Iranian side of the chokepoint.   We watched them manually point them at us through binoculars, we were at GQ as we passed through. (They knew better to actually lock their radar on us....we gave them advanced warning the outcome would not be good for them.)

I was there during the Iran-Iraq war when each side was basically just shooting at anything in the Gulf they thought were the enemy's ships.  Most of the time they were wrong.  Not a very fun time to be in the Gulf as an American-flagged ship...or any ship for that matter.  (but at least we could defend ourselves....for the most part)