Sailors and flyboys

I happened to have two uncles who served in the United States Navy. One jumped ship during a port call, saying America's First Gulf War to drive Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's invading forces out of Kuwait in 1989-1990 was not his war.

The other uncle retired from the Navy and would occasionally visit us in the Philippines for some R and R, or rest and recreation. Old habits die hard, it seems, as his latter years have been one long R and R, I suppose.

That passing thought of that uncle, Kuya Dindong, and his epic R and R tales had me chuckling during a recent pinch-hitting co-hosting job on DAILY TRIBUNE's digital show Usapang OFW. It was when a field reporter revealed that some of our overseas welfare officials were on vacation as over a hundred Filipinos were left stranded at the Rafah Crossing trying to escape from bombed-out Gaza to Egypt.

I muttered something along the lines of maybe those officials were in "need of a vacation so they'd be refreshed when they returned to their duty of helping our countrymen not be collateral damage in the fighting between the Israelis and the terrorist Hamas." There's not a touch of sarcasm there, mind you.

During his active duty, Kuya Dindong fed my fascination with warplanes by sending me boxes of magazines when he'd find his ship docked at Subic. Most would be about war birds, although some were of the kind that had centerfold pinups, the kind that may corrupt one on the threshold of manhood to seek low-flying birds.

Suffice it to say that I had mastered the subject matter enough to tell another newspaper's editor that they had a caption wrong, that it was not an F-16 fighter jet in their front page photo conducting a persuasion flight during one of our nation's bloody coups.

In fact, it was a Vietnam-era F-4 Phantom that accosted, if my memory serves me still, two "Tora-Tora" propeller planes piloted by renegade Philippine Air Force members. The F-4 did its job, and the coup plotters' air superiority was gone in a heartbeat, thanks or no thanks to Uncle Sam's meddling.

Later, my firstborn, then still a tot, would call me when mobile phones were still clunky and chunky as a handheld metal ice shaver, like the one we used to make "rainbow" coolers, nothing more than sugar syrup with red food coloring and "sago" or our cheap tapioca variant, to report that an F-4 I painstakingly glued together and painted in Tamiya camouflage complete with decals had "crashed."

Might as well get the bad news out, she may have reckoned, thereby blunting whatever anger she thought I might have had coming home. No big deal, as whatever damage the plane sustained during the crash just gave it "character." Nothing that could not be undone with a little more glue and a dab of paint here and there.

It is against this hyper-extended intro that I take note of the news that a PAF FA-50 light jet fighter scored a "simulated kill" of a fifth-generation American-made F-22 Raptor stealth fighter over the skies of northern Luzon during the Cope Thunder Exercise held in July.

The unlikely "kill" was reported by the Fighter's Journal, the official publication of the 5th Fighter Wing of the Air Defense Command of the PAF, which described it as an "unprecedented achievement in history." The "downed" F-22 was from the US Pacific Air Forces, and it fell prey to an FA-50PH "firing a heat-seeking missile."

In what could pass as a recruitment pitch for the PAF, the paper that picked up the story said, "Man-for-man, Filipino fighter pilots are among the best in the world."

The F-22 combines stealth, speed, agility, and situational awareness, and it has to be pointed out, long-range missiles that could take out the likes of an FA-50 before the latter becomes even aware of the former's presence. It would be hard to visualize the two in a real dogfight because the pilot of an F-22, like the FA-18 and the F-16 and F15E, among others, does not actually need to see an adversary to shoot it down.

The F-22 also has a thrust-vectoring system that, in the event it finds itself in a machine-gun range dogfight, would easily allow it not only to shake off an opponent at six o'clock (behind it) but also to vector behind the enemy, in effect quickly switching positions from prey to predator using physics-defying maneuvers. We'd love to hear from PACAF.

Meanwhile, kudos to our flyboys. Imagine what they can do with more modern planes.