As a matter of fact…

I ‘do’ have some patches…

In answer to an email question, here are two theater made patches from VP-4 that are on my flight jacket…

This is the ‘skinny’ Skinny Dragon logo.

VP4 patch

And our Crew 1A (Alpha status, meaning we were qualified for any P-3 mission) patch.VP4 Crew 1

And your Recce question of the day is… Inbound

What is it?

The P-3 is in what was probably the third pass of a full rig when this picture was taken…

Comments

As a matter of fact… — 21 Comments

  1. Is that a Grisha patrol frigate?
    Neat patches. We weren’t really allowed to do unique patches.
    However, I did rock an MHI patch outside the FOB
    And I love your Orion model. High class.

  2. It looks like a Kirov to me. The P-3 in the photo makes the ship look small, but it has the lines of a Kirov.

  3. SPE- Nope, not a Grisha… LOTS bigger! Things have truly changed, I know guys did a LOT of theater made patches back in the day…

    LL- Yep! Mean bastards too! They were notorious for training their guns if we made more than one pass…

    Bob- Yep, an oldie but a goody there! 🙂 I see one of them everyday as a co-worker is a former SEVAL in Q-2

    • Bah! The P-3 in frame throws off my sense of scale.
      Lets see you guy ID about a hundred different types of foreign armor.

  4. That big open vertical-launcher deck sort of IDs it for me. But it has been decades and the Kirovs and Sovremennys were the new things.

  5. CM- You and me both…

    Jon- Kirov. The last of the ‘big’ battleships… 700 man crew.

  6. Just curious, was that the typical reaction to a fly-by? That model is beautiful, “props” to the builder.

  7. LL beat me to it.

    I was reading about the Kirov class the other day, and the book indicated most of them were very poorly built.

    Even some of the Admirals called them “Death Traps”, and that the combined nuclear/conventional power plants never worked properly.

    They’re probably all rusting away in the backwaters somewhere…..

  8. When I was in the surface fleet, the senior officers onboard referred to those ships as “Battlestar Kirov.” I can’t speak to their quality, but they did look bad@$$. Biggest Sov. ship I ever saw “in person” was a Kynda class cruiser. Not a whole lot bigger than we were (FFG-7 class frigate), but a whole lot more weapons. The SS-N-3b missles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-N-3_Shaddock) in particular looked pretty big at a few hundred yards.

  9. Hey, according to Wikirumors (Wikipedia), only one is still in service, but Russia plans to have the rest operational again by 2020. I’ll believe it when I see it.

  10. I’m late to the party, but I recognized it right off. I wouldn’t have remembered, except that there was one in TV series, The Last Ship.

    Gotta say, I agree with SPEMack that the P-3 does throw off the sense of scale. But it is a beautiful picture.

  11. Ed- I’m not sure, I wasn’t on the lowboy…

    drjim- They might have been, but with enough conscripts… They may have been death traps, but they were impressive!!!

    Marlo- I only saw them from the air, thanks for providing a frame of reference! And I’ve heard that too!

    Randy- LOL, thanks!

  12. Very cool patches! Thank you for your service. In answer to your picture question…it is a ship and a plane. Oh, and there is a body of water. 😉

  13. Kirov!
    Finally a question I know. Glad the “Soviet recognition” class from sub school paid off.
    What do submariners learn to recognize nowadays?